Weiss, Mark (ed) Whole Island Six Decades of Cuban Poetry, The
T H E W H O L E I S L A N D The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support provided by
the Humanities Endowment Fund of the
University of California Press Foundation
and by Edmund and Jeannie Kaufmanas members of the Literati Circle of the
University of California Press Foundation.
T H E W H O L E I S L A N D Six Decades of Cuban Poetry A Bilingual Anthology Edi t ed by M a r k W eiss
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University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2009 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The whole island : six decades of Cuban poetry, a bilingual anthology / edited by Mark Weiss. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. isbn 978-0-520-25034-5 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-25894-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
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– niso z39.48 1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).Contents Introduction
Cuban Tightrope: Public and Private Lives of the Poets
A Note on the Text 1 Nicolás Guillén de El gran zoo | from The Great ZooEl caribe | The Carib 3 Guitarra | Guitar 33
La pajarita de papel | Little Paper Bird 5 El Aconcagua | Aconcagua 5 Los ríos | The Rivers 35 Señora | Lady 7 La sed | Thirst 37 El hambre | Hunger 9 Los vientos | The Winds 41 El tigre | The Tiger 43 Ciclón | Hurricane 3 Ave-Fénix | Phoenix 43 Lynch | Lynching 5 K K K | KKK 45 Las águilas | The Eagles 45 Luna | Moon 47 Tenor | Tenor 47 Reloj | Clock 49 Aviso | Announcement 49 Eugenio Florit
Los poetas solos de Manhattan | Poets Alone in Manhattan 51 Juego | Game 55 Brujas | Bruges 55 El eterno | The Eternal 57 La niebla | The Fog 57
José Lezama Lima Pensamientos en La Habana | Thoughts in Havana 59 Oda a Julián del Casal | Ode to Julián del Casal 71 Atraviesan la noche | They Pass Through the Night 81 Las siete alegorías | The Seven Allegories 83
Virgilio Piñera Los muertos de la Patria | The Fatherland’s Dead 87 Nunca los dejaré | I Will Never Leave Them 89 En la puerta de mi vecino . . . | On my neighbor’s door . . . 91 Testamento | Testament 91 En el Gato Tuerto | At the One-Eyed Cat 93 Pin, pan, pun | Bang Bang 95 Quien soy | Who I Am 95 Una noche | A Night 95 Bueno, digamos | OK, Let’s Say 97 Y cuando me contó . . . | And when he told me . . . 99 Reversibilidad | Reversibility 101 Isla | Island 105
Samuel Feijóo En la muerte por fuego de Gladys, la joven de los canarios | On the Death by Fire of Gladys, the Young Girl Who Kept Canaries 107 Tumba con palmas | Tomb with Palm-Trees 107 Tres blues | Three Blues 115
Son del loco | The Madman’s Son 119 Caonao adentro | Deep Within the Caonao 119 Gastón Baquero
Breve viaje nocturno | A Brief Nocturnal Voyage 121 Pavana para el Emperador | Pavane for the Emperor 123 El viento en Trieste decía | The Wind in Trieste Told 123 Los lunes me llamaba Nicanor | On Mondays My Name Was Nicanor 125 El héroe | The Hero 127 Fábula | Fable 127 Charada para Lydia Cabrera | Charada for Lydia Cabrera 129
Marcel Proust pasea en barca por la bahía de Corinto | Marcel Proust
Cruises the Bay of Corinth 131 El gato personal del conde Cagliostro | Count Cagliostro’s Cat 135 El viajero | The Traveler 137Eliseo Diego Bajo los astros | Beneath the Stars 141 El oscuro esplendor | The Dark Splendor 143 En memoria | In Memoriam 145 Cartagena de Indias | Cartagena of the Indies 145 Versiones | Versions 147 La casa del pan | The House of Bread 147 Riesgos del equilibrista | The Rope Dancer’s Risks 147 La niña en el bosque | The Girl in the Forest 149 La casa abandonada | The Deserted House 151 Oda a la joven luz | Ode to the Young Light 153 Testamento | Testament 153 Mi madre la oca | Mother Goose 155 Comienza un lunes | On a Monday 157 A una muchacha | To a Girl 159 Cintio Vitier El bosque de Birnam | Birnam Wood 159 Plegaria | Prayer 165
Fina García Marruz Visitaciones | Visitations 171 El momento que más amo | My Favorite Moment 181 de Gramática inglesa | from English Grammar
Pequeña elegía | Little Elegy 183 Dígame | Tell Me 183 Uso de plurales | Use of the Plural 185 Heraldo | Herald 185 Adán | Adam 185 Participios pasivos | Past Participles 187 Quién ha visto | Who Has Seen 187 Este libro de gramática | This Grammar Book 187
