About Alfonsina Storni
Alfonsina Storni Martignoni was an Argentine postmodernist intellectual, journalist, and poet born on May 22, 1892, in Capriasca (Swiss canton of Ticino) and died on October 25, 1938, on Playa de La Perla, Mar del Plata in Argentina. Born of Italian parents in Switzerland, Alfonsina Storni’s parents had emigrated to Argentina in 1885. They returned to Switzerland again in 1889 for an extended visit, where Alfonsina was born. She was three at their return to San Juan. Almost immediately, the family had great financial difficulty. Her father took to drinking, neglecting his business, and was absent much of the time. Storni’s mother, Paula, struggled to keep the family fed and in clothing, moving to Rosario after the father’s death in 1906. At thirteen, accordingly, Alfonsina began to work at a nearby hat factory to supplement her family’s income. During this period, however, she was recognized by a local theatrical company and began touring with them.In 1909, Storni enrolled in a school for rural teachers. She also secretly participated in the chorus of a theater, and when her theatrical activities were discovered, the incident created a minor scandal. Storni ran away, leaving a suicide note. In 1912, she arrived in Buenos Aires with her diploma and an infant son, eventually finding employment working as a cashier. Later, she worked at an import firm. Her first poems began to appear during this period, and in 1916, her first book, La Inquietud del Rosal (The Restlessness of the Rosebush) was published. The poems revealed her affinities to European modernism and symbolic writing. But later she denounced this work and attempted to prevent it from inclusion in collections.
Her books, however, in its complaints against sexual injustice, became a sensation in Buenos Aires, and she soon became involved in the literary world of the city, one of the first women to participate in that all-male society. Her dramatic readings at the poetic events led her friends to help her get a position, created especially for her, at the Lavarden Children’s Theater and a chair in reading at the Normal School of Modern Languages. She devoted her energies for the next several years to teaching. She also published several volumes of poetry, El Dulce Dano (1918, The Sweet Harm), Irremediablemente (1919, Irremediably), and Languidez (1920, Languor).
Throughout the 1920s, she directed the Teatro Infantil, a position which the city had created for her. But her financial security and professional admiration did not assuage her sense of gender injustice or her own dismay at having to be dependent upon men. Her work Ocre in 1925 began a change in her writing from a heightened romantic sensibility to concern with the status of women throughout the century. Later works include El Mundo de Siete Pozos (1934, World of Seven Wells) and Mascarilla y Trebol (1938, Mask and Trefoil), the latter appearing after her death.
The poetry of the dark lady is veiled in a sweet and terrible darkness, to the point of being almost entirely invaded by two incessant images: the sea and death, death and the sea, the leitmotif of a slow and inexorable flood of black waves, from her poems Frente al Mar (1919) to Un Cementerio que Mira al Mar (1920), or Alta Mar (1934), and up to the premonitory dream “Me at the Bottom of the Sea”. This is how, moreover, suffering from breast cancer, Alfonsina Storni settled, for the last time, in a hotel in Mar del Plata in October 1938 and committed suicide as in her poems. In bad health and suffering from depression, Storni walked into the sea in October 1938 to her death.
A month later, the Chamber of Deputies agreed to erect a mausoleum on the spot where her body was found—the beach at Mar del Plata—thus perpetuating her memory and incorporating her legendary figure into Argentina's national glories.
Browse all poems and texts published on Alfonsina Storni
I would like to walk the distant shore. And the undiluted skies would see me pass... To feel the incessant indifference of the sea
