I Erase You. You Are Erased.

The Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–1994) first married in 1930, at age 21. The bride was his cousin María Amalia. They divorced three years later and Onetti quickly married María Amalia’s sister, María Julia. That marriage lasted until he was 30. The next six years were the only unmarried phase of his adult life. In 1945, he married Elizabeth María Pekelharing, a journalist from Holland he met while working in Buenos Aires. His new bride introduced him to a friend, Dorotea “Dolly” Mur, a young Argentine violinist of German parentage. Ten years later, shortly after divorcing Pekelharing, he married for a fourth time. The latest and last wife, the only one not named María, was Dolly. This marriage lasted four decades—the rest of Onetti’s life.

In 1980, Onetti was awarded the Premio Cervantes, the Spanish-speaking world’s highest literary honor. Accordingly, a detailed chronology of his life is on the website of the Instituto Cervantes, from which this matrimonial history was gleaned. This official record makes no mention of the poet, songwriter, and translator Idea Vilariño (1920–2009). Which is exactly how Vilariño wanted it.

The two met in late 1950 or early 1951 at a party celebrating Onetti’s fourth novel. He was 41, and married to his third wife; Vilariño was 30. Four years later, Onetti dedicated his novel Los adioses to Vilariño. Three years after that, in 1957, she dedicated her sixth collection, Poemas de amor, to Onetti, by then two years into his long marriage to Dolly.

Individual poems by Vilariño have occasionally appeared in anthologies of Latin American poetry in the United States, but not until now, more than a decade after her death and in the centennial year of her birth, has one of her books appeared in English translation. Unsurprisingly, it is her best-known work, Poemas de amor / Love Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), in a translation by the poet Jesse Lee Kercheval. The literary scholar Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a Yale professor who wrote influential treatises on Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda, also cofounded a magazine with Vilariño in his younger years and co-translated a number of works with her. “One day we’ll all be remembered as the contemporaries of Idea Vilariño,” Monegal is often quoted as having said. For the English-speaking world, that day begins now.

Vilariño was born to a sickly bookish mother and an aspiring poet father with anarchist inclinations who ran a masonry supply store next to the family home in Montevideo. He and his wife expressed their literary ambitions in their children’s names: Azul, the firstborn, was named for a poem by Rubén Darío that the father would declaim at the dinner table; Poema was the youngest daughter; Idea was the middle child; Numen was the youngest brother; and Alma was the only sibling with a conventional name (though in English, Soul would not be conventional). The family was also musical: Idea played the piano and violin, while Poema once edited a collection of lyrics to popular waltzes for which Idea wrote the introduction. Alma was an accomplished pianist, and Numen later achieved some renown as a composer.

Vilariño suffered from asthma, aggravated by the powdery clouds of lime dust that billowed into the family home from the masonry supply store next door. In 1940, at age 20, she moved out. “And that,” states the celebrated Argentine nonfiction writer Leila Guerriero, in a remarkable essay published in 2010, shortly after the poet’s death, “is how Idea Vilariño left home and never, ever, ever again had a family.”

This was not the case, as Guerriero well knew. Vilariño was eventually a guardian to her younger siblings and shared a home with her sister Poema; she was even married for a while to Jorge Liberati, a philosopher 22 years her junior. But truer than any of these facts is the abiding vocation for solitude in Vilariño’s poetry. One of Onetti’s favorites among the Poemas de amor was “Ya no”—an ordinary phrase that’s peculiarly difficult to translate, unlike the even briefer title of Vilariño’s final collection of new poetry, No (1980). The last line of “Ya no” is “Pero yo vivo sola.” / “But I live alone.” 

As many photographs attest, Vilariño was movie-star glamorous. She always had three or four men in play, and was rumored to list her lovers’ names in a ledger. There was no glamour, though, to her bouts of severe eczema that began in adolescence. In the late 1940s, after the deaths of her parents and older brother Azul left her in charge of her younger siblings, she was bedridden with the worst flare-up of her life. Fluids accumulated beneath her rupturing skin, so copious they soaked through the mattress to puddle on the floor. As a teenager, Vilariño had written

En la arena caliente, temblante de
          blancura,
cada uno es un fruto madurando su
     muerte.
 
