The Fifth Star: María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira

María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira

Years: 1875-1924

Birthplace: Montevideo, Uruguay

Language(s): Spanish

Forms: lyric poetry and metaphysical poetry: sonnet; ballad, redondilla, silva, cuarteto, couplet: dramatic works; musical pieces.

Subjects: life, death, time, the soul, destiny, love, art, beauty, feminine sexuality, the role of women in society, passion, grief, hope, regret, loss, thepain of solitude, disillusionment, alienation.

Schools: Latin American modernismo; “Generación del 900”

Works: Poetry: Fuego y mármol (written c. 1903, published as a unit in a collected works edition for the first time in 1986); La isla de los cánticos (1924, published posthumously, dated 1925); La otra isla de los cánticos (collection of previously unpublished poems, 1959). Dramaticworks: La piedra filosofal (1908), Los peregrinos (1909) and Resurrexit (1913).

Firsts: Professor and Chair in Literature at the (then) newly-created Universidad de Mujeres (Women’s University) in Montevideo, Uruguay (1915 – 1922)

Entry By: Catherine Chandler

Photo Credit: Biblioteca Nacional de Uruguay, Archivo Literario


The Fifth Star: María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira (Uruguay)


In thenight skies above the Southern Cone countries of Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, the smallest of the eighty-eight modern constellations is visible: La Cruz del Sur (The Southern Cross), also known as Crux. This kite-shaped asterism appears on the flags of several countries, including Brazil and Australia. It consists of four bright stars, forming a cross, and one smaller star inside the cross, anunnamed orange giant simply referred to as ε Cru.

In the literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in these same Southern Cone countries, four women are generally considered the “star” poetisas of the era, their work often included in anthologies of Latin American literature.
Yet there is a fifth “star”, generally overlooked, whose work is seldom included in thoseanthologies, due in part to her personal aversion to the process of publication, to her death at the relatively young age of forty-nine, and perhaps most importantly, to an exclusionary process of canon formation in Latin American modernismo (Waisman, xxiii) and patriarchal judgment and erasure by her brother, Uruguayan philosopher Carlos Vaz Ferreira.

The purpose of this essay is threefold: (a) toencourage continued analysis and critical studies of the poet; (b) to encourage the translation of her work from Spanish into English and other languages; and (c) most importantly, to introduce this important poet to those who have never heard of the woman whose poetic work — and defiance of the paternalistic attitudes of the day — prepared the way for the other four, compatriots Delmira Agustini andJuana de Ibarbourou, as well as two other contemporaries, Nobel Laureate Gabriela Mistral of Chile and the Swiss-born Argentine poet, Alfonsina Storni.

Her name is María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira.


The Life and Times of María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira

María Eugenia Vaz Ferreira was born in Montevideo on July 13, 1875, a year of great political turmoil in Uruguay, to a wealthy and culturedfamily. Her father, Manuel Vaz Ferreira, was a Portuguese merchant originally from Valença do Minho, and her mother, Belén Ribeiro Freire, a Uruguayan of Portuguese and Spanish descent, was the daughter of an influential family in Uruguayan political and cultural circles. Manuel Vaz Ferreira died at the age of sixty on a business trip to Brazil, following which his only surviving son, Carlos, took onthe role of family patriarch. Two other notable Uruguayan poets, Julio Herrera y Ressig and Florencio Sánchez, were also born in 1875. The Vaz Ferreiras were Roman Catholics, and the youngest child, María Eugenia, was baptized in November of that year, her full name being María Eugenia Sofía Vaz Ferreira Ribeiro Freire de Andrade y Navia Cienfuegos.

Vaz Ferreira was educated at home by private...