2008

I was about to move to the USA, so I packed the anthologies of poetry by Alfonsina Storni that I had bought in Spain over the years into the moving container. I knew that I would immerse myself in her work, but I wasn't sure how or in what medium. First, I wanted to do some research and familiarize myself with her country. Little did I know at the time that this adventure would last until 2024.

In November 2009, I travelled from the USA to Argentina. It was a research trip involving numerous site visits. I met many people, including Storni experts and relatives, as well as women who had taken speech and acting lessons from her in their youth. They all helped me. A friend from years ago gave me access to the state archives. The Archivo General de la Nación became an important research site and I took lots of photographs as nothing had been digitized at that time. I also photographed the national flag in the director's office.

There were also excursions, such as a visit to Café Tortoni. We took photos in the Sala Storni and with the grotesque waxworks of Alfonsina Storni, Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Gardel. At the time, I didn't yet know why the waxwork of Borges (who is not in the photo) was ducking away so strangely.

During this trip, I decided to tell the story of Alfonsina Storni, ideally in audio format. Although I had experience with radio plays and audio installations, I had never produced a feature — an hour-long documentary created in a radio studio and broadcast on Swiss radio. This was new territory for me, but I knew I would learn a lot in the process. I made audio recordings of the atmosphere on the streets of Buenos Aires.

I met Bernard Senn, the editor-in-chief at Swiss Radio, in the summer of 2009. Fortunately, my pitch was based on one of Bernard's favorite songs, Alfonsina y el mar. He approved the project and our happy collaboration began, leading me to the radio studio in Bruderholz in the summer of 2010.

The interviews that I conducted in Buenos Aires had to be translated and re-recorded. We were assisted in this task by radio station announcers, as well as by actress Mona Petri, who recorded all of Alfonsina Storni's texts. We also used the original recordings from Buenos Aires and Ticino.

In October 2010 Argentina was Special Guest at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and the radio feature was broadcast for the first time.

Hemmed In

Following the radio feature, I focused on aspects of Storni's work that were virtually unknown in Europe and relatively unknown in Argentina. Firstly, I explored her journalism. In Argentina, I had met two young researchers who also appreciated the columns she had written between 1919 and 1921 and who had republished some of them alongside an insightful foreword. Secondly, I delved into her theater texts – and this was an interest that set me apart.

These two genres most clearly reveal the forces that Alfonsina Storni had to contend with throughout her life in order to become an active artist and a visible socio-political figure. Gender has constrained many independent, creative women, but Storni felt its effects particularly acutely.

Her entire body of work bears witness to the fact that she had to make a great effort to make her voice heard, often as the first and, above all, the only unmarried woman in a man's world. She did so throughout her life in various roles: as a citizen, a journalist, a poet, a storyteller, a literary critic, a theatre maker and a lecturer. Even poetry, which had been deemed a suitable genre for the gentler sex, was dominated by men. Yet Storni’s work was characterized by rebellion, impatience, satire, sarcasm, feminism and fantasies of a free, humanistic world beyond gender.

It seems almost paradoxical that Storni became a star in the press. I found numerous articles and interviews with her in newspapers and magazines, many of them  about her poetry – even though she repeatedly tried and failed to steer the conversation towards theater. Some journalists asked seasonal questions, such as “How do you celebrate Christmas?” In a carnival edition, she was asked: “Would you rather be a man?” In summer it was: “Where do you go on holiday?” In politically turbulent times: “Which politician would you like to marry?”. Even astrologers, graphologists and palm readers were consulted in an attempt to understand the poet's soul.

Theater

Alfonsina Storni was passionate about theater, but her journey to the stage was rocky. Her first comedy, Two Women, did premiere, but the experience was hapless to say the least. Storni herself had the play taken off the stage after its 1927 premiere (see Wach, chapters 6 and 7) and exposed corruption in the Buenos Aires theater business. During the production, which Storni considered a failure, she encountered an incompetent theater troupe, wheeling and dealing, nepotism, and dishonesty on the part of the press.

Alfonsina Storni provided a clear-eyed assessment of her own humiliation, mockingly revealing how the theater director, a "cunning entrepreneur," had taken her in.

The theater was the most important medium for her artistic development. There, she could use words, voice, movement, lighting, and stage space to create a reality in which characters clashed or found each other. With refreshing irreverence, Alfonsina Storni adapted plays by Euripides and Shakespeare and combined them with a third play under the title Feuerwerksfarcen (Fireworks Farces). These were provocative plays for a modern, experimental stage!

They were never performed. After the premiere in 1927, Alfonsina Storni remained unable to find entry into the world of theater for adults. This makes translating all these unperformed plays and making them available in German in the CIMBELINA volume all the more important to me (even in Spanish, they are now only available through sellers of used books.

I also devote a lot of space in my biography to Storni's theatrical work. The stage was the setting for both her dreams and her nightmares. She did not want to be an actress reciting other people's words; she wanted to be an author creating a new world with new characters and new language. She wanted to make her mark. She wanted to demonstrate that there was a way out of the infantalization imposed by a culture of machismo, a way for women to stop belittling themselves and instead move toward empowerment. Modern women do not allow others to take control of their lives. In her work for the theater, Storni was composing a soundtrack for the future.