Poetic work
Introduction to the work of Nicolás Guillén
Nancy Morejon
The first book published by Nicolás Guillén Motivos de son (1930), shows no relation to postmodernism (1) displays the American and other building elements of a sui generis poetic personality. The basic perspective of this book lies in the rigor and depth with which the author undertakes a verbal examination, as to the form, and in default, content, implicit in his subject. From this position, it destroys the context that had settled the term postmodern, so are grounds for proposing a literary art beyond the scope of an academic definition of the term (2).
Between us, the modernist and postmodernist poetic tradition really cracks with the emergence of language Motives ... Rather than finding or choosing a language of popular speech, are supposed grounds for the annihilation of all the verbal trappings of modernism and its aftermath. This overlooks entirely overcome what was accomplished modernist expression, and exhausted, and that the attempts "cutting edge" (in the academic sense of the term) had outlined to no avail.
The "modernism" was our way to keep up with art that had occurred in Europe, was an attitude, unbiased, where there was awareness of literary and artistic backwardness soothed us, by calling for the creation, opened our ossified and rusty door to a bold and demystifying art work, despite its impasses. I do not think that has only served to inventory airplanes, telegraph, modern civilizations, but to give a curfew to aesthetic and historical lesson that when the relationship between literature and revolution are not consistent, it degenerates into a political and artistic chaos .
Proponents of "modernism"-grouped around the magazine forward, gentle voiced some form.
Guillén Vanguard exists in the extent to which his verse is broken and foundation, will rebel style and national character.
Trying to find a national poetic expression with a new attitude to language, that is the forefront some of Nicolás Guillén, which involves stylistic revolution, literary and social (3).
is not an avant-garde novelty outside, but for the intentions of further social order. This is the case of César Vallejo, Peru, and remember the best criteria Mariátegui about the new art of the beginning of the century:
In today's world there are two souls, of revolution and decadence. Only the presence of the first gives a poem or a painting worth of new art. We can not accept new art that we do not trae sino una nueva técnica. Eso sería recrearse en el más falaz de los espejismos actuales. Ninguna estética puede rebajar el trabajo artístico a una cuestión de técnica. La técnica nueva debe corresponder a un espíritu nuevo también. Si no, lo único que cambia es el paramento, el decorado. Y una revolución artística no se contenta de conquistas formales(4).
De modo que los Motivos de son no sólo realizaron una conquista formal, la introducción del son como ritmo poético, a la poesía culta, escrita, sino que en ellos están presentes temas que abrieron las puertas del rescate cultural, de la descolonización, porque denunciaron la injusticia social y la discriminación.
For Guillén Motivos de son is the first question of reality. From a thematic and stylistic unity, these poems are a review of racial experiences; Guillen on his arrival in Havana, in which poor neighborhoods coalesced descendants of African captives to organize and constitute various pockets of cultural resistance. Through these experiences, Guillen assume their status as a black man. The poet, in an effort to search, in his dissent, inaugurates a process of understanding the human condition. Because more than frighten the bourgeois, Guillen placed, to bring characters and environments poetry layers of the most popular and plundered.
should be noted that following the oral examination that raises the poet, those guys fresh, popular, question life, conditioned by his monstrous prejudices and circumstances to which they were subjected. It be more of people's characters and their archetypes: Manué Bito, Mulata, Black bembón. But Guillen did not let the overflow found poetic expression that has made reality, but then finds a balance that evoke the worst interpretations of the bourgeois criticism. For example, it is clear that in the Grounds ... there is a treatment of race as a cultural concept as ethical value. This even continues Songoro cosongo (1931) and even in West Indies, Ltd. (1954). Not a few critics have tried to pigeonhole the work of Guillén (taking into account only the first book) in the limits of the designation of black poetry. It was a hobby-a-service, observed and released. There never understood that it was the appearance of a poem that spoke to black and black to find its proper place in national culture and to define their contribution to it. Not black as insulating element but as an integral element. The race will be linked later to the idea of \u200b\u200bthe ancestor, already addressed in another ideological and thematic complexity. In this first attempt, the poet suggests that in dealing with these issues calls for a control to internal conflicts, and that the conjugates, transcending, with its immediate racial community. A Dilemma of individual character extends over the entire core of humanity.
