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

Dawn - J. Ibarbourou

Juana de Ibarbourou (1895-1979) is little known here though famous, not just in her native Uruguay ( her photo is on the one thousand peso bill, as being photogenic didn't hurt!) but also throughout Latin America, particularly for the sensuality of her poems about love.  After her husband of thirty-seven years died in 1942, her subjects turned to contrasting the realities of aging and death with reminiscences about the past.  (A "medlar" - word in the poem- is a small, apple-like fruit that is edible only after it's over-ripe or beginning to decay.)

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Dawn (transl - Spanish)
                                                             translated by Perry Higman

I have spent a restless and sleepless night.
Day is dawning and I slip out of bed, bored.
Today I alone walk along this long street
of sealed doors and sleeping houses.

A dawn like smoke.
It seems the sun, ill-humored,
has lit a fire with green wood
to cook its breakfast.

The wind is moist like it just came from
a bath. In the pale sky,
the colorless stars
little by little are vanishing.

A milkman in a red beret goes by.
From atop an old wall,
I am tempted by a bent, plush branch
heavy with ripe medlars.

I walk, walk, walk,walk.
When I return and bend over him
With a kiss, to wake him,
He will think, with hungry joy,
That I too have just come from the bath.


                                                                                     Juana de Ibarbourou Uruguayan  (celebration)