These poems are translated from Agustini’s 1907 book, El Libro Blanco, which appeared when she was twenty-one. She shows a Rimbaud-like precocity, easily matching the most sophisticated creations of Europe’s decadents. Like Rimbaud, she would advance far beyond these forms, exploring poetic territory best known to the general reader from Rilke. These poems already show momentous flashes of what was to come.
The Poet Weighs Anchor
The golden anchor, raised above the wave,
stuck by sunlight, rings out its brilliance.
Lift the mizzen! Hoist the blue sail,let it spread,
like a bird or a dream widening its wings
for the downward stroke that will send it aloft!
The canvas catches wind,
propelling us into new day.
O my muse, let’s set out, beautiful sea
stretches before our joyous prow.
The east is cloudless as a perfect crystal,
Aurora’s rosy beams lead us,
Imagination wears, for the first time,
an extraordinary gown all set with gems
to scintillate as she wanders the waves.
The blue sail gives itself to Aeolus,
the north wind. It extends like an oriflamme,
(the battle standard of France’s medieval kings,
that shook its flaming length from the mast of a lance).
This is the moment supreme! I tremble,
do I correctly guess, O God,
what awaits me in unvisited worlds?
A wreath of fresh and fragrant laurel?
A glistening Golden Fleece? A gemmy sceptre?
Shipwreck? A messiah’s crown?
Through Fields of Dreams
A herd of wild colts stampeded by,
their overheated hides steaming in morning’s cool;
fierce of face: ears pinned, heads high, teeth bared—
shaggy ponies, manes flying in long disorder,
like deranged refrains at the end of every stanza—
they passed fast as a north wind scouring the pampas.
Then came eagles, in a splendor of feathers,
a magnificent vision, rarely seen
save by those who reach the peaks.
They soared with the assurance
of a poet’s inspiration. Royal as mountains,
with an arrogance befitting their Olympian breed—
the birds of Zeus.
Then there crossed the cloudless, heading westwards,
a dove, snowy as the host the priest holds high.
I forgot the noble prey-birds, the horses burning past,
realized that in the holy heavens of thought
a gentle dove can be the most beautiful of all.
Night of Kings
“His eyes had a sparkle never seen before,
he was blond and gentle and his name was Christ.”
“Go on,” said the magician, raising his face
with awful dignity.
“I will give you to drink from the cup of my experience,
a chalice from the east, full of consecrated wine.
There, in Bethlehem, on a legendary day,
was born a boy of more than mortal race.
“Poverty licked his hand like an adoring dog,
his perfect, porcelain, heavenly hand
with tragic destiny writ in the lines
of the palm. He smiled and smiled, at poverty,
at fate, at his own snowy lamb-like innocence,
at the Cross of his Tomorrow.
“He was my God! O Christ, my childhood’s faith claims you,
may this prayer sweeten these lips that implore you.
I’ve wandered, it is true, through many beliefs,
a spiritual vagrant, my blond, unlucky God,
but never did I stain the white and perfect ermine
of my childhood’s capacity for wonder!
Down all the roads I pilgrimed,
I proceeded, as in a dream, as if lost,
only, always, towards you.”
Rebellion
Rhyme’s the purple robe of a tyrant;
the brand seared into a slave; shackles
making painful any progress in the march of an Idea.
Don’t tell me it’s golden! Real thinking
doesn’t submit to serfdom in return
for the privilege of jingling. It needs to be free
so it can climb heights; it can’t be trimmed
to fit, it has to stay unmaimed, complete—
independent as a deity, hair in the wind,
sun in its face. How can anything
that hampers flight be called an adornment
befitting wings?
Poetry, in its holy essence,
is, all by itself, color—power—beauty!
It needs no lipstick, no spritz of perfume.
Why stiffen its digits by stuffing them in gloves,
forcing them to bang pianos or offer chocolates?
Leave them free and they’ll harvest stars,
rearrange mountain ranges, catch lightning bolts.
The redeeming arms of poetry
encompass the world, embrace the sky—
why nail them to the cross of rhyme?
Suffering Beauty herself rises up
in rebellion—it’s an arrow in her heart
to force a corset on Apollo’s torso
so his heroic form
can slip into a flunky’s glittering livery.
To perish in accord with the laws of its being,
a wave wants a beach to die on, not a dike
to be baffled by. A great thought,
having cut its way through with a line of verse,
doesn’t want to find at the end of that arduous arcade
that it has to stop and fumble open
a pretty little door of crystal and gold.
No, it wants the pampas, whose wideness
cries out “Liberty!”
The Statue
See her sovereign silhouette standing out
against the background of the garden,
as clear contoured as if she’d been cut out with a scissors!
She seems to have sprouted on her pedestal
like the first early shoot of the family tree
of some great race to be—
some hale, unshakeable race,
hewn from the hardness of marble
with heroic hits of the chisel,
some great nation destined to replace
humankind, to chase us from the plains of the future!
On your knees! It is so you should behold her
imposing, in august calm,
in her frightful nakedness!
God, grant motion to this body,
give it life! What grandeur sleeps in her form!
Pity it—on its raised base, exposed,
wretchedly defenseless, poorer than a worm,
yet eternally calm!