During the poems, Guillen develops, the poetic word, intimate conflict, as outlined above. Poetry becomes the space testimonial of vital I engaged in their poetic. Thus, the poems evoke the landscape of black in the slums of the capital are part of a larger sequence in which the poetic poses its own destiny before those lives and characters of the Cuban people. The poetic acts in this book through a descriptive colloquialism. Colloquialism understood as meaning credited to the latest Latin American poetry.
poetry Reasons are imposed, moreover, a fact unknown or distorted, or given peripherally, is a fresh testimony. Poetry is the tool to investigate reality or context, and so is experience, necessity and justice. At the same time, the Grounds ... poetry are fighting racial prejudice. Found a national expression and initiate a process of cultural decolonization, as I said before. The poem that opens this book proves it. He opens the process. "Black bembón" opening and counting, is the poetry of the grounds because it summarizes, synthesizes the essence of verbal play and of undermining the book's central theme: the black man searching for his identity, the condemnation of the exploitation of their human condition
" Po what makes you so brabo,
when you bembón black design,
if you have the holy mouth, black
bembón?
(5)
Guillen alienated black Cuban discovers her own beauty, rescuing them from the hands to the supremacy of Greek or Latin fees imposed during the colonial period.
Poems "There boluntá dyeing", "Búcate Silver" are a clear denunciation of the economic crisis of the period, which corresponded to the international level, with the deepest economic crisis that capitalism has suffered throughout its development, 1929. "You do not know groin" represents one of the first national poet's anti-imperialist overtones.
For the challenge, and daring intentions, by the finding in poetic expression, by the blunt way that opened the gap to break up the values \u200b\u200bof the bourgeois order, extend to the grounds for are the integral meaning of the term avant-garde.
In the language of the Memorandum, to reproduce the speech of black Havana, implies the poet's desire to regain "Lost language", as well appoint Martínez Estrada: the "language of the vanquished." The "black Canto 'of Songoro cosongo is a true literary mystery. Enchantment of the poet "by the word? Vestiges "Yoruba language? Do I want imperative to rebuild the lost world, to restore the ancestral language destroyed before the imposition of another, where it vanished?
Motives, stylistically, with no background in the history of written poetry (educated) in the nation, although in the ancient oral mixed origin. It is clearly palpable presence guarachas lyrics, street hawkers, parades and rumba, discounting of the sound, for granted. Some have supported the theory of an influence on the theater grounds and letrillas Lope and Góngora. I do not think that Guillen had to resort to the bookish, the merely literary, when we know that this poetry was his own personal experience. Simply put, we combine oral and written tradition of our people, one joined to another.
reproduction of the spoken language of the slums of Havana (Cuban versions of the black American ghetto)-language that descends from the muzzle of the African captives were clustered into them, "is already one of the constituent elements of the linguistic expression, aggressive and rebellious, she gave Motives fair size (6).
On the subject of English poetry, much debated, and its influence on Guillén, I think about all of our best poets is he who has mastered and shaped his tongue. Guillen is the most "English" of the Cuban poets, no doubt. Neither French influence, or even through Darius, and by the reflection of French in English. It found no traces of Surrealism or Dada, but no longer know and read. Their trainers and final readings were the English classics: Quevedo, Góngora, Garcilaso, Fernando de Herrera, Cervantes. It has always been marginalized elegiac vein Guillen, and logic preference for English elegiac. I know of his penchant for Quevedo, to the extent that it reflects the work of the English tragedy, which reveals his awareness of the decline of Spain. Guillen has said that "in general [...] much poetry of the Golden Age rhetoric is wildly false. Where there is pure poetry in that sea of \u200b\u200brhetoric is in the Quixote, a sea of \u200b\u200bpoetry, but is written in prose. " Feel a great admiration for the poets of the Renaissance, by the Archpriest of Hita, preferring his direct style, sarcastic, proverbs, popular. It has to do with his view of poetry. Berceo mainly because she likes the poet approaches that in many ways the contemporary.