 
On the hot sands, seething with
       whiteness,
each body is a fruit ripening its own
       death.

The line is from one of the seven poems in her first published book La suplicante (1945). Eczema made the skin all over her body crust and harden, until it had to be soaked and peeled away, as if she were a fruit.

She told interviewers there were two mysteries about herself she could never solve. Why did she publish her work to begin with? And why hadn’t she taken her own life? She attributed her publications to circumstance and force of habit—she’d been invited to publish young, and was used to doing so, though writing poetry was an intensely personal act she felt no need to share. As for why she’d never committed suicide, she could only attribute her resilience to those years of lying agonized on a wet bed, covered in dead skin, fighting to stay alive. In the end, she couldn’t deny herself that victory. She lived to age 88.

In an interview with the literary scholar Jorge Albistur, Vilariño described her daily life during the 1950s:

I’d get up at four a.m., sometimes without having slept from the asthma. By eight, I’d be teaching my classes in [a high school in the Montevideo neighborhood of] Nueva Helvecia, and by two p.m. I’d be at my job in the Sala de Arte at the Museo Pedagógico. Quite often, after I left work at eight, there would be editorial meetings for Número [a magazine she cofounded, which ran from 1949 to 1964]. I know how to build a fire, paint walls, translate, make a garden, train a dog, frame things, and make gin. I was divided between desire for death and the love for these tasks, for life.

The writer Manuel Claps, a former lover who during the worst of the eczema brought Vilariño food, combed her hair, and helped strip away layers of dead skin, introduced her to Onetti. The two were already acquainted with each other’s reputations as high-level players of blood sport romance. Vilariño claimed she’d pictured Onetti as a cretinous Don Juan. Onetti imagined her as a garish, heavyset manhunter. “We were monsters, both of us,” Vilariño would later say. She fell in love that first night. A few days later, Onetti went home to Buenos Aires and was unable to return to Uruguay for more than a year. So they corresponded, and continued to do so for the rest of Onetti’s life.

If their relationship was lifelong, their love was measurable only in hours, days, nights. One of the Poemas de amor attempts a tally. Was it six nights? Seven? As many as nine? Probably more than that; it’s characteristic of Vilariño to exaggerate on the side of paucity, and another of the Poemas de amor speaks of “tantas noches” / “so many nights.” In 1983, she confided to researcher and curator Hilia Moreira:

There was a man who’d show up unexpectedly at my house, at any hour. We’d close doors and windows. All clocks stopped. We didn’t know if it was night or day, if it was Saturday. We were enemies, relatives, strangers … It was an experience of ecstasy. Once he proposed we marry. The very beauty and intensity of such games makes them dangerous, at the edge of a boundary from which there may be no return. These are not ceremonies that can regularly be repeated.

For all her stated indifference to the reception of her work, Vilariño was pleased by Erich Hackl’s translations of her poems into German in the mid-1990s. Hackl, who went on to become an internationally celebrated novelist, stumbled across Vilariño’s work in an anthology and traveled to Uruguay to meet her. When a collection of her poems that he co-translated appeared in Austria, Vilariño and Hackl gave bilingual Spanish–German readings together across Europe. Following one, a man approached Vilariño to tell her, in broken Spanish, that the reason her work was so popular in Europe was because of its intensividad, an incorrect form of intensidad that Vilariño pronounces with smiling emphasis on the extra syllable in Mario Jacob’s documentary film Idea (1997).