Lorenzo García Vega Variaciones | Variations 189 En las lágrimas de las focas | In the Seals’ Tears 191 Túnel | Tunnel 193 El santo del Padre Rector | The Rector’s Saint’s Day 193 El viejo Maldoror | Old Maldoror 197 Con una advertencia | With a Warning 197 Texto martiano | Martían Text 199 Buscándome el vacío | Seeking My Void 199 Ilusión venida a menos | Illusion Come to Naught 199 Arañazo mediúmnico | Mediumistic Scratch 201 El extraño rigor | Strange Rigor 201 Colosal olvido | Colossal Oblivion 201 Manuscrito para la cajita | Manuscript for the Box 203 No, vano discurso no es vacío | No, Vain Speech Is Not Empty 203 Junto al campo de golf | By the Golf Course 203 Revisando la visión | Revising the Vision 203
Caluroso el día | Warm Day 205 Un mandala | A Mandala 205 Carlos Galindo Lena
Qué hacer si he perdido las llaves . . . | What to do if I’ve lost the keys . . . 205
Siempre es bueno recordar a Tebas . . . | It’s always good to remember
Thebes . . . 207Ayer el mar era una ausencia | Yesterday the Sea Was an Absence 209
Francisco de Oraá
Yo no sé cómo voy a no sé donde | I Don’t Know How I’m Going I Don’t
Know Where 211De cómo fue la muerte hallada dentro de una botija | How Death Was
Found Inside a Jar 211 En uso de razón | Of Sound Mind 213 Ahora quita el agua y pon el sol | Now Take Away the Water and Bring the Sun 215 Vida de niño | A Boy’s Life 217 Ahogado en el serón | Drowned in the Basket 217Sobre las cosas que, si miras bien, ves en el cielo | Concerning the Things
That, If You Take a Good Look, You’ll See in the Sky 217 Dos sueños con un ave | Two Dreams of a Bird 219 Aventura entre niños | Adventure Among Children 219 Del pescador | Of the Fisherman 221 De tres fotos de Mella | On Three Photos of Mella 223Roberto Branly Atardecer sobre San Anastasio | Evening Falls on San Anastasio 225
Pablo Armando Fernández Nacimiento de Eggo | Birth of Eggo 231 Rendición de Eshu | Surrender of Eshu 233 de Suite para Maruja | from Suite for Maruja
La primavera, dices . . . | “Spring,” you say . . . 235 Cuando anochece . . . | When night begins to fall . . . 237 Casi siempre, y solos . . . | Almost always, and alone . . . 237 Roberto Fernández Retamar Un hombre y una mujer | A Man and a Woman 239 Felices los normales | Blessèd Are the Normal 241
Le preguntaron por los persas | Being Asked About the Persians 243
Fayad Jamís A veces | Sometimes 245 Las bodas del hormiguero | The Wedding in the Anthill 247 Vagabundo del alba | Wanderer of the Dawn 247 Charlot y la luna | Charlie and the Moon 253 Por esta libertad | For This Freedom 257
Heberto Padilla En tiempos difíciles | In Difficult Times 259 El discurso del método | Discourse on Method 261
Oración para el fin de siglo | Prayer for the Turn of the Century 263
Los poetas cubanos ya no sueñan | Cuban Poets Don’t Dream Anymore 265 Para aconsejar a una dama | To Advise a Lady 267 Poética | Poetics 267 Paisajes | Landscapes 269 El lugar del amor | The Place of Love 269José Álvarez Baragaño Los distritos sonoros | Sonorous Districts 271 Yo oscuro | Dark Self 271 Los muertos | The Dead 273 Revolución color de libertad | Revolution, The Color of Freedom 275 Nuestro nombre no está escrito . . . | Our name is unwritten . . . 279
César López
Como en cualquier ciudad . . . | As in any respectable city . . . 281
El poeta en la ciudad | The Poet in the City 285Antón Arrufat de Repaso final | from Final Revision
Mi familia muerta . . . | My dead family . . . 291 El gallo que canta . . . | The rooster that sings . . . 293 José Kozer
Te acuerdas, Sylvia | Sylvia, Do You Remember 297 Rebrote de Franz Kafka | Kafka Reborn 299 La dádiva | The Offering 301 Jerusalén celeste | The Heavenly Jerusalem 303 Última voluntad | Last Will and Testament 305 Ánima | Anima 307 Reino | Dominion 309 La casa de enfrente | The House Across the Way 311 Danzonete | Danzonete 313
Miguel Barnet Así, la muerte | Death’s Like That 315 Suite cubana | Cuban Suite 317 Caminando la ciudad | Walking the City 319 Con pies de gato | On Cat’s Feet 323 Memorándum XIV | Memorandum XIV 323 En el barrio chino | In Chinatown 325
Belkis Cuza Malé Las cenicientas | The Cinderellas 327 La fuente de plata | The Silver Platter 327 Caja de Pandora | Pandora’s Box 329 Crítica a la razón impura | Critique of Impure Reason 329 El ombligo del mundo | The Navel of the World 331