The importance of language and for Guillen was highlighted by Miguel de Unamuno, who had entered the language lesson, which meant the work of the Cuban. I can never stop associating this fact, the letter from Unamuno to Guillen in 1932, with the attitude that more than twenty years later, André Breton would take over the poetry of Aimé Césaire, Martinique poet, the great (7). To the astonishment of French poetry written in France, no one handled the language as he had managed Césaire. The "Overseas Indian" gave a history lesson.
is further evidence in both cases, the tragedy imposed linguistic colonization. From this historical fact, the English language, in our case, called a dichotomy: an ideal language and the other factual. The lexicon and phonetics of English speakers in America is the second, that of the mainland, the first. Faced with this dilemma, Guillen chose resistance and literature brought the language of the muzzles. We all know that it abandoned the romantic commitment and then molded as one, the language of the victors. At that time, the "civilized" it pointed the finger, was accused of "barbaric", without realizing Reasons that the nation would trigger a decisive battle between the symptomatic and "artificial lawyers '(' false scholars) and" the natural man. "
been seen, especially contemporary poetry, that when the poet thinks about his tools, the poetry itself and the word comes to question his poetic voice and its different functions. This does not arise in the various poetic Guillén, he has won a language and expression, which reflects not know because his and insurance. The poet's poetry is not an exercise mysterious, life is never conceived as ailing, his word continues to build dreams and chimeras.
formal findings of Guillén's poetry are: a line broad, discursive, more or less reflection, in which the poetic is consistent with the vital and vice versa, a line of classic mold (the English poetic tradition exercised by Góngora, Garcilaso, and Quevedo, mainly) in which the poetic is not me but a we, cultural or epic (plural almost a monologue, from the us Whitmanesque), which integrates hybrid characteristic forms of national culture, a brief verse, nominations elliptical poet useful for satire, and drilled in its sounds, epigrams, madrigals. This last verse is the basis The Great zoo, and sections of the sprocket. For example, in West Indies, Ltd., river poem, prose, Quevedo, Guillen risks experimenting with new forms of poetry untouched by it or used to in his poetry. The formal style of this poem is the embryo of the Elegy to Jesus Menendez. Here, then, Guillen puts into question the concept of free verse, heightening the expressiveness of the verse Whitmanesque. West Indies is a fresh pathetic. Guillen is an ironic, bitter, angry. In this paper paint a mismatch between the poet and social context: the frustration of the revolution 30.
The transit time which is already formulated as poetic critical awareness of the word are detected in the whole (1947). Remember "guitar." In this book a popular flight Dove (1958) established the theory of concentric circles. If not, compare each (both) of the poetic arts core of both books. The poetics of the dove ... closing only a vision of poetry inherently outline another without recourse exclusively to the formal aspect.
This adventure rooted, which were the reasons are for destroying the rhetoric of the era and usher in a new and valid expression of nationhood, was a path of knowledge, and will Songoro cosongo its principal, its subsequent development, their temporal continuity. Some critics
decided to deny the correlation between this book and Reason are in addition to these two works with the rest of the work of Guillen. These positions seem to me wrong. From the Grounds to find a difference cosongo Songoro, denying space and repeats, while an undeniable continuity. "The Process of Evolution? A clearly. Songoro ... continues the break, but bear with increasing awareness, and he reinstated the adventure of a new poetic knowledge described in the book that preceded it. Suffice it to say that the title of the book comes from a verse of the plea "If you knew ...», 1930. So in Guillén must understand and see a continuous time, as when we throw a stone into still water of a pond and create inevitable, endless concentric circles, of which I spoke a moment ago. His work is structured in this way. Songoro is a new beginning, another beginning, a review, a new transience. Guillen himself proposed in the poetics of the book, the founder poem "Arrival" and assimilated the formal rebellion who were the eight grounds. Cosongo Songoro images are characterized by a higher degree of effectiveness. The poet shuffles his word, his intellectual approach, gives birth abrupt to the contradictions that then go to form the body of his poetry. This book is structured much of the poetry of Guillén future personality and its American dimension.
