Background
Julia Constancia García de Burgos was born in a rural Santa Cruz Barrio in Carolina, Puerto Rico, on February 17, 1914. She was the eldest of many children. Her family moved to the city of Rio Piedras in 1928.
San Juan, Puerto Rico
De Burgos earned a teaching certificate from the University of Puerto Rico in 1933 after two years of study.
San Juan, Puerto Rico
De Burgos earned a teaching certificate from the University of Puerto Rico in 1933 after two years of study.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0940238233/?tag=2022091-20
1983
(Translated Poems of Julia De Burgos (English and Spanish ...)
Translated Poems of Julia De Burgos (English and Spanish Edition)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0962396818/?tag=2022091-20
1992
Julia Constancia García de Burgos was born in a rural Santa Cruz Barrio in Carolina, Puerto Rico, on February 17, 1914. She was the eldest of many children. Her family moved to the city of Rio Piedras in 1928.
De Burgos enrolled first at the University of Puerto Rico High School, and later at the university itself, from which she earned a teaching certificate in 1933 after two years of study.
De Burgos worked in a publicly funded daycare center, and taught in rural schools.
In 1937 she published her first volume of poems, Poemas exactos a mi misma. Privately printed, it reflects the revolutionary patriotism of the Nationalist Party in Puerto Rico, for de Burgos was a longtime activist for Puerto Rican independence. Unhappy with that first collection, de Burgos tried to have the work suppressed.
De Burgos went on to publish her 1938 volume, Poema en veinte surcos. The book’s title, which means “Poem in Twenty Furrows”, expresses Burgos’ deep attachment to her native land, as does its most famous single poem, “Rio Grande de Loiza”, an ode to the river by the side of which she spent much of her childhood. This river, according to Amiris Perez-Guntin in American Women Writers, recurs as an image throughout much of Burgos’ poetry, as do themes of disappointed love, the search for the true self, the fight for social improvement, and the liberating power of art.
De Burgos moved to New York and then Cuba in 1940 in her search for freedom. A meeting with the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in Havana in 1940 deepened the profound influence of that poet upon de Burgos’ work. De Burgos’ traveling companion to New York and Cuba was a man for whom she had written many love poems. However, in 1942 she suffered a traumatic disappointment in love, which scarred the remaining eleven years of her life and prompted her to flee Cuba for New York, where she remarried in the early 1940’s. Her remaining years were plagued by alcoholism; although she continued to write, she spent a good deal of time in hospitals, and finally collapsed, unrecognized, on a Harlem street in 1953.
Since her death, de Burgos has become increasingly renowned on her home island and beyond. A posthumous volume, El mar y tu, y otros poemas, was published in 1954, and a collection, Obra poética, in 1961. Her last poems, gathered in El Mar y tu, are in many cases love poems about her great but disappointing romance, and, in Perez-Guntin’s words, portray “her disillusionment and final disintegration".
A bilingual selection of Burgos’ work, Roses in the Mirror, was published in Puerto Rico in 1992, and in 1995 came the complete bilingual collection, Song of the Simple Truth.
Julia de Burgos has been proclaimed “Puerto Rico’s greatest poet” by her translator, Jack Agüeros. She has also been called “the most important Puerto Rican woman poet of the century” by Patricia Monaghan in Booklist, and “almost legendary" by Lawrence Olszewski in Library Journal. According to a Publishers Weekly reviewer, de Burgos “looms larger than life in the literary psyche of Puerto Rico”. De Burgos was a recipient of an award from the Institute of Puerto Rican Literature, for her writing Canción de la verdad sencilla. The Spanish Department of the University of Puerto Rico posthumously honored de Burgos by granting her a doctorate in Human Arts and Letters in 1986.
There are many cities which have honored de Burgos, including Carolina, Puerto Rico, New York City, New York, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Illinois, San Juan, Puerto Rico and Willimantic, Connecticut.
The Puerto Rican sculptor Tomás Batista sculpted a bust of Julia in the Julia de Burgos Park in Carolina. There are several books about de Burgos, as well as several films. In New York City, the Julia de Burgos Cultural Center, on 106th Street and Lexington Avenue, is named after her.
(Translated Poems of Julia De Burgos (English and Spanish ...)
1992De Burgos was an outspoken feminist, opponent of dictators and striver for personal as well as political independence.
Quotations:
“Don't let the hand you hold hold you down.”
"I remember a day when I spoke of my river and something like a storm stirred in his being. Was it my breast that trembled with the memory. Was it nostalgia that showed through my eyes.”
De Burgos got married to Ruben Rodriguez Beauchamp in 1934, but divorced in 1937. She married Armando Marin in 1943.
