Born: 1903, Paraguay
Died: 20 March 1987
Country most active: Paraguay
Also known as: Dora Gómez Bueno de Acuña
Paraguayan poet, journalist, radio actor and educator Dora de Acuña began her career as a primary school teacher. This, and her work performing children’s programs for radio – along with reciting local and foreign poetry, among other roles – stand in contrast to her often erotic poetry, influenced by the Uruguayan poet Delmira Agustini. She also contributed to the Asunción newspaper El Orden.
Josefina Plá included Acuña in her 1982 work, Voces femeninos en la poesía paraguaya (Feminine Voices in Paraguayan Poetry). Brazilian researcher Walter Wey wrote in his book Paraguayan Poetry — History of an Unknown (1951):
“Eroticism did not exist in Paraguayan poetry before Dora Gómez Bueno de Acuña. At least not with the insistence on the theme, with the depth that she imbued it with. The Paraguayan poet, in general, while not sensual or erotic, was not platonic either. He ignored women… Eroticism found its great and powerful voice in a poetess, as years before it had found it in Uruguay, in the magnificent art of Delmira Agustini . Flor de caña (1940) brought together poems that, at the time they were published in newspapers and magazines, scandalized the Paraguayan intellectual circles and, certainly, much more so, the society of Asunción. No man had had the audacity to sing of love as Dora Acuña did, with complete freedom, without preconceptions or fear of social gossip… In Dora Acuña… one notices the desire to live intensely, sensually, in an immense lyrical fullness. Her love for plant life bursts forth in all the images. Her human presence invaded the tropical landscape of Paraguay. The inhabitants of those jungles and fields are no longer the spirits of the Guarani imagination. A human being lives, throbs, stirs, trusting only in the senses…”
Another intellectual, Viriato Díaz-Pérez, in the prologue to his first book of poems, wrote, “Dora Gómez Bueno de Acuña, poet, scholar, animator of literary circles – and sometimes their soul – is devoted to her work, which is that of art, with the pure and illuminating love that springs from the idealistic spirit, and it is thus that her work adds to her own personal merits the universal and eternal merit of beautiful romantic things.”
Her published works include:
Flor de caña, poesías (Reed flower), Asunción: Imprenta nacional (1940)
Barro celeste (Heavenly mud), Asunción: Imprenta nacional (1943)
Luz en el abismo (Light in the Abyss), Asunción: Indoamericana (1954)
Vivir es decir (Living is saying), Asunción: [s.n.] (1977)
Antología (Anthology), Asunción: Alcándara (1985)