Although the linguistic reality of Guillen's another that of Jacques Roumain, or of Césaire and Langston Hughes, it is pertinent to note that its historical, cultural and political involves many elements in common. Do not forget that language is a link and not an end. The poets I mentioned above (Roumain, Césaire and Hughes) have a common historical experience of being descendants of African slaves were born in traumatized societies by structures underpinning racist colonial rule and capitalism. The poems 'Arrival' (8) (Songoro cosongo) and "The surname" (The Dove popular flight) to give Guillen an irreducible American significance in these texts to embody the trauma in American countries as Brazil, United States the islands of the Caribbean. The African Presence in America, born of the introduction of slavery, the final mark, appear in our literature to these poems that are far from each other twenty-seven. The first, in 1931, and the second, 1958. Here Guillen takes a visionary because it defines the idiosyncratic nature of America insular. The American man's culture was shaped by others, of which theirs is a residual type. It is, moreover, to grant the right place, the true sense of history that is, the human element that provided the labor relations of production gotten in the affected areas of the continent, especially over slavery:
reflect our sweaty skin moist
faces of the defeated (9).
No one before (1931) was well aware of this presence, and that historic event. Warning against exotic European civilization against the encroaching glare before:
And now that Europe
naked flesh roasting in the sun and search
Harlem and Havana are
jazz and black shine while applauding the boulevard,
and facing the envy of white on black
really talk (10). This book culminates
attempt decolonization noted in the poem "Black bembón." Through a new treatment of eros in the madrigals, Guillen facing the black man's aesthetic battle to regain her beauty, unadulterated and relegated by the system. The woman is the best means to accomplish that aesthetic appreciation, which has a huge ideological. Revolutionary thought of the erotic theme is served to be met:
Your stomach knows more than your head
and as much as your thighs. That is the strong
black
grace of your naked body. Sign
jungle yours,
with red necklaces, gold bracelets
your curved, dark
and that alligator swimming in the Zambezi
your eyes.
The key moment in the literary career of Nicolas Guillen in the two books published outside of Cuba, in 1937, they are: Spain. Poem in four anguish and hope, and Songs for soldiers and sones for tourists. Is the material upon accession to the communist revolutionary movement.
the world convulsed by the consequences of the First World War, intellectuals, writers and artists radicalized his politics. As the revolutionary struggle was inevitable, in our continent the Communist parties, or were founded (Mexico, Peru) or were restructured. Part of the artistic vanguard firmly decided to political activism, or set aside its creation, or put at the service of world proletarian revolution, and against the growing fascism. The sensitivity of the time was permeated by the need for social revolution (12).
The ultimate event that brings together the forces of revolution, the English Civil War, during which he celebrated the 11th International Congress of Writers for Defense of Culture. They agreed Neruda and Vallejo, Miguel Hernandez and Langston Hughes, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Marinello and Félix Pita Rodríguez, Heinrich Mann and Tristan Tzara, René Maran and André Malraux, Vicente Huidobro and Antonio Machado, León Felipe, and Cernuda, Alberti, Alexei Tolstoy Ehremburg. Not coincidentally the same year is 1937, in Valencia, Guillen entered the Communist Party (13).
Spain's poem ... is not just a song of solidarity in which artistic creation is subject, authoritarian, an idea, but also a way to find his other identity Guillen, along with the exercise of partisan education.
For its part, songs for soldiers and sones for tourists was a premonition policy of the Cuban revolution and the current state of America was a "successful lyrical expression of the political" in the words of Juan Marinello. He said this in his foreword:
For quality, the nature of his poems, this book is conflict and resolution, adventure and success, experience and completion. There is in these verses feat unequaled daring and conquest. It is no exaggeration to say that from here shows a new way, unusual, revolutionary poetry. And I can say without fear that any political poetry is made today in our land has look, in the core, the substance of these songs clean and strong. Here is the significance
American Guillén: his genius to combine artistic and political avant-garde art, his poetic genius maintained thematic and stylistic coherence to design a spiral, its historical genius reveals an awareness of class and home to the black man in America, descendants of African captives, his genius, a visionary, he saw that he would lead the Cuban revolution Fidel Castro. The "Elegy to a soldier alive" contains the elements of a genuine revolutionary program:
This peace is guilty. When will
talk
your mouth, your chest and yell rude,
to rebel and shake!