Nancy Morejón Parque Central, alguna gente (3:00 p.m.) | Some People/Central Park/ 3:00 p.m. 333 Luis Rogelio Nogueras
Mujer saliendo del armario | Woman Emerging from the Closet 335
Un tesoro | A Treasure 337 Canta | Sing 337Don’t look back, lonesome boy | Don’t Look Back, Lonesome Boy 339
(Yambos interrumpidos) | (Interrupted Iambs) 341Pérdida del poema de amor llamado “Niebla” | Loss of the Love Poem
Called “Mist” 343Oración por el hijo que nunca va a nacer | Prayer for the Son Who Will
Never Be Born 345 Un poema | A Poem 347 El último caso del inspector | The Detective’s Last Case 347 Una muchacha | A Girl 349 Viaje | Voyage 351Lina de Feria Poema para la mujer que habla sola en el Parque de Calzada | Poem for the Woman Who Talks to Herself in Calzada Park 353 No es necesario ir a los andenes | You Don’t Have to Go onto the Platform 355 Preámbulo | Preamble 357
Delfín Prats
No vuelvas a los lugares donde fuiste feliz | Never Return to the Scenes of
Your Happiness 359 Para festejar el ascenso de Ícaro | In Celebration of the Ascent of Icarus 359Fábula del cazador y el ciervo | Fable of the Hunter and the Stag 361
Viento de Patmos | Wind Out of Patmos 361Excilia Saldaña La mujer que ríe y llora | The Woman Who Laughs and Cries 363
Raúl Hernández Novás Quién seré sino el tonto | Who Would I Be If Not the Fool 369 Sobre el nido del cuco | Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 371
Amando Fernández Descenso de la agonía | Deathwatch 387 El capitán | The Captain 389 La estatua | The Statue 391
Soleida Ríos Pájaro de La Bruja | The Witch’s Bird 393 Maleva y los niños en el paraíso | Maleva and the Children in Paradise 395 El texto sucio | Dirty Text 397 Recogí limones | Gathering Lemons 403 El camino del cementerio | The Road to the Cemetery 405
Lourdes Gil Desvelo de los pájaros anoche | The Birds’ Insomnia Last Night 407 Fata Morgana | Fata Morgana 411
Reina María Rodríguez Ellas escriben cartas de amor | Women Write Love Letters 411 Una mujer se desnuda frente a un profesor estupefacto | A Woman Undresses in Front of a Stupefied Professor 413 Una muchacha loca como los pájaros | A Girl Mad as Birds 415 Pescadores (crudo) | Fishermen (Rough) 417
Abilio Estévez Las pequeñas cosas | Small Things 419 Frente al río | Facing the River 421 Visita del abuelo | Grandfather’s Visit 421
Iraida Iturralde Claroscuro | Chiaroscuro 423 El rostro de la nación | The Face of the Nation 425 Exilio, la sien | Exile, the Brow 427
Ruth Behar Carta | Letter 427 Ofrenda | Offering 429
El mundo | The World 429 Un deseo para el año que viene | A New Year’s Wish 429 Ángel Escobar
Las puertas | Doors 431 El pulgar y el índice | The Thumb and the Index Finger 433 Hospitales | Hospitals 435 Los cuatro cuentos | The Four Tales 435 Otro | Another 437 La sombra del decir | The Shadow of Speech 439 La guardería infantil | Daycare Center 441 Quién le teme a Franz Kafka | Who’s Afraid of Franz Kafka 443 Frente frío | Cold Front 443
Ramón Fernández Larrea Poema transitorio | Transitory Poem 445 Cantando con mi abuelita sobre las piernas | Singing with My Grandmother on My Lap 447 El país de los elfos | The Land of Elves 449
Roberto Méndez Fábula peligrosa | Dangerous Fable 451 Ensayo sobre la tristeza | Essay on Sorrow 451 Lo estelar | The Stellar 453
Rolando Sánchez Mejías Cálculo de lindes | A Calculus of Boundaries 455
Rogelio Saunders Vater Pound | Vater Pound 463
Ismael González Castañer de Sábado | from Saturday
Cinco mujeres turcas . . . | Five Turkish women . . . 469 Vacaciones en el mundo | A Vacation in the World 471
Mirar y mirar por la ventana | Looking and Looking Through the
Window 473Viendo construir un puente . . . | Watching them build a bridge . . . 475 Juan Carlos Flores
Tótem | Totem 477 El secadero | The Drying Shed 477 Uno de los blues | One of the Blues 477 Retrato de una (otra) dama | Portrait of (Another) Lady 479 El ciclista K | K the Bicyclist 479 Sírvase usted | Help Yourself 479 La mosca | The Fly 481
Pedro Llanes
Nombres de la casa invisible | The Names of the Invisible House 481
Sigfredo Ariel La luz, bróder, la luz | The Light, Brother, the Light 487 La vida ajena | The Other Life 489 La hora de comer | Dinner Time 491
Frank Abel Dopico El correo de la noche | Night Mail 493 Mercadillo de máscaras | Mask Market 495 A mi padre | To My Father 497 Francois Villón | François Villon 497 Cuando pasan los años | When the Years Pass 499
