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“I detest biographies,” Eunice Odio once wrote. “The affairs of my
private life are the most private and, in general, no one knows them,
except me.” Despite these objections, a few words of introduction will provide a sketch of the writer considered the foremost Costa Rican poet in the 20th century.

   She was born Eunice Odio Infante in the capital of San José in 1919. In the early 1940s, she launched her career reading poems on Costa Rican radio under the pseudonym of Catalina Mariel. Her first collection, Los Elementos Terrestres, was published in Guatemala in 1947 as the winner of the Premio Centroamericano “15 de Septiembre”. Shortly thereafter, she moved to Guatemala and became a legal citizen, never returning to live in her birth country.

   Additional volumes – Zona en Territorio del Alba and El Tránsito de Fuego – followed in 1953 and 1957. The latter collection, a book-length epic poem, uses a cast of classical and invented mythological characters to tell the story of the world’s creation.

   In 1959 Odio moved to New York City for two and a half years. “The United States scares me,” she would later write. Although a “model of social justice” and a “paradise of the proletariat,” she concluded that the country was a “highly-polished disaster.” She disliked, in particular, the Beats, Pop Art, and feminism. The latter comes as a surprise, given that she lived an independent life wholly dedicated to her art. A selfconfessed “reaccionario,” she complained: “In North America roles are inverted: she is he; he is she.”

   Despite her misgivings, a certain affection developed for the country. She wrote a poem in praise of the Statue of Liberty, an elegy for Louis Armstrong, and a tribute to the Hudson River, the mighty waterway that runs along the western shore of Manhattan. The poem published here (titled ‘Ode to the Hudson’ by the translators) is in fact Part V of the long poem ‘En la vida y en la muerte de Rosamel del Valle’ (‘In the Life and Death of Rosamel del Valle’). Del Valle (1901-1965) was a Chilean poet and journalist who resided for a long time in New York and wrote, among other things, the book-length poem Orpheus (1944). Odio dedicates the poem to Rosamel’s widow, Teresa Dulac.

   After her stay in New York, Odio returned to Mexico City, where she became a citizen in 1962, and lived for t he rest of her life. From 1964 until her death, she collaborated on the review Zona Franca and, despite her distaste for biography, wrote a brief life of Alexander Fleming for the Mexican Ministry of Education. In 1967 she entered the Rosicrucian Order, where she advanced to the Second Grade Superior of the Temple.

   She died alone in 1974, at the age of 54, her body undiscovered for days after the death, her funeral sparsely attended.