Clara Silva
(1905-1976)
As a young avid reader, Clara Silva’s first book of poems was La cabellera negra , published in 1945. It was followed by Memoria de la nada (1948) and Los delirios (1954).
Raised in a fervently Catholic family, she and her sister Concepción were taught to love everyone without distinction. The dilemma between religious and earthly love is present throughout his work:
“What am I looking for, what am I not looking for, hesitant? / Speeding distances in vain / At one time I am love, beloved, lover.”
But it was not in the poetry of those first volumes where the author stood out the most, but as a novelist. In his novels, these religious concerns remain latent. Frustrated and lonely women, trapped in old houses, abound in his narrative.
It is a poetics of grayness, of the gloomy and sordid, expressed with crudeness and naturalistic attention, without disregarding the ugly, the grotesque and the eschatological. Thus, marginalized environments and desolate landscapes are approached: garbage dumps, drainage of collectors in lonely streams, wastelands that look like moors and those miserable ranches that at the time were beginning to be known with the ironic name of “cantegriles.”
Clara Silva married the critic and essayist Alberto Zum Felde . They both passed away in 1976.
Poetry
- The dark hair (1945).
- Memory of nowhere (1948).
- The delusions (1954).
- The Weddings (1960).
- Indian Prelude and Other Poems (1961).
- Guitar in shadow (1964).
Narrative
- The survivor (1951).
- The soul and the dogs (1962).
- Notice to the population (Editorial Alfa, Montevideo, 1964, republished by Arca in 1967 and by the Uruguayan Classics Collection of the Artigas Library in 2009).
- Witness room (1967).
- Forbidden to pass (1969).
Review
- Genius and figure of Delmira Agustini (1968).