Alberto Rodríguez Tosca Ojos de perro azul | Eyes of the Blue Dog 499 Suma transitoria | Transitory Sum 501
Omar Pérez López Contribuciones a un idea rudimentaria de nación | Contributions to a Rudimentary Idea of a Nation 505 Cunda, el herrero . . . | Cunda, the blacksmith . . . 507 Imprecaciones, adivinanzas | Invocations, Riddles 507 Saludo de los perros | The Dogs’ Greeting 509
Las instituciones místicas del decoro | The Mystical Institutions of Decorum 509 El loco | The Madman 513
Antonio José Ponte
Un poco a la manera de Ismael | Somewhat in the Style of Ismael 515
Sobre el planeta | Regarding the Planet 515 Canción | Song 515 Un bosque, una escalera | A Forest, a Stairway 517 La silla en escapada | Chair on the Run 517 Augurios | Auguries 519 Asiento en las ruinas | A Seat in the Ruins 521Heriberto Hernández Las paredes de vidrio | Glass Walls 523
Fábula del delfín y la sombra del pájaro | Fable of the Dolphin and the
Bird’s Shadow 525Pedro Marqués de Armas Tú no irás a Troya | You’ll Not to Troy 527
Claro de bosque (semiescrito) | Forest Clearing (Half-Written) 529
Damaris Calderón Con el terror del equilibrista | With the Terror of the Tightrope Walker 535 Ésta será la única mentira en la que siempre creeremos | This Will Be the Only Lie We’ll Always Believe 535 Astillas | Splinters 537 Huesos fuertes | Strong Bones 537 La máscara japonesa | The Japanese Mask 539
Alessandra Molina As de triunfo | Trump Card 541 Herbolaria | Herbalist 545 Ronda infantil | A Childish Round 545
Carlos A. Aguilera
Javier Marimón Generación espontánea | Spontaneous Generation 557 Biographies and Notes to the Poems 563
Translators 593 Acknowledgments 597 Credits 599
This Page Left Intentionally Blank
Introduction Cuban Tightrope
Public and Private Lives of the Poets
Relations with Cuba have preoccupied the North American imagination far more than one might expect, given the island’s small size and minimal 1 power. North American understanding of Cuba has, at the same time, been obscured by longings for the exotic, as well as mythologies of both right and left, in which Cubans have also been known to indulge. It’s been imagined as a place simpler than our own, whose people are less inhibited and more passionate, friendly to strangers and prone to dancing in the street, a land strangely set apart in a childhood fantasy, as evidenced by the opulent hulks that cruise its streets. For those of the left, there’s the equally simplified Cuba of heroes, where the new man, freed from the shackles of exploitive cultures, has managed to create a society based on cooperation and compas- sion rather than greed, despite the opposition of the giant to the north. And for those of the right there’s a gray, joyless, island-wide gulag, where all spirits are crushed under the weight of oppression.
The reality has always been more complex. Except for a period of relative cultural isolation and attendant provincialism between the collapse of the Spanish empire on the mainland in the 1820s and Cuba’s own achievement of independence in 1902, Havana has been a cosmopolitan city. It was one of the major entrepôts of Spanish America, and all the currents of European thought and culture passed through its port. Cuba has had an active literary culture for four hundred years, which since the late nineteenth century has had a disproportionate influence on the literatures of all of the Spanish- speaking Americas. Even before the Revolution, when literacy rates hov- ered around 70 percent, the education of those who received one was often extraordinary. Among the first actions of the revolutionary government was a massive literacy campaign and a large investment in education at every level, as a result of which Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates and one of the best-educated populations anywhere. Presses and journals, though plagued by censorship and worse, and under government control, like almost every- thing else in Cuba, have proliferated, publishing an endless outpouring of books, a portion of each press run made available to the general population forced into exile have often been of the educated classes, and they, too, have spawned a publishing industry and a major efflorescence of literature and thought, which, because of the successive waves of emigration, has remained closely allied to the development of poetry on the island.
