Inquietudes sentimentales

Inquietudes sentimentales (Alquimia Ediciones, 2016)
by Thérèse Wilms Montt
Argentina, 1917

The young Thérèse (later Teresa) Wilms Montt's first chapbook, the angsty and occasionally preternaturally macabre Inquietudes sentimentales [Sentimental Concerns], was once blandly described by its author as a work which "habla de la sociedad chilena" ["speaks about Chilean society"] or some such pedestrian mumbo jumbo.  Whether that explanation was intentionally vague or exactly the sort of revenge-minded, gloved backhand to her recently abandoned home country that you'd expect from an aristocrat turned bohemian who'd had to flee the convent where she'd been locked up by an abusive husband, voilà the poem in prose debut of a singular and apparently singularly unhappy talent.  I confess that I love Wilms Montt's imagery even though I'm not quite sure what to make of the content of her work in some ways.  Are these 50 short pieces autobiographical?  More concerned with the aesthetic end of things?  Do such questions even matter?  Whatever, the Baudelairean spleen does seem heartfelt (is that the word?) enough here & for every mopey love poem that threatens to put me to sleep, Wilms Montt more often than not offers up a non-narcotic antidote in the form of a memorable image--"un corazón partido sobre un plato de Sèvres" ["a broken heart on a Sèvres platter"] (13); a menacing start to a poem--"El silencio ha estrangulado la noche" ["Silence has strangled the night"] (19); or that uplifting bit about how the pealing of bells doesn't always signify the announcement of a festive occasion for, "tras de él suele venir el carro de los leprosos" ["after it, the lepers' cart often follows"] (14).

Teresa Wilms Montt (1893-1921)

Inquietudes sentimentales appears alongside Los tres cantos (1917), En la quietud de mármol (1918), and Anuarí (1918)--the three other collections Wilms Montt published in her lifetime--and the standalone poem Belzebuth (1919) in the handsome centennial edition of her Poesía reunida (Santiago de Chile: Alquimia Ediciones, 2016, pp. 9-35).

Teresa Wilms Montt, de tumba en tumba

"Teresa Wilms Montt, de tumba en tumba"
by Alejandra Costamagna
Chile, 2011

"Teresa Wilms Montt, de tumba en tumba" ["Teresa Wilms Montt, from Tomb to Tomb"] is a gloomy, doom-perfumed biographical sketch of the Chilean poétesse maudite (1893-1921, above) who wowed then mostly all-male literary salons in Buenos Aires, Madrid and Paris before ending her life in the company of a flask full of Veronal.  While she walked the earth, she espoused sepulchral raisons d'être such as the following--"Soñar, sin parar, encerrada entre las paredes de mármol, lisas y limpias, de una tumba" ["Endlessly dreaming, shut inside the marble walls, clean and smooth, of a tomb"] (46)--and spent time among the gravestones in Buenos Aires' stately Recoleta Cementery penning diary entry-like notes to the rejected lover who had slit his wrists in front of her: "De la vida a tu tumba, de tu tumba a la vida, ése es mi destino" ["From life to your tomb, from your tomb to life, that is my fate"] (60).  Although, as with fellow suicide Gérard de Nerval's pages, it may be tough to suss out where the boundaries between the autobiographical and the artistic dissolve in Wilms Montt's slender body of work, essayist Alejandra Costamagna makes me want to learn more--much more actually--with the literarily come-hither comment that "la escritura de Teresa Wilms Montt es el coro de su leyenda" ["Teresa Wilms Montt's writing is the chorus to her legend"] (49).  In other words, more Wilms Montt in my future.

Alejandra Costamagna

"Teresa Wilms Montt, de tumba en tumba" is the second of seventeen sketches to appear in the Leila Guerriero-curated Los malditos (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2011, 45-64).  Readers of Spanish can enjoy what seems to be a complete version of Costamagna's essay here.