Unbroken Chain: The Tradition of Uruguayan Women Poets

Jesse Lee Kercheval

Unbroken Chain: The Tradition of Uruguayan Women Poets

 
 
Whenever I read an anthology of Latin American or South American poetry, even the most recent ones, I am always frustrated by poor representation of women poets. Uruguay, with only 3.3 million people, is the smallest Spanish-speaking country in South America, but it has a long and strong tradition of women poets, starting with Juana de Ibarbourou (1885-1979), whose lyric and erotic writing about nature made her one of the most popular poets in South America, and who is still known as Juana de América. In Uruguay, Ibarbourou is so iconic she appears on the thousand peso note (while Emily Dickinson, alas, does not appear on any U.S. currency). The other important early woman poet is the equally beloved Delmira Agustini (1886-1914), a modernist who wrote frankly about sexuality and desire, dedicating many of her poems to Eros. This tradition of poetry by women continues from Juana de Ibarbourou and Delmira Agustini in an unbroken line down to the present.

Uruguayan poets, men and women, are all well aware of the tradition. When I edited the anthology América invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets (University of New Mexico Press, 2015), I asked the contributors to include in their bios the names of the Uruguayan poets who influenced them. Nearly half the anthology is made up of women poets, including Laura Cesarco Eglin, Victoria Estol, Karen Wild Díaz, and Paula Simonetti, and they all included women poets in their answers. More recently, I edited a feature for Tupelo Quarterly of five younger Uruguayan women poets, including Eloísa Avoletta, who, still in her teens, is part of a program that includes an online anthology called En el camino de los perros: Antología virtual de poetas ultrajóvenes uruguayos. I asked these poets, too, to name the woman poets who had influenced them most. Among these two groups, many named Juana de Ibarbourou and Delmira Agustini, the twin “mothers” of Uruguayan poetry. But the most common choices were Idea Vilariño, Ida Vitale, and Amanda Berenguer, who formed part of the Generation of ’45, an Uruguayan literary movement whose influence helped bring Latin American literature to world prominence.

The first of the three poets from the Generation of ’45 included here is Idea Vilariño (1920-2009), who had a famous relationship with another member of the group, the Cervantes Prize-winning novelist Juan Carlos Onetti. Their love affair is one of the best known in South American literature. All of the poems in Vilariño’s most famous book, Poemas de amor, exploring love and obsession, are addressed to Onetti. He was briefly imprisoned by the Uruguayan military dictatorship in 1974, then went into exile, as did many of the members of the Generation of ’45, leaving Idea Vilariño, who had been stripped of her teaching post by the dictatorship, alone and isolated in the capital, Montevideo. Though she wrote many other books, she continued working on Poemas de amor, revising and adding poems to multiple editions, from 1957 until her death. The poems included here, translated by me, are all from Poemas de amor. Though Vilariño is often included on lists of the most important Latin American poets, none of her books are available in English translation.

Amanda Berenguer (1921-2010) authored fifteen poetry collections. Uruguayans often refer to her as “Querida Amanda”— dear or beloved Amanda—and her poems show a vital mind: insightful, singular, and often funny. Among her many awards are a Casa de las Américas Prize for Poetry, and two national prizes for what is probably her best-known book La dama de Elche. The wonderful news here is that Ugly Duckling Presse will release Materia Prima, a bilingual anthology of Berenguer’s work, co- edited by Kristin Dykstra and Kent Johnson, in 2018. The poems included in this portfolio are translated by Dykstra.

Ida Vitale (b. 1922), the last living member of the Generation of ’45, is a poet, essayist, critic, translator, and literature professor who has authored more than thirty books. In 1974, during the dictatorship, she left Uruguay, spending time in Venezuela and Mexico. Since 1989, she has lived in Austin, Texas. Vitale received the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry in 2015, but her work is not well known in the U.S. Her translators are Kathleen Hedeen and Victor Rodriguez Nuñoz, who also translated Vitale’s only book available in English, Garden of Silica (Salt Publishing, 2010).

Among the poets I’ve chosen from the following generation is Selva Casal (b. 1930), author of fifteen books of poetry. A former lawyer, Casal is inspired by her experiences working with people who have faced injustice. Her 1975 publication of No vivimos en vano (We do not live in vain), during the dictatorship, resulted in her losing her position as a professor of sociology. Her father, Julio
J. Casal, was also a poet. Selva Casal alternates living in Montevideo and in the small beach town of Solymar. Though not in good health now, whenever she is able to appear to accept an award or read from her work, Casal always draws a crowd of younger poets. Her poems in this portfolio are translated by Jeannine Pitas, who is working on translating a full collection Casal’s work. Though she has won numerous prizes in Uruguay, Argentina, and Mexico, none of her books are currently available in English.