The writers Vilariño herself translated were primarily British or French: Shakespeare, Graham Greene, Raymond Queneau, Emile Durkheim, and others. A co-translation of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral was the closest she came to working on the literature of the United States. In 1982, when a friend offered to nominate her for a Guggenheim Fellowship, she categorically refused. An artist has a responsibility to serve as an example, she said. A decade earlier she’d written a letter to the editor of the literary magazine Marcha criticizing those who accepted funding from the nation she referred to as “el imperio.” That money, she argued, was a vehicle of cultural penetration. In the early 1950s, she protested a military treaty Uruguay signed with the United States, and her collection Pobre mundo (1966) included “To Guatemala,” which referenced the aftermath of the CIA-backed coup that deposed Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz, in 1954:

te tienen de sirvienta
sí señor sí señor
te pagan bien es claro
y a lavar pisos y a poner la mesa
para que coman otros…
         … Nuestro destino
es decir sí señor
 
 
they have you for housemaid
si señor si señor
pay you well of course
to scrub the floor and set the table
so others can eat …
         … Our destiny is
to say si señor si señor

***

Jesse Lee Kercheval began spending time in Uruguay in 2010. Her translations of the country’s poets soon appeared in various US magazines, followed by a steady stream of Uruguay-related books. Indeed, she’s become so prolific and indefatigable a translator that Vilariño is only one of three poets from Uruguay whose books are appearing in translations or co-translations by Kercheval this year.

“I forbid myself to elaborate or explain, and so the poems are minimal,” Vilariño once said. Leila Guerriero describes Vilariño’s preferred technique as “the elimination of anecdote.” Kercheval’s translation appears to espouse these same principles, insofar as it is free of footnotes and has only a sparse introduction. The dozens of Uruguayan poets Kercheval has brought into English over the past decade form a notable context for this volume. However, aside from the original Spanish poems that face the translations—crucially important for the work of a poet such as Vilariño—context is in scant supply in these pages, and what little is provided is often problematic.

The introduction, for example, sets Vilariño and Onetti alongside Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart—all tempestuous relationships, certainly, but also all married couples who lived together for many years. All the poets it compares Vilariño to are women (Plath, Anne Sexton, and a sequence of Uruguayans), whereas Vilariño declared she didn’t feel much connection to poetry written by women. The poet whose name is often invoked along with hers in the many panels, programs, and articles that have celebrated her centennial in Uruguay is Neruda.

Kercheval’s introduction declares that “Onetti is the amor referred to in the poems,” thus boldly limiting to a single individual the object of desire evoked in this powerful and hugely influential work of lyric poetry. The book’s introduction and back cover state that Love Poems was dedicated to Onetti—as, indeed, that 1957  first edition was—but Kercheval’s translation includes no dedication page. For her part, Vilariño once said that Onetti used to accuse her of not having loved him at all, of simply wanting to create an image for the history of literature. To his boundless rage, she eliminated the dedication to him from some later editions of the Poemas de amor. “Not all the poems there are his,” she explained to the great Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska in a 2004 interview. In a follow-up letter, Vilariño wrote, “When I speak of love, the full potential of being is in play.”

Certain of the Love Poems are so elemental they seem formed out of a primordial, prelinguistic matter whose translation is innate within it, entirely foreordained. One of these is the brief “Adiós”:

Aquí
lejos
te borro.
Estás borrado.
 
 
Here
far away
I erase you.
You are erased.

“Never has verse been less free than mine,” Vilariño told Poniatowska. But not every poem in the collection rules its translation with such an iron fist, nor should a translator allow that. To translate love poems is to write love poems, which is always personal. Miguel Machado, a former student of mine, made a Spanish translation of “Crossing the Square,” Grace Schulman’s evocation of a winter walk across Washington Square Park with her husband. Machado’s version referred to Washington Square only as “el parque.” He lived in a different part of New York City, and his rendering allowed him to more capaciously include himself and his own love. (Schulman was intrigued and delighted by the choice.) “El parque” does not rule out the possibility of Washington Square, but many translation choices inevitably foreclose other readings.

