Fake Birds: Rewritings of the Myth of Leda and the Swan in Rubén Darío, Delmira Agustini and Silvina Ocampo

Abstract

In Latin American Modernism there are abundant appropriations of elements from Greco-Roman mythology. Among them, I propose to analyse the rewriting of the myth of Leda and the swan by Rubén Darío in Cantos de vida y esperanza (1905) and Delmira Agustini in Los cálices vacíos (1913). In the dialogue between these poems (Agustini's response to Darío) and between both of them and the mythical hypotext, it is possible to see how certain anxieties and violences around the construction of gender and sexual desires are plotted. I will also address a later rewriting that recovers and appropriates Darío's poem: Silvina Ocampo's "Leda and the Swan" (Los nombres 1953). This latter text is extremely transgressive with canonical representations of the myth because it foregrounds the representation itself and places the emphasis on the mirror over the "living" characters.