Nancy Bacelo (1931-2007) was the author of over a dozen collections of poetry. She was the publisher of the important poetry magazine and press Siete Poetas Hispanoamericanos, which featured, among many others, Circe Maia, another poet included in this portfolio. Bacelo founded the Feria Nacional del Libros y Grabados, a Montevideo book fair which she ran for 47 years and which was the center of literature and music throughout the military dictatorship. Her poetry is preserved and her work is continued by the Foundation Nancy Bacelo in Montevideo. Perhaps better known in Uruguay today for her work with the Feria del Libros and Siete Poetas Hispanoamericanos, her collected works El velo magistral que esconde todo: obra reunida shows her poetry to have been a true life’s labor, diverse in style and theme. Bacelo’s poems here are translated by Catherine Jagoe. A few of her poems appear in the excellent anthology edited by Kent Johnson and Uruguayan poet Roberto Etchevarren, Hotel Lautreaumont: Contemporary Uruguayan Poetry (Shearsman, 2011), but none of Bacelo’s books are available in translation.

Circe Maia (b. 1932) is the author of ten books of poetry, including her collected poems, Circe Maia: Obra poética, and the more recent collection Dualidades. Maia was born in Montevideo, but she has lived most of her life in the northern city of Tacuarembó, where she taught philosophy until 2001. In 1972, when the military dictatorship took power, police broke into her house in the middle of the night and arrested her husband for supporting the urban guerilla group MLN-Tupamaros, leaving Maia behind only because she had just given birth to their youngest daughter. She wrote about the experience in her short autobiographical novel Un Viaje a Salto (Editions del Nuevo Mundo, Montevideo, 1987), which is available in English as A Trip to Salto (Swan Isle Press, 2004), translated by Stephanie Stewart. Maia’s poetry is available in translation in The Invisible Bridge/El Puente Invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015). I edited and translated that book and the poems here. Maia is the living poet most often cited as an influence by younger Uruguayan poets and they often make the five-hour bus trip from Montevideo, where nearly all of them live, to Tacuarembó to visit her in her home.

Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004) was born in Salto, Uruguay, and raised on her family’s farm. She began writing as a child and published her first book of poems at the age of twenty-two. She went on to publish a total of fourteen books of poetry, three collections of short stories, and one novel. Di Giorgio’s surreal, fable-like poetry has attracted increasing attention in the U.S. in the past few years and is available in two recent collections, Diadem: Selected Poems (BOA, 2012), translated by Adam Gianelli, and The History of Violets (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), translated by Jeannine Pitas, who is also the translator of the poems here. Ugly Duckling Presse will publish Pitas’s complete translations of Di Giorgio in 2018.

And finally, Tatiana Oroño (b. 1947), the youngest poet in this portfolio. Her books include Estuario, La Piedra Nada Sabe, Morada móvil, and the bilingual French/Spanish Tout fut ce qui ne fut pas/Todo tuvo la forma que no tuvo. Oroño’s work has been published in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Chile, El Salvador, Spain, France, and Mexico. She is the daughter of the well-known Uruguayan visual artist Dumas Oroño and has always written about art in both her prose and poetry. In 2003, she was the co-organizer of Primer Encuentro de Literatura Uruguaya de Mujeres in Montevideo and co-editor of La palabra entre nosotras, the book that resulted from that conference. Her work was cited as an influence by several of the young poets mentioned above and provided a fine end for this selection, though I could just as easily have gone on, through the poets born in the 1950s, such as Silvia Guerra, whose work you can read in the anthology Hotel Lautremont and in a recent feature I edited for the journal Drunken Boat. And on to those born in 1960s, like Melisa Machado, whose work is also included in the Drunken Boat feature and who has a collection forthcoming from Action Books, translated by Seth Michelson. That would bring us to those born in the 1970s and 1980s, and to the poets of this century, featured in América invertida and in En el camino de los perros, respectively.

I am often asked why there are so many women poets in Uruguay, what makes this tradition possible, and to be honest there is no perfect answer. Uruguayans often mention education as the reason. With the passing of the 1877 Law of Common Education, Uruguay pioneered universal, free, and compulsory primary education in the Americas, founded on a secular, national school system providing equal education for both sexes. Certainly, Juana de Ibarbourou, who grew up not in the cosmopolitan capitol of Montevideo, but in the small provincial town of Melo, benefitted from this. In 1909, at 17 years old, while still in high school, she published a prose piece, “Derechos femeninos” (“Women’s Rights”), beginning a lifelong career as a prominent feminist—something that, like her poetry, is difficult to imagine would have been possible without the time she spent in three different public schools.

But to me, the tradition exists unbroken for the slightly circular reason that each generation of women poets has been aware of its predecessors, each young poet is aware of her opportunity because of the poets who came before her. The Uruguayan poet Virginia Lucas and I are currently editing a collection of essays by Uruguayan women poets about literature—the majority by Uruguayan women poets writing about other Uruguayan women poets. The anthology will include Ida Vitale’s essay on Juana de Ibarbourou, Tatiana Oroño’s on Amanda Berenguer, and one by the young poet Laura Cesarco Eglin on Ida Vitale. There is a tradition that nourishes women‘s poetry in Uruguay. And it is a poetry I believe deserves to be better known and read by the rest of the world.

Jesse Lee Kercheval’s translations include The Invisible Bridge / El puente invisible: Selected Poems of Circe Maia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015) and Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren (Action Books, 2017). She is the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she also directs the Program in Creative Writing.