Very little of the poetry of Cuba and its diaspora has made its way into the awareness of non-Spanish speakers. The long postrevolutionary U.S. embargo is partly to blame, limiting the flow of information, but also limit- ing imports of paper to the island, so that books have been produced in small editions and rarely reprinted.
Perhaps more important than the effects of the embargo is the unsys- tematic way in which writing makes its way from one language to another. Faced with the overwhelming presence of the source culture, translators tend to translate work that flatters their preconceptions and the preconcep- tions of publishers and readers. Which is to say that politics often figures in the choice. This is especially true for poetry, a hard sell at the best of times. So, for instance, Heberto Padilla, a fine poet, was being published in trans- lation by major New York publishers almost as soon as he left the island, for reasons that will become apparent, while the poetry of essential figures like José Lezama Lima and Eliseo Diego has had to wait for decades.
Between the late 1960s and early 1990s another factor came into play. Cuban poets needed government permission to have their work published, whether on or off the island, and until recently only the favored were allowed to travel abroad, as promoters of Cuba and their own work. A small cadre of what have come to be called the oficialistas, poets who, like Pablo Armando Fernández, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Miguel Barnet, and Nancy Morejón, often hold important government posts, became the public face of Cuban poetry in the outside world and have tended to be disproportionately published in translation. That most of them have also been victims of repres- sion is often forgotten.
The reception of poets of the diaspora has also been influenced by politics. José Kozer, perhaps Cuba’s most influential living poet and a resident of the United States since 1960, speaks of being shunned by the left in his adoptive country as a gusano, a worm, the term of abuse for anti-Castro exiles of the far right, while right-wing exiles themselves have sometimes rejected him as a communist because of his liberal politics; he, and those like him, have had a difficult time breaking into print in English.
Little of the work included here will be familiar to English-language readers, regardless of its source: most of the few translations that exist have bookshelves, and despite the lively interest in all things Cuban, there have 2 been only a handful of narrowly focused bilingual anthologies. The Whole
Island, surprisingly, is the first attempt at a comprehensive picture of Cuban
poetry in the modern period. I have tried to present a range of poetries that represent the best of what’s been published in book form by native-born or naturalized Cubans writing in Spanish on or off the island, beginning with the founding of the seminal journal Orígenes in 1944 by Lezama Lima and the critic José Rodríguez Feo, and to present as well the full range of Cuban practice in this period.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the discussion that follows inevitably suf- fers from a kind of tunnel vision. Cuban poetry in this account may seem separate from other arts and thought, even those produced by the poets themselves, many of whom are also novelists, essayists, and playwrights. It may also seem more Cuba-centered than the poetry itself, although a strong strain of exceptionalism in Cuba long predates the official messianism of the current regime.
It’s also helpful to remember that Cuba’s culture is in some ways very different from ours. North American readers may notice, for instance, the relative paucity of women in this anthology — only twelve of the fifty-five poets included. This proportion appears consistent with the relative num- bers of women published on the island, although there may be a change in the works in the generation too young to be represented here, and it’s not true of Cuban-born poets in the United States, where the gender division approximates that of North American poetry in general. My numbers are, at any rate, consistent with the proportions in the standard anthologies in 3 Spanish. The relative scarcity of Cuban women poets has not been a hot-button issue on the island, although poets like Nancy Morejón and Reina María
Rodríguez tend not to be shy about their displeasures. There don’t appear to be any cultural or official barriers that women have to overcome to write or publish, and there have been important women writers in Cuba since the late nineteenth century. Some women have also wielded considerable power in literary bureaucracies, among them Morejón, who heads the Caribbean section of Casa de las Américas, the preeminent arts organization on the island, and Haydée Santamaría, who founded it in 1959 and was its director for twenty years until her death.
None of those I have asked about this subject have offered an explanation for the imbalance. Cubans of both genders have in fact been surprised by Race plays a very different role in Cuba than in the United States, and although there is certainly plenty of racism, and economic inequality tends to cling to color lines as it does in the United States, it’s considerably less 4 poisonous than here. One difference is the lack of a sense that owner- ship of African culture is restricted to those of African descent. It raises no eyebrows, for instance, that Miguel Barnet, a White ethnographer of Afro-Cuban culture, writes “ethnographic novels” from the point of view of Afro-Cubans, any more than Pablo Armando Fernández’ right to compose 5 his santería-derived poems would be questioned because of his color. The negrista poems (as Latin Americans refer to writing in Afro-Spanish dialect) familiar to non-Cubans from the early work of Nicolás Guillén had passed from fashion by 1944, and the major poets have rarely written in black dialect since. Like most of their white compatriots, Afro-Cuban poets tend to come from educated, urban backgrounds, and with the enormous exten- sion of quality education in the generations since the Revolution I doubt that many of them would be able to speak or write dialect unselfconsciously.
