Jose Lezama Lima Selections Ernesto Livon-Grosman (Editor) Available All Format
Jose Lezama Lima Selections Ernesto Livon-Grosman (Editor) Available All Format
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Jose Lezama Lima Selections Ernesto Livon-Grosman (Editor)
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SELECTIONS
ERNESTO L IV O N - G R O S MAN
Credits and acknowledgments for the poems and other texts included are on page
ISBN 0 - 5 2 0 - 2 3 4 7 6 - 6 ( p b k . : a l k . p a p e r ) .
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Acknowledgments
ERNESTO LIVON-GROSMAN
Key to Translators
F R O M La Fijeza (1949)
Thoughts in Havana
Joyful Night
Fabulous Censures
The Adhering Substance 41
Weight of Flavor 45
Death of Time 47
Procession 49
Tangencies 51
Resistance 55
Surprised 76
Mother 78
Unleashed so
The Nec\ 82
Dissonance 86
I Hear a Bird 90
Pavilion of Nothingness 94
DOCUMENTS
Confluences (1968)
Selected Bibliography 1 83
Credits 1 85
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
IX
T R A N S C E N D I N G N A T I O N A L P O E T I C S
X I
left the island or, after a certain point in his life, even his home.
(Among the many photos of Lezama there is only one by now very
rare set of pictures of him walking around Havana's Cathedral.) T h e
complexity of his circumstances matches well the historical changes
undergone by his country and ultimately by his poetics. It is this com-
plexity, which Lezama himself refers to as "difficulty," that makes
Lezama's work unique in an introspective sense and that also pro-
vides an opportunity to reflect on the extraordinary historical times
in which it developed. Therefore we should look for the keys to his
poetics not only in the texts themselves but also in their cultural set-
tings and in Cuban society at large, so alive both before and after the
Revolution.
In the opening statement of La expresión americana (1957), one of
Lezama Lima's best-known books, the author declares: "Only diffi-
culty is stimulating," a statement that has become Lezama's trade-
mark, the departure point from which we are to approach his work in
particular and, presumably, literature as a whole. The fact that, since
Lezama's first exposure to a large Latin American readership in the
late 1960s, his work has always been seen as difficult never constituted
a real obstacle but rather an incentive for continuing to delve into it,
based on an understanding that the complexity of his writing reflected
his equally complex cosmogony. Lezama's poetic unveiling of reality
is echoed in the complexities of the language itself. To recognize this
serves as an effective strategy for questioning the cultural circum-
stances in which he was embedded without reducing them.
José Lezama Lima was born in Cuba on December 19, 1910, and
with the exception of brief trips to Mexico in 1949 and to Jamaica in
1950, he spent most of his life in Havana, where he died in 1976. Yet
his writing always went beyond the cultural boundaries of his nation.
Lezama's private and public personas were barely separate, and many
XII \ T R A N S C E N D I N G N A T I O N A L P O E T I C S
of his activities as publisher and cultural
b r o k e r w e r e m a r k e d by a noninstitu-
tional, almost domestic, character. A f t e r
the premature death of his father, when
L e z a m a was only nine years old, he
and his mother m o v e d into his grand-
mother's house on Calle P r a d o and
later to 1 6 2 Trocadero Street, where the
writer lived until his death. H i s father's
death left the family in a precarious situ-
ation f r o m which the family never com-
pletely recovered. In spite of his family's
financial difficulties and his o w n severe
asthmatic condition, L e z a m a was able to
establish around his home an expanding
artistic circle of painters, musicians, and
writers, which w o u l d become a defin-
L e z a m a L i m a at a year and nine
ing factor o f Cuba's twentieth-century
months old, 1 9 1 2 .
cultural life. L e z a m a ' s w o r k , his poetry,
novels, and essays, are the result of the social and personal circum-
stances in which he developed his poetics, yet the facts of his life have
proven so elusive that w e still lack a comprehensive biography. R e a d -
ing his w o r k is, then, the best w a y of reconstructing his intellectual ca-
reer, and with some limitations it provides a larger personal picture as
well.
T R A N S C E N D I N G N A T I O N A L P O E T I C S / XIII
more or less disguised rewritings. Lezama finished high school in
1928. In 1930 he became a law student, but the university closed down
for political reasons, and Lezama spent the following years reading
Góngora, Lautréamont, Valéry, Mallarmé, and Proust. It was during
those years that he started to write essays and developed his own po-
etics and a network of friends and writers that later constituted his
closest circle. In 1956 Lezama turned down a job teaching literature at
the Universidad Central de Las Villas, but a year later he read a series
of five lectures at the Centro de Altos Estudios that were published as
La expresión americana, a collection of essays in which Lezama ex-
pressed his own encompassing view of Spanish American culture.
The Cuban Revolution took place in 1959, and in i960 Lezama was
designated director of the Department of Literature and Publications
of the National Council of Culture. In 1961 he became one of the vice
presidents of the U N E A C , the Artists and Writers Union of Cuba,
and in that same year his two sisters left the island. Lezama, whose
sometimes elusive public persona added to the complexity of his work,
experienced the separations from his sisters as traumatic experiences
that, like everything with Lezama, generated more writing, in this
case in the form of extensive correspondence with them. Lezama's at-
titude toward the Cuban Revolution is a clear example of his elusive-
ness toward institutional life in general. Although he held an official
post, and although he wrote a poem in memory of Che Guevara, it
was never clear where he stood as a supporter of the Revolution.
