Nydia Lamarque was an Argentine poet. In addition to publishing several books of poetry, she was a lawyer, activist, and translator. She was associated with the socialism and feminism movements.
Biography
Early life
Lamarque was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina and was of partial French descent on her father's side. At age 12, she began writing poetry.
Poetry and translation
In 1925, Lamarque published Telarañas, her first book of poetry. In 1927, she published Elegía del gran amor. In 1930, her third work, Los cíclopes: una epopeya en la calle Sucre, was published. In 1950, she published Acta de acusación de la vida, and in 1951, she published Echeverría el poeta. She was fluent in French and was known as a "prominent translator of French literature," translating the work of "Baudelaire, Racine, Rimbaud, Henri De Man, Adolfo Boschot, and Héctor Berlioz." In 1948, she published the first translation of Baudelaire in Argentina.
Lamarque was involved in Boedo, a "vanguard writers' group," and was a member of Ateneo Feminino Buenos Aires. She was also associated with the Argentinean Communist Party and "concerned with social problems." She served as president of the Argentinean Antiwar Committee and organized the Latin American Antiwar Conference in March 1933. In July 1933, Lamarque published an article in the magazine Contra, in which she argued that "art, as a product and synthesis of social factors, reflects the reality of society" and that "pure art is the decadence of the bourgeoisie" and defended the "triumphant proletarian art of the U.S.S.R."
In 1925, Jorge Luis Borges wrote positively about Lamarque's work in Spanish, comparing it to Alfonsina Storni's and saying that it had neither "the vagueness nor the gossipy shrillness that this Storni tends to offer us." He dedicated his poetry collection, Fervor of Buenos Aires, to Lemarque. In Literatura Argentina Contemporanea, literary critic Juan Pinto referred to Lamarque as "the poetess with the most masculine voice of our literature."