Skin tone also functions differently in Cuban culture; those of mixed heritage are seen, and tend to see themselves, as a separate group. Guillén, for instance, would react indignantly if called black, insisting that he was
mulato. For this reason the translators have retained the Spanish mulato/
mulata, rather than using the English language mulatto, which carries very
different cultural baggage.
At least nine of the included poets are mulato or black, and several others may be as well. It’s not customary to include author portraits or mentions of race on book jackets in Cuba.
My goal, in any case, has been to present a collection of the most sig- nificant poems and poets within an evolving context that Cuban poets and readers might recognize, not as North Americans might wish it.
Among Cuban poets and readers there is general agreement about who the most important poets are, and I have included these, except for Dulce María 6 Loynaz, whose estate’s demands were exorbitant. I have included as well a selection of other fine poets, many of them younger, from among the large number who had to be excluded because of limitations of space. Inevitably, this has led to injustices, but I hope that my choices are at least plausible.
Anthologies are about choices. My hope has been to display something of the complex matrix of ways of thinking about poetry and their environ- ments that Cuban poets have woven, to create something of a group portrait through time of an extraordinary poetic culture very different from our own. Political considerations have played no part, though I am well aware exclusions, and even into the line and page counts allocated to each poet.
Within Cuban poetry there’s a mini-genre centered around the metaphor of the tightrope walker, deriving from Eliseo Diego’s “The Rope Dancer’s Risks” (p. 147). It’s been put to different uses, but for me it has become some- thing of an overarching metaphor for the Cuban poet’s suspension between the external — the political — and the demands of craft and psyche.
The connection between politics and poetry has in fact been expressed by a tradition of poetic exile and martyrdom. Among Cuba’s most important
- – nineteenth-century poets, José María Heredia (1803 1839) was forced into exile; Gabriel de la Concepción Valdés, known by his pen-name Plácido
1844), was executed for his supposed participation in a slave rebellion; – (1809
- – and Juan Clemente Zenea (1832 1871) was executed as a rebel during Cuba’s interminable and brutal wars of independence.
The most significant figure by far was José Martí (1853 – 1895), universally known as the Apostle of Independence, who was killed in the first engage- ment of Cuba’s final struggle for freedom from Spain. His contemporary,
1893), has been assigned the role of an apolitical coun- – Julián del Casal (1863 terweight of sorts, not least by Lezama. Both are usually considered early members of or participants in the loosely organized hemisphere-wide move- ment known as modernismo, the idiosyncratic Latin American adaptation of French Romantic and Symbolist poetry of the second half of the nineteenth century. Their impact was felt during their lifetimes, but most of their work only became available in the 1920s, when the poets of the Orígenes group were first learning their craft.
Martí was the chief propagandist and theorist of Cuba’s final War of Inde- pendence. He is ubiquitous, in public statuary and on the walls of every schoolroom and government office in Cuba, and in the opening lines of his “Versos sencillos” (“Simple Verses”), appropriated for the lyrics of “Guan- tanamera,” Cuba’s unofficial national anthem. Thanks to the Cuban exile community, he joins the other liberators of Latin America at the northern end of New York’s Avenue of the Americas, where it gives way to Central Park, frozen in monumental bronze on his rearing horse at the moment before he was to be struck down in battle.
Martí was also one of Latin America’s most influential poets. He was largely responsible for the introduction of Whitman to Spanish-language poetry, as well as for the introduction of free verse, though much of his own verse was rhymed. While poetry in rhyme, especially sonnets, is still written, free verse, and the long Whitmanic line, have become the dominant forms In Martí’s work can be found germs of the three tendencies that have governed most of Cuban poetry since: his often difficult syntax, extreme imagery, and nervous line are reminiscent of the neobarroco; there are poems that have the proselike cadences of what’s come to be called conversaciona
lismo; and there are the poems that justify his position as a modernista.
A large part of Martí’s impact has been as a role model, the quintessential revolutionary and patriot, the politically committed poet. “Every Cuban,” according to José Kozer, “in his heart of hearts wants to be José Martí. But we lack two things that would be necessary to make this possible: the breadth of language as total knowledge and expression, and an ethical sense of life whose daily character is absolute, demanding of us a maximum of compassionate and spiritual behavior. . . . It’s impossible to live with the 7 language and ethical purity of the Apostle.” He has become the demanding conscience of Cuban poetry.