In 1964 Lezama's mother died. In that same year he married Maria
Luisa Bautista, his constant companion and the person who, during
the last years of his life, helped him to cope with his increasingly dete-
riorating health. If we were to choose two determining moments in his
career, instances that could be considered turning points of his life and
XIV \ T R A N S C E N D I N G N A T I O N A L P O E T I C S
w o r k , they w o u l d be the editing of Orígenes and the publication o f his
first novel, Paradiso, in 1966. T h i s novel granted L e z a m a the visibility
both inside and outside C u b a that he truly deserved, a kind o f recog-
nition that he did not have before its publication. A l t h o u g h the ten
years that separated the publication of Paradiso and his death were for
the most part m a r k e d by health problems, they were also a time w h e n
his w o r k was gaining an increasingly international appreciation.
In 1958 Cintio Vitier, one o f the f e w members o f the Orígenes cir-
cle still alive in C u b a , developed a massive history o f C u b a n poetry —
Lo cubano en la poesía — in w h i c h a m o n g other things he canonized
L e z a m a ' s w r i t i n g in an effort to m a k e his w o r k and Orígenes organic
components o f Cuba's literary history. Since L e z a m a ' s death the
n u m b e r o f w o r k s dedicated to his poetics has multiplied exponen-
tially, as have the critical perspectives on his writings. T h e s e writers
all had in c o m m o n a desire to follow the multiple b r a n c h i n g o f
Lezama's baroque poetics, as was the case with such canonical and es-
thetically diverse writers as Julio Cortázar, Severo Sarduy, Reinaldo
Arenas, and Néstor Perlongher, a m o n g others, all o f w h o m share
L e z a m a ' s appreciation o f the baroque imaginary.
Latin A m e r i c a n literature has often been seen both inside and out of
Spanish A m e r i c a as a dramatization of history, as a rehearsal, in con-
tent as well as form, o f the cultural issues of the last five hundred
years. T h i s perspective is taken with the hope that a fresh realignment
of major historical landmarks — the Spanish conquest, the wars of in-
dependence, the struggle for national organization, and so on — will
provide the reader with a sense o f continuity that directly or indirectly
T R A N S C E N D I N G N A T I O N A L P O E T I C S / XV
L e z a m a L i m a with his mother, 1953.
XVI \ T R A N S C E N D I N G N A T I O N A L P O E T I C S
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We go through ourselves
and having stopped point out the urn and the doves
engraved in the chosen air.
We go through ourselves
and the new surprise gives us our friends
XVIII \ T R A N S C E N D I N G N A T I O N A L P O E T I C S
and the birth of a dialectic:
while two dihedrals spin and nibble each other,
the water strolling through the canals of our bones
carries our body toward the calm flow
of the unnavigated land
Lezama calls on a common past; the verse "They want that death they
have given us as a gift" could be read as a reference to the United
States' intervention in Cuba's war of independence with Spain. They,
the carriers of the first flute, the one "made from a stolen branch," are
the Americas colonized by Europe, and both are by now inseparable
from each other. While Lezama is asking for an introspectiveness that
would give us friends, he also points out the existence of a dialectic
rift. The poem asks us to acknowledge the "two dihedrals," each of
them already forming a double angle, the North and the South, each
with its own geography, looking in turn at the indigenous as well as
the European components of their present, while we drift even fur-
ther into the "unnavigated land," a continental reality that presum-
ably will end the conflict between the two Americas.
As was the case with the Vietnam War for the United States, the
Cuban Revolution created for Latin America a dividing line, a before
and after, that changed the way Spanish American countries saw
themselves in relation to each other and to the rest of the world. The
Revolution not only inspired and supported many liberation move-
ments and multiple attempts to overthrow conservative or ineffective
Spanish American administrations, but it also promoted a pan—Latin
American movement based on the idea of a shared language and a
continental sense of cultural fusion, known in Spanish as mestizaje.
Although many of the issues included in the Cuban agenda, such as
land reform, nationalism, and the development of a national culture,
were already present in the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the conti-
T R A N S C E N D I N G N A T I O N A L P O E T I C S / XIX
nental, political juncture of the 1960s was marked by the search for a
political model that could overturn the cultural and political depend-
ency of Spanish American countries; this in turn created a common
ground for a shared political project, making the Cuban Revolution
an attractive role model. It was not — by any means — the first incar-
nation of a pan—Latin American proposal. Already during the wars of
independence of the early 1800s Francisco Miranda had appealed to
the British Crown, asking for support for a centralized Spanish
American government with an Inca official as its head. Since then, the
idea has been revisited and associated with a political model of
diversity.
Lezama's own continental view of the Americas lacks any such ex-
plicit political ambition. Yet La expresión americana can at times be
read as a precedent to the Revolution's model, and perhaps it even
helped to negotiate his relation with the revolutionary establishment. 1
But like so many events associated with Lezama's work and poetics,
the official reception of his work was uneven, and he lost official back-
ing toward the end of his life. Lezama supported the Revolution and
some of its ideals of justice and sovereignty, which of course were al-
ready upheld by his beloved José Martí, one of the most prolific Cuban
intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century. Lezama'a at-
titude toward homosexuality created a similar effect to that of his pol-
itics. As if walking a tightrope, Lezama seems to have taken a
guarded stance on these issues, not so much to hide his position but to
avoid turning himself into a target. In this respect Lezama's position
was not very different from that of so many other people at the time:
on the one hand, sexual preferences were for the most part kept pri-
vate, and on the other homosexuality was not exactly an open topic of
conversation. Although in Paradiso he makes a direct reference to the
homosexuality of some of its characters, Lezama's poetry, as well as
XX \ T R A N S C E N D I N G N A T I O N A L P O E T I C S
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