Stella Díaz Varín, also known as La Colorina, was a Chilean poet of the Generation of '50. Her unprecedented deep and philosophical style, as well as her controversial personality, marked a before and after in Chilean poetry.
Biography
Stella Díaz Varín was born into a middle-class family. Her mother was a descendant from a highborn family of french origin which had fallen on hard times. Her father was an anarchist clockmaker who fostered in Díaz Varín her political ideals. Their economical situation and her father's ideas, together with her passionate readings, moved her since a very young age to write and publish poems and articles in local newspapers. In a public act in 1946 she read a poem in front of the Chilean presidentGabriel Gonzalez Videla which was dedicated to him. After this, the President would help her to settle in Santiago, a desire she had been nourishing since her father's death in 1935. Díaz Varín moved to Santiago in 1947 to study medicine and psychiatry, despite the opposition of both her mother and older brother. Her interest in psychiatry came from her desire to scrutinize the human brain and therefore understand the dreams of humans. During her studies she wrote articles and poems for several newspapers: El Siglo, La Opinión, El Extra and La Hora. The closing of the newspapers in which she worked forced Díaz Varín to abandon her studies, which she never completed. President González Videla, who had won the elections in 1946 with the support of the Communist Party, passed the Law of Permanent Defense of Democracy which prohibited the existence of the Communist Party in Chile. Its members, Díaz Varín among them, became persecuted. Based on their mutual aversion toward the government, Díaz Varín, Enrique Lafourcade and Enrique Lihn tattooed a skull in their shoulders, symbolizing a pact to kill González Videla, whom they considered a dictator. In 1949, the editor Domingo Morales helps Díaz Varín to publish her first book: Reason of my Being. The poems of this volume reflect the vitality and strength of the poet; through suggestive images and an underground language she wrote about death, solitude and recognition of the feminine condition. This poems manifest the intricate relationship between the writer's life and poetical creation. A fictionalized version of Díaz Varín appears in Alejandro Jodorowsky's autobiographical film Endless Poetry, where she is played by Pamela Flores. Jodorowsky represents her as a Chilean Bukowski and the first punk poetess.
