“Life-Hook” (“Vida-garfio”), called “Clinging to Life” in another translation, from Juana de Ibarbourou’s first poetry collection, Las lenguas de diamante (1919), shows themes and modes of expression that recur in her popular early work.

The playful, almost flirtatious attitude of many of her poems here treats the usually somber notion of death as life-giving renewal, transformation, and rebirth—the continuation of life in another form. Ibarbourou’s images denote a sense of physicality rather than metaphysics, no “dark night of the soul,” in fact, no soul at all!

Although the body will decompose and revert to atoms after death, its senses will remain intact, so that she can hear the laughter of birds and the charming chatter of a fountain, feel the sun warm her bones and the breeze cool her flesh, see the fierce red sunsets, touch the soil with hands eager to tunnel and scratch back to the surface.

Her body should not be buried deep because it will struggle to make a quick transition back to life and, by implication, should be allowed to. She must not be buried among the dead but among the living, so that her body can become the physical medium in which seeds send out roots, the roots become a plant, and the plant becomes her instrument to return to Earth and continue the connection with her beloved, in one great chain of eternal evolving and being.

One can understand why Ibarbourou’s portrayal of death—which ignores and thereby negates the concepts of purgatory, heaven, and hell—was considered irreligious and pagan, against which she felt forced to march out her Roman Catholic practices and later wrote two volumes of religious prose. The poem reflects no fear of death but, rather, joyous acceptance of it as a continuation of life as we know it. Love conquers all, even death.

Although this poem reflects none of Latin American modernist tropes of exotic palaces and princesses, it subtly reflects a more profound sense of the Orient in its embrace of the concept of reincarnation. In several of her writings Ibarbourou played with the idea that she might have been a shrub in a previous life.

Ibarbourou’s images in this poem differ from others in her works by alluding not to nature in the wild but to human-influenced nature, for example, in her references not to a flock of birds but to a birdhouse or aviary; not to a mountain stream, but to a fountain; not to seeds dispersed by the wind, but to those sown on purpose by her loved one. The original Spanish version has five stanzas of four (mostly 14-syllable) lines each, of varying rhythm, with rhyming second and fourth lines.

Bibliography
Ibarbourou, Juana de. “Vida-garfio” / “Life Hook,” translated by Sophie Cabot Black and Maria Negroni. In Twentieth-Century Latin American Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, edited by Stephen Tapscott, 123–127. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Categories: British Literature, Latin American Literature, Literature, World Literature

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