The poetry and life of Julián del Casal more closely approximate the stan- dard image of modernismo. A dandy and flâneur, he dressed the part of the poet, as he had learned it from Baudelaire, whose crucial influence he introduced to Latin America, along with Baudelaire’s invention, the prose poem (translating and imitating several of the master’s), although most of Casal’s poetry is in conventional rhymed forms. He cultivated an aesthete’s eye in his personal collecting, in his poetry (introducing the japonisme that remains a part of Cuban culture), and in the remarkable crónicas that he wrote for the Havana newspapers to earn his keep. These journalistic pieces range from keenly noted society reportage to portraits of Havana’s slums, all recounted with an ironic detachment. He has become the model for the poet as poet first and last, and for the creation of a politically inviolable aesthetic and personal realm.
It’s tempting to elevate Martí and Casal into champions of the two arms of a dichotomy that can serve as the key to understanding the dialogue of Cuban poetry since 1944, but the choices taken have seldom been that stark. One needn’t, however, exaggerate the explanatory power of the con- flict between the ideal or necessity of a politically engaged poetry and the hope for a more private verse to appreciate its centrality. For a Cuban poet to be apolitical is so counter to expectations that it’s inevitably interpreted as a political statement in itself.
By the late 1930s, when Lezama began publishing, modernismo’s moment had passed (though it continued, notably, in the work of Dulce María Loynaz and remained an influence on a great deal that was to follow, including the as flâneur). It was replaced as the dominant mode by what Latin Ameri- cans call vanguardismo (which is no more related to what we call in English the avant-garde than modernismo is related to what we call modernism). In Cuba, by the 1940s, the aspect of vanguardismo called coloquialismo or con 8 versacionalismo had become dominant.
Conversacionalismo eschewed the ornate imagery and vocabulary of
modernismo, as well as its symbolism and indirection, in favor of a syntacti-
cally straightforward verse written in the language of everyday speech, a “poetry that does not inevitably have to be subjected to abstraction and the systematic chain of metaphors which have tyrannized poetics in the Spanish 9 language over the centuries,” as Heberto Padilla put it. Eugenio Florit’s epis- tolary “Poets Alone in Manhattan,” and the work of Guillén, Virgilio Piñera, Fayad Jamís, and of course Padilla, are examples of conversacionalismo’s range, and it has remained the majority strain in Cuban poetry. Not inci- dentally, it has proven particularly useful for writers of political verse.
Padilla, to a degree that his contemporaries (who allied themselves with French surrealist and existentialist poetry) probably would have found dis- turbing, saw Cuban poetry as in need of an infusion of influence from the poetry of his English-language contemporaries, especially Robert Lowell. Lowell, in Padilla’s estimation, “had brought back to American poetry a vigor of language that had dissipated — he was different from Eliot, Auden, Stevens, and William Carlos Williams,” all published in Orígenes, and “he distanced 10 himself also from the Beat poets. . . .” The goal was a poetry in which the shaping hand of the poet was invisible.
Like most forms of thought, poetry usually requires that the overwhelm- ing amount of language and other phenomena that are always present be radically filtered. For conversacionalistas, as for their English-language counterparts, that filtering is in the service of the presentation of a logically coherent argument that should be understandable by any competent reader. As such, its focus is on the end to be reached — an end known to the poet beforehand — rather than on what’s encountered in the process of getting there. Since 1937, when his first book was published, but reaching its fulfill- ment in his poetry of the 1940s and thereafter, Lezama elaborated a very different practice. Taking his cue not from the poetry of another culture but from Spain’s Baroque, out of which had grown its New World colonies, and particularly from the work of Luis de Góngora, he brought attention back to the world of undifferentiated phenomena that we all inhabit. So, in his major poems, the reader confronts an unfiltered glut of information, presented without syntactic or ideational hierarchy. The “Ode to Julián del Lezama’s day; obscure, sometimes private, references; allusions to the cróni
cas; objects from Casal’s, as well as Lezama’s, collection of art and oddities;
inner thought and outer experience presented without boundaries or inhibi- tions—all, apparently, thrown at us helter-skelter, by means of an enormous vocabulary borrowing from the idioms of different trades, times, dialects, and places.
Padilla was to tell us in his memoir that reading Lezama “I found myself violently dispatched to a realm of pure language, his one and only king- 11 dom.” From the beginning Lezama had confronted the accusation that his work was obscurantist, hermetic, a mere construct of language, disen- gaged from ordinary life, disinterested in social reality. He would answer, 12 famously, that “sólo lo difícil es estimulante,” only the difficult stimulates growth (which I find myself recasting as a statement at once Darwinian and from the realm of religious and therapeutic practice, “only hardship begets change”), but also that “understanding” was beside the point — the poem was to be experienced as a thing in itself, not as a subject for paraphrase. An analogy that comes to mind is a first encounter with a forest or any com- plex ecosystem. One can deconstruct the forest, catalog its species and their interactions, but it can’t be paraphrased, one has to experience it as simply there. The Lezamian moment is of that order of reality — all the confusion of the unfiltered moment present at once. As such, he claimed, it was a more profound engagement with everyday life than the clarified narrative 13 of conversacionalismo.