Such choices occasionally happen here and are another reason to be grateful this is a bilingual edition. In the first poem, “Un huésped” / “A Guest,” the line “Somos ajenos / tu / y yo misma / y mi casa” becomes “We’re someone else’s / you / and me too / and my house.” This evokes a conventionally adulterous scenario, with each party wed to another. But in the context of Vilariño and Onetti, there’s no “someone else.” Even Dolly, the long-term wife, didn’t see it that way. Onetti’s biographer María Esther Gilio tells a story about crossing paths with Dolly one day, after the Onettis had moved back to Montevideo. Dolly was carrying a bag of canned food to Vilariño’s house because Onetti was going to spend a few days there and Vilariño never fed him. Gilio asked Dolly why it didn’t bother her that Onetti had other women. She replied that Onetti wrote about women in his books so how could she ask him not to get to know women? She wanted him to be happy. (“[Dolly] was invented for me,” Onetti would say.)

The word ajeno can mean “belonging to someone else”; it can also mean unconnected, alien, foreign, aloof, strange. In Jacobs’s documentary, Vilariño says of Onetti, “He was the last man I should have fallen in love with. He was everything I should not have loved. We never knew or understood each other.” The Poemas de amor are less the history of a single passion than an epistemology of passion itself. The eighth line of “Ya no” is “nunca sabrás quién fui” / “you will never know who I was.

Another poem, “El Encuentro,” explores the idea of belonging to someone absolutely, metaphysically. “Todo es tuyo” /“Everything is yours,” it begins, and then goes back to the origin of the speaker’s being: “te lloraba al nacer  / te aprendía en la escuela.” By interpolating prepositions that aren’t present in the original, the translation makes these lines far more conventional: “I cried for you at birth / I learned with you in school.” The Spanish poem is not an ode to a classmate.

***

In an article published last April in the Uruguayan newspaper Brecha, Vilariño’s longtime friend and collaborator Ana Inés Larre Borges, to whom the poet bequeathed her private papers, denounced the fact that five boxes of those papers were sold to Princeton University by the great-nephew who ultimately inherited the estate. It was an outcome that ran counter to the express intentions set forth in Vilariño’s will, and that Vilariño, with her “implacable anti-imperialism,” would have vehemently rejected.

What would Vilariño think about having her poetry translated for readers in the United States? Kercheval is to be commended for having opened a space for Uruguayan literature in the United States, for being the first translator to publish a book of poems by Vilariño in English, and for the precision of some of the translations. But I am perplexed and dismayed by one aspect of her contextualization of these poems, which confirms Vilariño’s expectations of el imperio and invites a superficial and reductive reading.

Kercheval’s introduction states that in 1974, “[Onetti] went into exile … leaving Idea Vilariño, stripped by the dictatorship of her teaching post, alone and isolated in Montevideo.” And there she was, Latin America’s Miss Havisham. That’s the last readers of this book are told about Vilariño’s life. I don’t know if Kercheval simply didn’t learn much about that life, or if she deliberately excised its political dimension to reinvent Vilariño as a figure of pure literature for easier consumption in the Empire.

In fact, Vilariño’s political engagement began in the 1950s, alongside her affair with Onetti. By the early 1960s, she told Poniatowska, she’d realized that an apolitical and purely literary magazine like Número, to which she’d devoted so much of her time, was pointless. She was galvanized by the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959, and by the increasingly authoritarian trend in Uruguayan politics, backed by the United States.

In August of 1961, Che Guevara gave a speech in Montevideo. It took place during one of the interludes when Onetti was at Vilariño’s house and all clocks were stopped. Onetti may later have doubted Vilariño’s love but she gave him great proof of it that day: she missed Che’s speech for him. Then the phone rang. A shot fired in an assassination attempt on Che had instead killed Vilariño’s colleague, a professor named Arbelio Ramirez. A meeting was convened within the hour. “If you leave, you won’t see me again,” Onetti warned. She left. When she returned three hours later, he was gone.

There were many goodbyes, Vilariño said, which was why there were so many poems, and even a novel with the word Adiós in the title. But that day in 1961, the bullet meant for Che also caused a definitive shift in Vilariño’s priorities. In the years that followed, she bought a house in the seaside resort of Las Toscas and frequented the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, or Tupamaros, a guerilla resistance group. According to musicologist Coriún Aharonián, another of her close friends and collaborators, she became a member of the Tupamaros, part of a cell working on cultural aspects of the revolution. In the second half of the decade she visited Cuba twice. She told Poniatowska that being in a country that was living out its revolution was overwhelming. She had to read her own poems to remind herself who she was.

