Writer Judy Veramendi first heard about Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini in 1972, when Veramendi was an exchange student in Pamplona. “I was sitting in class and my Latin American literature professor said, ‘Today we’re going to read the poetry of the first woman to write like a woman in the Spanish language,’” says Veramendi, who grew up in Park Forest. “I thought it sounded chauvinistic and started laughing at him. He said, ‘Don’t laugh, senorita, it’s true.’
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Veramendi wound up writing her undergraduate thesis on Agustini, and now the poet is the subject of her first play, The Empty Chalices, which weaves together Agustini’s verse and scenes from her tumultuous life. “The culture she came from was so Catholic and repressive, and still she managed to write this incredible poetry,” says Veramendi. Born in 1886, Agustini published her first poem at 15; to her friends and family, she was known as “la Nena” (“the Baby”). Friends with other Latin American modernists such as Ruben Dario and Manuel Ugarte, she married at 26, shortly after publishing her third and best-known work, a collection titled The Empty Chalices (her metaphor for the Catholic Church’s attitude towards women). She left her husband a month later because, says Veramendi, she “couldn’t stand the vulgarity of marriage.” The following year he shot and killed her and then himself.
She finished the novel in January and published it herself this month in both English and Spanish editions. Her theatrical adaptation is also being produced in both languages; the Spanish version premiered in Montevideo last month. “It’s great to write and have people read your work, but there’s nothing like having characters in your head for a long time and seeing them in flesh and blood on the stage in front of you and feeling the audience reaction around you,” she says. She’s also been trying to track down her old teacher in Spain. “If I ever find him, I can’t wait to tell him about it.”
