Anuarí
Teresa Wilms Montt
Translated by Jessica Sequeira
Beyond the melodramatic events of her brief life, the work of Chilean poet Teresa Wilms Montt (1893-1921) resists the passage of time with the strangeness of its images of eternity and the beauty of its oneiric song of contemplation, composed amidst the deepest horror.
In “Anuarí”, Wilms Montt’ s collection of prose poems which was first published in 1918 and is presented here for the first time in English, in a brilliant translation by Jessica Sequeira, the author seeks to order her thoughts amidst the blur of nightmare, building, layer by layer, a world of dissonant beauty. Though the book has much in common with her other works, such as Sentimental Doubts and In the Stillness of Marble, in the present collection new figures, such as toads, swamps, decapitated heads, tea roses and the “Sly Lady”, appear-along, of course, with the spirit of the unrequited lover Anuarí who killed himself in front of her.
A prologue by Ramón del Valle-Inclán also adds insight into the work.
About the Author
Teresa Wilms Montt was born on September 8, 1893 in Viña del Mar, Chile, into an elite, well-connected family. Her first book, Inquietudes sentimentales, consisted of fifty poems with surrealist features, while her second, Los tres cantos, explored eroticism and spirituality. Both books enjoyed great success in Argentine intellectual circles. In 1918, she moved to Madrid, where she published two works widely recognized by Spanish literary critics: In the Stillness of Marble and Anuarí. Upon returning to Buenos Aires in 1919, she published her fifth book, Cuentos para hombres que todavía son niños. She died in 1921, in Paris, from an overdose of Veronal.
About the Translator
Jessica Sequeira was born in San Jose, California in 1989, and currently lives in Santiago de Chile. Her works include the novel A Furious Oyster (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and the collection of essays Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age (Zero).
Her translations include Bernardo Couto Castillo’ s Asphodels (Snuggly Books, 2020), Enrique Gómez Carrillo’ s Sentimental Stories (Snuggly Books, 2020), Rafaela Contreras’ s The Turquoise Ring and Other Stories (Snuggly Books, 2019), Adolfo Couve’ s When I Think of My Missing Head (Snuggly Books, 2018),and Liliana Colanzi’ s Our Dead World (Dalkey Archive).
Paperback, 88 pages. Release date: September 2, 2024
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-156-9
Price: US$14.00
From the same author:
In the Stillness of Marble, (Snuggly Books, 2019)
Sentimental Doubts, (Snuggly Books, 2020)