Alfonsina Storni

1892-1938

Alfonsna Storni was born on May 29, 1892, in Switzerland.

In 1896, the Storni family moved to Argentina and settled in the province of San Juan where her father had a brewery. Four years later, the family moved to Rosario city where Alfonsina was forced to abandon her studies and get a job to help her parents.

Some time went by until the theater company of Manuel Cordero arrived in Rosario and Alfonsina got a job as an actress and traveled around the country. She later decided to become rural teacher and got a teaching job in a school as dramatic arts teacher.

During this time she had an affair with a married man of the political world, with whom she had a son, at the age of 19. Since then, she divided her time writing poems and teaching at the Labardén Municipal Infant Theater and in the National Conservatoire, where she worked until the last days of her life. She managed to publish poems in "Caras y Caretas", a leading  illustrated magazine of political satire, scientific and social news that included a few literary collaborations; and received awards and honors for them

In 1916, she began to give public speeches and to got involved in the literary circles after her book  "La Inquietud del Rosal" was published. Her principal poetical works are: "El dulce daño", "Irremediablemente", "Languidez", "Ocre", "Poemas de Amor", "El amo del mundo", "Dos farsas  pirotécnicas", "Mundo de siete pozos" and "Mascarilla y trébol". She also collaborated with major magazines and newspapers from Buenos Aires.

In 1920 she won the First Municipal Prize of Poetry and the Second National Prize of Literature.

Alfonsina participated in the creation of the Argentine Society of Writers' and her involvement in the literary movement was very intense. In 1928 she traveled to Spain with actress Blanca de la Vega where she met other women writers and where the poet Concha Méndez dedicated her some of her poems.

In 1935 Alfonsina had to be operated to remove a tumor, but the cancer spread and she would go through deep deppressions; and to worsen her situation, two of her fiends, writers Horacio Quiroga and Leopoldo Lugones, comitted suicide.
 

In October of 1938 she traveled to Mar del Plata from where she sent two letters; one to her 26 year old son and a farewell poem to the "La Nación" newspaper.

She survived a cancer, but a problems of the heart drove her to commit suicide at the age of 46. Her last poem is called: "Quiero Dormir" (I want to sleep). Her biographers assure that she jumped to the water from the seashore in Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires province.

Alfonsina Storni was one of the most important Argentine poets of the century and was poetical and spiritual myth that slowly submerge in the sea.

In the proximities of the site where the writer Alfonsina Storni took her life on October 25, 1938, there is a commemorative monument, designed by the sculptor Luis Perlotti in 1942.