In 1974, Vilariño visited Onetti in his bed at the psychiatric hospital where the newly installed Uruguayan dictatorship had incarcerated him months before. It was the first time they’d seen each other in years. Shortly after, Onetti and Dolly left for Spain. Whenever Vilariño had occasion to be in Madrid during their decades of exile there, she would stop by the Onettis’ apartment.

Vilariño could have left Uruguay herself, but refused. She stayed and fought. In 1975, a year after Onetti’s departure, she married her former student, the philosopher Jorge Liberati. Guerriero, who interviewed Liberati, tells of a time the couple arrived at the house in Las Toscas, where Tupamaro leaders were sometimes guests, to find 20 soldiers stretched on the ground, guns trained on the front door. Liberati walked toward them calmly, responding to their questions. Their marriage, the only marriage of Vilariño’s life, lasted a little over a decade.

In the end, what mattered most to Vilariño were the lyrics she wrote for the songs that made her, in Poniatowska’s words, “the voice of a whole generation of resistance to dictatorship.” Vilariño had always been entranced by popular music, the tangos and waltzes of the Southern Cone that reached audiences far vaster than any printed poem could. One of the most beloved songs of that era, “La canción y el poema,” was written when Alfredo Zitarrosa, a leading figure in la nueva canción, the political music movement of the 1960s, turned up unexpectedly at Vilariño’s house in Las Toscas at midnight, demanding lyrics. She gave him “Canción”/ “Song,” one of the Poemas de amor, as the chorus; in the verses they added, the singer tells of hearing a voice in the distance, and realizing it may be her own. “There was no greater vehicle,” Vilariño told Poniatowska. “[T]he songs went where our books could never go, to everyone. And the singers needed lyrics, and people needed to hear them.”

A 1970 album by legendary Uruguayan band Los Olimareños included “Los orientales,” another song with lyrics by Vilariño, this one evoking the 19th-century revolution against Spanish colonial rule waged by José Artigas and his band of orientales, or Easterners (Uruguay being the easternmost nation of the Southern Cone). Even as it invokes Uruguay’s founding history, “Los orientales” also strikes a contemporary note; the people who abandon all for the revolution, the orientales, appear on “streetcorners” (esquinas), not a common phenomenon in the Uruguay of 1807, as Pepe Guerra, a member of Los Olimareños, has noted. Vilariño had a lifelong obsession with prosody, a subject on which she wrote several books. It did not escape the attention of audiences that when this ostensibly historico-patriotic anthem was sung, the four-syllable orientales could be replaced by Tupamaros without affecting the rhythm.

In 2010, José “Pepe” Mujica, a Tupamaro leader imprisoned for 12 years during the period known as the civic-military dictatorship (roughly 1973-1985), was elected president of Uruguay. Vilariño  did not live to see this outcome but she did help to create it. As dictatorship consolidated its hold on Uruguay in the 1970s, Los Olimareños were banned. More than a decade went by before they were allowed to play again, on May 18, 1984. One of the people in the crowd of 50,000 at Montevideo’s Estadio Centenario that night was Vilariño. When the band broke into “Los orientales,” every voice in the stadium joined in, Vilariño’s among them.

Porque dejaron sus vidas,
sus amigos y sus bienes,
porque les es más querida
la libertad que no tienen,
porque es ajena la tierra
y la libertad ajena
y porque siempre los pueblos
saben romper sus cadenas.
 
 
For they gave up their lives
their friends and their possessions,
for what they love more
is the freedom denied them
the land is taken from them
freedom taken from them
but the people will always
know how to break their chains.

“It didn’t matter whether the song was mine or not,” she said. In an introduction to her collected song lyrics, she wrote, “No one remembered who’d written the words to ‘Los orientales’ … [T]he whole stadium sang them, with enormous collective emotion. And so did I, there amid all of them. Nobody.”

In that ocean of sound, Vilariño, the woman who wrote the words everyone was singing, was only another voice. She was erased.