Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Explosion - Delmira Agustini


(Note: READ the poem FIRST, before this commentary.) Delmira Agustini (1887 - 1914)... She was a rising poet in Uruguay, known for original imagery while exhibiting a strong command of traditional Spanish meters and forms, when she died at the age of 27.  The circumstances of her death increased her popularity.  Married but a few weeks, she had separated from her husband but agreed to see him one last time. She was found dead with him the next morning in a short-time hotel in Montevideo, the victim of a murder-suicide.  It gives this selection poignancy to contrast the exuberance and happiness at finding Love with its outcome.  And a commentary on the dark side of the passion.  (Check out this poem from an earlier posting, which has some marvelous lines about that flip side - loss - of love.  But without a murderous rage directed at the love object.)  
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Explosion
                               transl. from Spanish by Perry Higman

If life is love , blessed be it!
I want more life to love!  Today I feel
a thousand years of ideas are worth nothing
next to one azure minute of feeling.

My heart was dying, sad and slow….
Now it blooms in light like a flower of Phoebus:
Life bursts like a violent sea
where the hand of love strikes its blow!

Today my melancholy, with broken wings
went out into the night, sad, cold;
like an old mark of sorrow

it dissolves in distant shadows….
My whole life laughs, kisses, sings!
My whole life is a mouth in bloom!

                                             Delmira Augustinin - Uruguay

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