Alfonsina y el Mar

Alfonsina Storni was born in Switzerland in 1892 and grew up in Argentina, where she worked in a hat factory as a teenager, became a rural schoolteacher and, in Buenos Aires, raised a child alone while making her name as a modernist poet. On 25 October 1938 she took her own life at Mar del Plata, throwing herself into the sea from a jetty. Three decades later the pianist Ariel Ramírez and the writer Félix Luna turned her death into a zamba. Ramírez never met Storni, but she had been a pupil of his father, Zenón Ramírez, who passed her story on to his son. The song imagines her not leaping but walking slowly into the sea. That image has fed a persistent but mistaken rumour that the lyric is Storni's own suicide note set to music. It first appeared on Mercedes Sosa's 1969 album Mujeres argentinas, Argentine Women, and Philips issued it as a single with Juana Azurduy, another song from the album, on the other side. It became one of the best-loved songs in Argentine folk and popular music and a classic across Latin America, recorded by countless artists in many genres. The Israeli lyricist Ehud Manor translated it into Hebrew, and Chava Alberstein once performed it with Sosa, mixing the two languages. In Sosa's voice, a song about one woman's despair became a tender act of remembrance, and it is still how many people first meet Alfonsina Storni.