This paper highlights the way in which some Latin American women poets from different decades of the twentieth century, and from different countries, approached the territory of desire and pleasure, at times vindicating it by revealing how patriarchal culture denied them their expression, both in life as in literature, at other times, simply and decisively, proclaiming it without any kind of restriction. To this goal, significant examples of poetic approaches, emphases, and different tones are provided throughout the article.

In Cuban and Puerto Rican negrista poetry (no matter what ethnicity the author is to be ascribed to) the black or mulatto females are depicted uniquely in accordance to their external
attributes. Works by Nicolás Guillén and Luis Palés Matos draw attention to their fractured beauty and the artificiality of their body, which tends to acquire purposes the white body (the vehicle
for reason) lacks, namely, that of augmented sexuality. In this meaning, their bodies represent the desired ones. Nonetheless, the configuration of racial identity through physique implies that the female subject is severed from its specific historical circumstances: the black or mulatto female body serves as the national symbol. The picturesqueness of African origin, which these females
incarnate, invokes untamed and savage sensuality, hints at its ludic and festive nature (Jáuregui, 2008), and furthermore replaces and suppresses the harsh reality of a subject exploited by agroindustry and (neo)colonial sugar companies that operated within the area. In other words, such depiction disguises the fact that they are only labour bodies. From the perspective of such sexualized and racialized portrayal of female corporeality, the aim of the paper is to answer Hélène Cixous’s dilemma: “Where is she?”

The portraying of the subjects in front of the looking glass is a literary topic in which the body is involved in a range of possibilities. From the corporeality of the “other” reflected by/in the narcissistic or self-critic perspective about the appearance of oneself, the mirror offers to Spanish contemporary poets a fruitful frame to explore all the variations of anagnorisis and dis-cognition. The text develops a theoretical and cultural episteme in order to read the work of a number of Spanish poets, in which the body analysed in the looking glass could adopt the form of grief, complaint, egotistical exposure, cultural references (e.g. Alice or Narcissus), or technological exam.

The article concerns the place of corporeality in the poetry of a Maurician francophone poet Umar Timol. One can distinguish four main attitudes towards the human body in Timol’s texts: body as an object of worship or – on the contrary – of disdain and condemnation, body as a humanitarian challenge and as an object of self-reflection. The absence of typically Western dualism of physical versus spiritual in Mauritian poet’s philosophy procures a new and exotic perspective for European readers. The author ponders the purpose and motifs which could stay behind such standpoints mainly by analysing the poems in the context of Mauritian culture and comparing them to other Muslim or Indian texts.

Until recent times, the representation of desire and erotics in Spanish poetry was quite scanty. Even now, there are few poets who explicitly deal with sex in their poetry. In this article, I analyse the work of three poets with different outlooks on desire: a homosexual male (Rafael-José Díaz), a heterosexual female poet (Ada Salas), and a heterosexual male poet (Eduardo Moga). Taking into account, among others, the theories of Roland Barthes (A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments) and Anne Carson (Eros the Bittersweet), I attempt to emphasise the originality of the language treatment of bodies in love.

The body is a way of being in the world and to contemplate it. The body limits, interacts and enjoys while gender captivates and creates. Geography confines, epoch determines and circumstances may be decisive. The work exposes such aspects in the poetry of four women who belong to the same generation, but to different geographic areas. More specifically, it shows writing as a projection of the woman; the body as lyrical subject and object and hand as part and symbol of the fullness and the collapse of corporeality, especially female corporeality. The topics dealt with in the paper will be, on the one hand, how the body inhabits the world and what its relationship with the writing is, and on the other hand, the study will analyze the hand as a metonymy of the female body and the changes due to the passing of time.

The body, although not presented in a direct way, connects the two main themes of Rendicción (2013), the second volume of poetry by Mario Martín Gijón. Based on the theory of José Enrique Finol (presented in the work La corposfera. Antropo-semiótica de las cartografías del cuerpo, 2015), I carry out an analysis of how the corporeality is depicted in the poetry of Martín Gijón. In the said poetry book, the body has not only obtained the status of the object (linked to the themes of love and eroticism), it has also become an assistance of the artistic activity. In this way, the poetry is embodied (Merleau-Ponty, 1993), the word is a living body with all its creative powers.

The article focuses on the study of the representation of time and temporality in contemporary Mexican poems about eroticism-love. Recreating the moment of the union of lovers, a situation that does not conflict the concept of transcendence, plays a fundamental role in such a poetry. Similarly to what happens during mystical ecstasy, this union affects the perception of the individual identity, usually reduced to dualist and exclusive terms such as body/soul, outside/inside, form/essence, etc., as well as the time-space categories involved in its building process. In an attempt to communicate this transcendence, poems resort to figurative and symbolic wordings including, for example, “heaven,” “paradise,” or “golden years,” which seem to be restored since ecstasy enables participation by suspending the chronological time and its course.

The two seemingly opposing realities: the body and the spirit, have always been the source of the inspiration for the artists of the different times and cultures. In Colombia of the 1940s the new poetry group was developed and called “Piedra y Cielo.” The group redefined the Colombian poetry of those times by introducing numerous changes and innovations. The name of the group (which literally means ‘the Stone and the Sky’) alludes to the two dimensions of our
life: the corporeal and the spiritual. Hence, the naming suggests that the poetry created by the group would seek for and demonstrate the relationship between the two dimensions. Thus, this article is to analyse the way that the “Piedra y Cielo” poets understood the role of the relationship in question while working on their poems ‒ in accordance with their theoretical commentaries and how they reflected this understanding in their poetry.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, many families experienced the death of one or more of their children. As a consequence, some artists undertaken the topic in their works, by employing the figure of dead child. The theme was reflected in poetry, pictures/photographs, paintings, and musical pieces of the time. The Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez also knew the pain caused by the loss of a child. Indeed, his niece, María Pepa, passed away when she was only two years old. This tragic event had prompted the poet to write about the little girl’s death in Historias. This article attempts to analyse the elements of corporeality, or particularly – the corpse, in Juan Ramón Jiménez’s collection of poems called la niña muerta, to see how the poet underscores the figure of dead child and, by describing the dead body, increases the dramatic effect, as a way of keeping the child alive forever in his writings.

The purpose of the article is to indicate the possible translation difficulties encountered by translators while recreating the corporeality represented in the poetry of Anna Świrszczyńska, considered one of the most renowned Polish poets of the twentieth century. Special attention will be paid to the poetic strategy of the author that deals with personal experiences, and whose purpose is the poetization of life through revealing the qualities of the human body. I propose to conduct a comparative study between the original poems and their Spanish translations, which aims to find out if the logical-semantic structure of the works whose main axis is the perception of corporeality has been reflected in the target texts. In addition, I try to outline in the article the extent to which its aesthetic intentionality can work in the Spanish-speaking poetic context.