Delmira Agustini (1886-1914)

Agustini was an outstanding Spanish American modernista writer who expressed female sexuality in a time when literary writing was dominated by men. The poem "Lo inefable" (the ineffable) was part of her poetry book De Cantos de la Mañana published in 1910. Her untimely death, by the hand of her husband at the age of 28, not only attests to the end of her virtuoso writing but also to the many women who have suffered violence against women.

According to Aníbal González, Augustini had a brief, convoluted, and paradoxical life, “the spoiled child of a bourgeois family in a less-than-cosmopolitan Montevideo, she had always behaved correctly and had avoided the public eye (as a women were expected to do in that time and place); yet, simultaneously, she wrote remarkably beautiful and profound erotic poems in which, loke no other Spanish-language female writer before her, she openly expressed her sexuality and desires” (A Companion, 125)
  • González, Aníbal. A Companion to Spanish American Modernismo. vol. 240., Tamesis, Woodbridge, UK;Rochester, NY, 2007.

Lo Inefable

Yo muero extrañamente... No me mata la Vida,
No me mata la Muerte, no me mata el Amor;
Muero de un pensamiento mudo como una herida...
¿No habéis sentido nunca el extraño dolor

De un pensamiento inmenso que se arraiga en la vida
Devorando alma y carne, y no alcanza a dar flor?
¿Nunca llevasteis dentro una estrella dormida
Que os abrasaba enteros y no daba un fulgor?...

Cumbre de los Martirios!... Llevar eternamente,
Desgarradora y árida, la trágica simiente
Clavada en las entrañas como un diente feroz!...

Pero arrancarla un día en una flor que abriera
Milagrosa, inviolable!... Ah, más grande no fuera
Tener entre las manos la cabeza de Dios!