The Gray Muse
Profound, so profound, weird and pale
with a solemn, ghastly wax-candle pallor—
her eyes are sunken, ringed with gray—
like those of someone fevered by fatal disease—
ringed with symbolic circles, frightful occult signs!
Pearls wind around her soft neck,
heavy, dense-clustered as pomegranate seeds,
an opalescent rope of naiad’s tears.
Wild, silken, madwoman’s hair
overflows her shoulders
like a blonde wave of champagne.
He white profile’s austere as that of a glacier,
yet soft—it makes a cadence of lines.
As she moves, her shape seems to blur
as though surrounded by a silvery vague halo
or a veil made of fog.
through which one glimpses her lead-colored lips—
setting and bezel for the slow, cold,
unholy opal of her kiss.
See how her lips tremble in prelude to it,
while her eyes glow like the spectral legends
of the north, hypnotic as the surge of icy seas.
In her eyes one glimpses a chilling infinity,
it’s like staring into the eyes of a seer,
or the yet more cryptic eyes of a living sphinx!
Like looking through someone’s eyes to their soul
and then past it, into visionary depths
horrible and bottomless.
Her song is dark, rich, smooth as satin,
the words blur into a twilit distance,
become unintelligible echos; her song
walks with muffled footsteps down,
ever down, her steps ring out as they sink
into your soul—tremendous, incomprehensible
as the call of a church bell.
O gray! Grand imposing gray!
Gray of winter, of obstinate fogs, of sickly dawns.
Strange gray! You express the Muse,
the Muse herself, weird color, deep and supreme,
the blue-gray of the Muse whose eyes,
like ritual candles, signal
the weighty mystery of her being.
Her eyes open slowly, like gray flowers of death,
to enfold your soul, ensnare it
in their grim gaze. Her eyes are the gray of steel;
her sad soul, the color of ashes;
her eyes express all things.
They stare at you as would a snake-charmer
who learned his art in the shadow of the pyramids.
Looking into them, I see the coast of Brittany,
beliefs born of its northern fogs,
phantoms, storms, Druid megaliths . . .
Oriental Scents
Night entered the apprehensive room,
found me already dreaming, though not yet asleep.
A Chinese vase stood on the piano,
as if on a wide, mysterious horizon.
It held a sheaf of opalescent flowers,
perfuming the room—a warm perfume
that rose like waves of heat from the bouquet,
as though the stems were sweet, floral candles
and the flowers themselves were flames.
I let my eyes slowly half-close
and gave myself to the waves of scent
as a shipwrecked sailor might abandon himself
to the will of the sea.
In that sleepy hour, it seemed two different perfumes
approached me, floating from the blossoms.
One was myrrh and honey to the senses,
the other—grave, profound,
entering the temple of my soul.
Those scents were spirits, apparitions,
taking on the beautiful forms
of lovely, weird, pale persons.
One was a wizard in rose that flamed
with red and gold, the other—a nun,
white as a candle, towering, straight
as a taper, with long, delicate fingers.
These two opened doors
that hadn’t been in the room before,
portals on wide ways which I entered, trembling.
They told me many, many things
in their own strange language, these opal blooms,
things rare and deep and sometimes hard to fathom
as the deepest shadows in the room.
Hearing these, I felt like some great seer
able to read in the stillness
life’s frightening mysteries.
O flowers, your whiteness made me drunk,
a white so white it shone of itself in the shadows
like the seal of God imposed, glowing, on the darkness.
O flowers, tell me more!
Your voices reach me through the dimness
as if from beyond the irrevocable wall
dividing Death from Life.
I feel the approach of sleep, your perfume
brings it to me on warm waves of scent.
I meet it like an oriental lord
sailing forth on his ostentatious barge,
majestic in his power and idleness!
O flowers, tell me much, much more!
It’s harder now to make out what you’re saying.
Tell me, in the steady deadness of a statue,
doesn’t there lurk some occult life?
The approaching night, isn’t it a troop
of women dressed in mourning, marching
towards some hoped for light? Tell me what you know
of the mysteries of our existence, of Calvary’s
tremendous legend, tell me where do souls go
in their final flight?
The caverns of sleep, tell me, flowers,
are they not, these dreaming grottos,
our best oasis in the desert of life?
It is part of our project to create a library of the greatest poetry by women from every time and land—a “great wall of girls” —a collection so imposing in scope that women’s genius will be visible even from outer space. Literary translation is the primary means for securing this end.
96th of October Editions has already published books by Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva (Russian); Mascha Kalèko (German); Renée Vivien (French); Anna Margolin (Yiddish) Rachel Blaustein (Hebrew); and Sappho (Greek). Ancient literature written by women, and attributed to men, will be found in O’Malley’s Woman in Chinese and Faintly’s Hebrew Hussies and Hellcats. Our fully annotated editions of books by Julia Vinograd and Emily Dickinson are important turrets on the “wall.” Delmira Agustini is a distinguished addition to this company.
We are actively interested in publishing new translations: do not hesitate to send us your work.
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We propose, as a literary magazine, to do our part to render great women audible. This we view as a necessary corollary to political feminism, but neither identical nor subordinate to the latter—just as securing women’s rights is a necessary corollary to securing universal human rights, but neither identical nor subordinate to that latter aim.