Josefina de la Torre, the forgotten poetess | Women Poets

Poems about the soul and the sea written by a woman from the Canary Islands.

https://bvpb.mcu.es/, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Female Voices - Women Writers to Remember

by Alessia Pizzi

N.4 - August 2023

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Josefina de la Torre was an early 20th-century Spanish artist (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1907-2002). Her major works are "Versos y estampas" (1927), "Poemas de la isla" (1930), "Incomplete March" (1945 and 1968) and "Medida del tiempo" (1940-1989). Although she is included in Gerardo Diego's "Poesía española contemporánea" (1934), her figure is beginning to take center stage in recent studies, after a period of severe oblivion.

Group of 27, neo-popularism and the “Island Girl”

Literature, music and acting were the main expressions of her inspiration, also accomplices of her roots: her uncle was the famous baritone Néstore de la Torre Comminges and her brother Claudio de la Torre won the National Literature Prize in 1924. It was on this occasion that Josefina accompanied him to Madrid, got to know the poets of the time, and became a protagonist of the poetic revival of the so-called "Group of 27," a Spanish literary and poetic movement composed of a group of poets and writers aimed at an innovative thrust.

Within this group, among other trends, also emerges the literary current of neo-popularism with Rafael Alberti and Federico García Lorca, of which Josefina becomes an exponent in the Canary Islands, experimenting with new techniques for a "rebirth" of popular and traditional Spanish lyric poetry. The "marine" identity of the island set her apart, so much so that Pedro Salinas, in the preface to her first sylloge "Versos y estampas" (1927), would call the poet the "muchacha-isla," precisely the island girl, because of her strong connection to local themes.

Women without hats

In her youth, again in the context of the Generation of 27 and in the name of women's independence, she also linked up with the Sinsombrero group, composed of avant-garde women artists and poets such as Concha Méndez, Margarita Manso, Ernestina de Champourcín, Carmen Conde, and Maruja Mallo. The group's name came from Mallo and Manso's transgressive gesture of removing their hats during a walk along Puerta del Sol in Madrid. But this was only the beginning of the subversive actions: Mallo even broke into a church with a bicycle!

Me busco y no me encuentro

I look for myself and I can't find myself.

I roam the dark walls of myself,

I interrogate the silence and this awkward emptiness

and I do not succeed in the echo of my uncertainties.

I do not find myself.

And now I go as if asleep in the darkness,

groping the night from every corner.

And I could not be earth, nor essence, nor harmony,

which are fruit, sound, creation, universe.

Not this discouraged and slow threshing out

that turns everything that is wounded into questions.

And I roam the deaf walls of myself waiting for the moment to discover my shadow.

Translated with DEEP-L, spanish source

Italian (video version)

If it is to be, I want it to be

If it is to be, I want it to be

it will be soon. When I think

of sleeping horizons

and the sea on the beach.

If it is to be, may it surprise me

in my best memories

to make its presence

a single sign in the air.

Not asleep, nor awake:

if it is to be, I want it to be.

Translated with DEEP-L, spanish source

Original source: Poetesse Donne: Josefina de la Torre

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