from The Other Music

Francisca Aguirre was recently awarded the Premio Miguel Hernández for her book Historia de una anatomía.  A significant cultural achievement, it is also one of personal importance because, as she explained to me, a great poet and an honorable man, Miguel Hernández was incarcerated by Franco, writing some of his most enduring poetry in prison, where he ultimately died of tuberculosis.  Translating Aguirre's work continues to be an education, literary and political, on the act of being oneself in a context.  The two poems published here are some of Aguirre's earliest works.  "The Stranger" comes from Aguirre's first book Ítaca, 1972, and "Masterpiece" from her second book, Los trescientos escalones, 1976.  The 1970s was a decade of political importance in Spanish history.  Franco died in 1975, though his regime lasted until 1978, and the release in Spanish cultural expression following nearly a half-century of artistic suppression is palpable.  By 1984, we get Pedro Almodóvar's drug-selling lesbian nuns.  The 1970s was also an important decade in women's history—indeed, the inception of women's history as a mainstream field of scholarship. Aguirre's poetry is an antidote to a US-UK construction of second-wave feminism. These poems are second-wave feminist poems, yet Aguirre writes about ownership and exploration of the internal self rather than ownership and exploration of the body.  Ítaca, the story of the Odyssey from Penelope's point of view, can be read as a critique of patriarchy through the disturbance inflicted on Penelope's psyche. In Women poets of Spain, 1860-1990: toward a gynocentric vision, scholar John Chapman Wilcox suggests one reason Aguirre began publishing later in life was because her husband's work took priority within the couple.  Aguirre explains this delay as prioritizing life over art. Indeed, being a wife and mother seems integral, rather than antagonistic, to the work of writing: the urgency of this poetry is to communicate with loved ones.