Vilariño, Idea (1920–)

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Vilariño, Idea (1920–)

Idea Vilariño (b. 1920), Uruguayan poet and critic. She taught literature in the high school system of Montevideo, where she was born, as did many other women of her generation. She began teaching in 1984 as a humanities faculty member at the University of the Republic in Montevideo. She has written critical studies of the poetry of the Spaniard Antonio Machado, Grupos simétricos en poesía de Antonio Machado (1951), and the Uruguayan Julio Herrera y Reissig, Julio Herrera y Reissig (1950), as well as many articles on other Spanish poets. She published a thorough study on tango lyrics in Las letras de tango (1965). Her critical essays have appeared in Clinamen, Asir, Hiperión, Marcha, Puente, Carte Segrete, Texto Crítico, La Opinión, Revista del Sur, and Brecha. She is also an accomplished translator of Shakespeare into Spanish.

Vilariño's poetic expression is concise, with minimal utilization of rhetorical devices, and expresses a dark world, where the vital elements fail to survive. In form, her poetry is also brief, without much artifice. She has published La suplicante (1945), Cielo, cielo (1947), Paraíso per dido (1949), Nocturnos (1955), Poemas de amor (1957), Pobre mundo(1966), Treinta poemas (1967), Poesía (1970), and Segunda antología and No (1980). She has received many prestigious awards, including the 1987 Pre-mio a la labor intelectual José Enrique Rodó, awarded by the municipal government of Montevideo. In 1993, she was awarded a month of fellowship for the Complutense University in Madrid. In 2004, she won a Konex Award for literature.