MORE INFORMATION
The edition of all his stories pay off other debt with Luisa Cards In the jail expressionist Emmy Hennings Those years in which a woman signed with his initials to take seriously
Born in New York in the last decade of the NINETEENTH century and died at the age of 75 in 1968, Mercedes de Acosta has become famous in life for her eccentric wardrobe male (he liked to carry layer, pants and toe shoes and buckle in the style of the pilgrim fathers), and his stellar love life. Isadora Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, Pola Negri, Tallulah Bankhead, and, above all, Greta Garbo —with whom he established a high-profile and toxic relationship— included in your payroll affective. But Acosta was something more than a socialite sexually voracious and irreverent, was also a playwright, screenwriter, essayist, novelist and poet. Under the title Imposeída, the editorial Torremozas together an anthology in a bilingual edition of his three poetry collections, Moods (Moves, 1919), Archways of Life (Arches of life, 1921), and Streets and Shadows (Streets and shadows, 1922). The compilation of 55 poems seeks to restore, beyond its raucous biography, the work of this hispanic united States “embraced urban modernity”.
“we’re Always looking for authors interesting that are not known in Spain, seems fundamental to us to bring their voices and get them to read,” says Marta Porpetta, editor of Torremozas. “When we met Mercedes de Acosta we thought it was a fascinating woman, and we believed essential to make known his poems, which had been left in the shadow of his famous biography,” he adds.
Jesus J. Barquet and Carlota Caulfield, in charge of the edition and of the translation next to Joaquín Badajoz, admit that the own Mercedes de Acosta helped fuel his legend loving the detriment of his work. In the sixties, impelled by their economic hardships, she published her memoir, Here Lies the Heart (Here lies the heart) that, according to Barquet, “complicate” more the story of his life. “His relationship with Greta Garbo catapulted his public profile and the interest of journalism farandulero,” he explains. The historian of the theatre Robert A. Schanke has published in 2003 a biography That furious lesbian —referring to how the name was Cecil Beaton, photographer, set designer and rival for the heart of the Garbo—. It desentrañaba with previously unpublished material, the truth behind the woman who Tallulah Bankhead dubbed “the countess Dracula” and that Truman Capote referred to as “the best letter” in their board game of beds and famous The International Daisy Chain. Acosta was all a character of Broadway and the night in new york, a city whose contradictions are present in his poetry collections. His work in theatre, most prominently, Jacob Slovak (1923), dealt with anti-semitism in a small town in New England. In other poems, reflects his struggle for personal acceptance: under the arrogance which gave him his social position and his strong personality hid the melancholy of knowing a freak. Of cuban origin, his paternal grandfather was a spaniard who settled in the Dumanbet province of Matanzas, and his mother’s family was entroncada with the Spanish nobility. “To my country / Land of Spain. Earth sad and tragic. / Place of warm hearts, hair, and eyes dark,” he writes.
“dared to live by putting into question social conventions
Jesus J. Barquet
Mercedes was the youngest daughter of eight siblings. His mother, Micaela Hernandez de Alba and Alba, I wanted a male and not only treated the small as a kid but that was called during its early years, Mercedes Rafael, who until the 7 years is believed child. The fascination with his eccentric and aristocratic mother marked his entire life. As she recalls the prologue to the book, your premature “departure from the conventions of feminine” made him proclaim from the very young to the ambiguity of his sexual identity: “Who of us belongs to only one sex? I, sometimes I feel androgynous,” he said.
“dared to live his life by putting into question countless social conventions,” says Barquet. Latin and feminist —”in 1919 he was a restless activist in the movements for women’s rights and, among them, the right to vote,” reads the book— despite the security that he displayed in public, was a woman beset by the hardships. Despite being openly lesbian, between 1920 and 1935 he was married to painter Abram Poole, also a homosexual. The fear of being “insatiable” comes up in some of his poems more existential. “I think the whole state of insatiability for any reason —and she confesses to have you— can be, in itself, a form of autotortura,” says Barquet, who blames his relationship with Garbo the emotional ups and downs of the poet. “Mercedes loses control of their life, and makes it extremely dependent on a Garbo capricious, and with, apparently, another agenda of life in which Mercedes was not the priority. In my opinion his relationship with Garbo was discovered when another way of flogging in it that maybe already existed before without that was so harmful, and that could qualify as the obsession to appear, which is also a contemporary issue to be analyzed”.
Covers of two of the works of Mercedes de Acosta. THE COUNTRY
When the writer died, Cecil Beaton, another fascinating character, but harassed because of their complex class and viperino without remedy, he wrote: “I don’t feel sorry for the death of Mercedes de Acosta. My only regret is to have lived unfulfilled. In his youth he showcased in the taste and originality. It was one of the most rebellious, and outright lesbians that I met. It is a relief that their long sinking in unhappiness has reached the end”.