There is no way to cope with this flood of phenomena except to submit oneself to the moment and be carried along in a fugal current, where words, references, and motifs recur and recombine in changing, progressive guises, creating an inexorable propulsive force.
Haroldo de Campos and Sévero Sarduy were to name this kind of art 14
neobarroco,
a term that Lezama and his companions never used, but it’s apt enough that it’s become the term of choice, not only, I think, because Lezama had invoked the Baroque masters, but also because behind his practice is the central metaphor of the Baroque, the neoplatonic concordia
discors, harmony out of discord.
To paraphrase a large body of theology, from the apparent chaos of the disjunct phenomena of a moment, a life, the natural world, and all of human history arises a harmony only perceivable to the mind of their maker, who alone is capable of simultaneous awareness of all things. To approach that state (and it is the function of the immense polyphonic structures of Baroque music, art and architecture to help us do so) is to approach the state of pro- mind of God, recapturing the harmony of the paradise garden from which 15 humans were expelled for their discordant sin. Lezama thought of himself as a Catholic, but his version of Catholicism scandalized the more orthodox members of his circle. Hell, he thought, 16 didn’t exist, or if it did, it was and had always been empty. He seems also not to have had a strong personal sense of a sinful nature to be overcome. And he apparently wasn’t willing to consign paradise to the next life, point- edly naming his autobiographical novel Paradiso, in Italian, rather than the Spanish paraíso, so that his reference to the final book of Dante’s allegorical
Divine Comedy would be unmistakable. For Lezama, the ecstatic moment
17 was in the full experience of the garden of this world, not the next.
Orígenes, the first important organ for the dissemination of the neoba
rroco, began life in 1944 with an edition of three hundred hand-delivered
copies. By the late 1940s the neobarroco had become a force with which hos- tile critics had to reckon, inspiring an essay in the large-circulation weekly
Bohemia (which at the time was something like a combination of Newsweek,
18 People, and the New Yorker).In the three decades since Lezama’s death it has become perhaps the dominant strain in Latin American poetry, among poets Catholic or otherwise.
What Kozer said of the demands posed by Martí could be applied equally to Lezama, and very few Cuban poets, other than the entirely secular Kozer, have risen to the challenge. Only Cintio Vitier (a Catholic), Samuel Feijóo (a Communist), Lorenzo García Vega (secular), and Raúl Hernández Novás (secular) have fully embraced it, though it has powerfully influenced the work of others, particularly Ángel Escobar and Soleida Ríos.
Orígenes emerged in a rare interval of relative calm in Cuba’s tortured
history, when Fulgencio Batista, who had been the de facto power on the island since he seized control of the military in 1933, was content to allow a civil government to rule. It was a uniquely permissive government in mat- ters of censorship, and writers were basically ignored, which meant that a nonpolitical poetry became conceivable.
Most of the poets who have become known as the Orígenes group or generation, among them Piñera, Gastón Baquero, Diego, Vitier, Fina García Marruz, and, somewhat later, García Vega, had originally come together around three earlier short-lived journals that Lezama had edited, and they were united as much by Lezama’s commanding presence and example (even his enemies saw him as something of a poetic saint for his total devotion to his art) as by his practice. It’s helpful to remember how young they were in
1944. Lezama, at 34, was the oldest. Piñera was 32, Baquero 28, Diego 24, Lezama and Piñera’s tortured, passionate friendship was already a decade old. Vitier and García Marruz were to marry, and Diego would marry García Marruz’ sister. The poet and priest Ángel Gaztelu, Lezama’s confes- sor and himself a member of the group, officiated at their weddings. Except for Piñera and García Vega, they all espoused a meditative Catholicism, and Lezama was something of a pontifical figure for his younger compatriots.
Orígenes was to publish forty issues, surviving until 1956, well into Batista’s
final thuggish presidency. It included work by Cuban poets who never iden- tified themselves with the Orígenes group, including Eugenio Florit, Samuel Feijóo, Fayad Jamís, Pablo Armando Fernández, and Roberto Fernández Retamar, as well as a Who’s Who of French, North American and English, and Spanish-language poets. But the seeds of its fracture were evident from the first, in Lezama’s high-handedness, its perceived failure to engage 19 politically, and also, as Piñera was to admit, its Catholicism. Rodríguez
Feo was to withdraw his co-editorship, and, crucially, his financial sup- port, after issue 34, producing two parallel issues under his sole editorship before ceding the title to Lezama’s version, which published its final issues with Baquero’s financing. Immediately thereafter, Rodríguez Feo founded
Ciclón, which continued publication until its voluntary dissolution shortly