You, pariah Cube, alone and miserable, you
roaring voice of the continent:
blood that takes you on your current
is the same in Bolivia, Guatemala,
in Brazil, Haiti ... Dark land, land
wire flight and wing burned
same fever, dry
knife and bullet hits,
where
claws are hard with pick and shovel digging day and night
graves (14). Guillén
addresses the issue of sugar cane ascribing a new meaning in the formal, epigrammatic, and in the content, anti-imperialist. His only literary history in our The harvest of poetry is Augustine Acosta, Julio Antonio Mella defined as follows: "The harvest is the first major political poem of the last stage of the Republic. (15)" The book was, in truth. In the nineteenth century, our poetry was exposed to the ravages of "landscape." Most of the poets, romantics and modernists, alluded to the sugar cane, but as an ornament, as part of an ecology impossible not to notice thanks to his exuberant nature. There was talk of sugar cane as he spoke of the palms. The harvest, with the combative "Poem of the reeds" of Pichardo Moya, banish the vision of our poetry cane sugar, giving it a national character. However, the author did not exceed certain boundaries. Rather than "failure individualistic 'rather than' individualistic approach," as Nick, is no better an unconscious class interest:
... The book expresses politically ideal, the protest of settler threatened, and the former landowner, Cuban, ruined by the U.S. Central. It's just real and protest. But there's more. The Central Yankee imperialist penetration with general words, is not a phenomenon of today. If the "independence" existed, it was precisely because imperialism began to exist so much today that frightens us. This fact is not fatal, in the mystical concept of the word, but a reality that reflects the historical determinism [...] The fight against the Yankee settlers until you get a temporary improvement, or will be fully up and become a proletarian pure to work the land of the gringo (16). Sugarcane determined
our historical destiny since his culture conducive to the implementation organic slave system. It is well known that this is the common denominator of the economy in the West Indies.
Although argued neutrality, Acosta-whose verse is but a sharp dependence of Ruben Dario was a whistle blower of the economic drama mediated Cuba. Acosta shunned political engagement:
I do not want to judge this song is I believe a poet of crowds. Contrary to my cry Rubén [Darius], I know I will not go to the crowds, because when they come to my poetry will cease to be (17).
is currently stateless.
whom Guillen is therefore introduces the breath-imperialist to address the issue of sugar cane:
The black
along the reeds.
The Yankee on the cane.
Land under the reeds. Blood
that we go!
("Cane") (18)
His anti-imperialism, which has significantly permeated all his work is based on Jesus Menendez Elegy (1958), whose history is integral West Indies, Ltd. (19) (1934), as explained above. The timing of this are the years that follow the dark triennium, the fall of Machado and frustration of the revolution of 33. In the latter performs an awareness, demystifying, the existence in the West Indies of a typical colonial status, and therefore one of the most critical of American underdevelopment. Not only rejects the misery of alienation, declaring as a vice of the modern world in the Caribbean islands, but the palpable Yankee management in them, in their most accomplished and consistent.
Nicolás Guillén's work has generated copious critical literature, in most cases exalted and praise, not without good intentions and misunderstandings. Repeatedly, we are facing a critical impressionistic, although at times objective. The discrepancies that have resulted from it, refer to the location of the poet in the various classifications that modern literary history has been used to define movements as the so-called negrismo "(" afrocubanismo ',' mulatto ', etc.), Or blackness, or to censor the presence of political concepts in his poetry. It is obvious that such considerations prevailing in the literary criticism of overt or extreme right, and with some other mitigating factor, even in "free thinkers." What detracts is one of the richest and most clever lines Guillen: his anti-imperialism and political ideas in the service of the oppressed classes and for the world proletarian revolution (20), or to highlight the clear contextual relations Guillén's poetry with African civilizations.
Havana, June 1972.
1. In 1922, Guillen collected his poems in the book teenage brain and heart, unpublished until Angel Augier publish it in the new edition of his biography, Nicolás Guillén notes for a biographical-critical study in 1965. Modern style, these poems show the influence of literary and Dario Silva. There are sonnets and free verse style of the "Letter to Madame Lugones' in Nicaragua. Other poems are antecedent "Apart from my textbooks." The poem "Longing" is a true pioneer of poetic art "guitar" in The are integer (1947).
2. As conceived our criticism, for example, has been in a narrow, restricted to the group of the Revista de Avance-first organ isms diffuser Europeans, and some poems, the first, from authors such as Manuel Navarro Luna and Félix Pita Rodríguez. Is not that the exact affiliation gives this term. We must broaden their limits of significance.
3. This applies perfectly to the rest of his work, and reaches its climax in Songs for Soldiers and sounds for tourists, a book in which the poet makes possible the identification of the artistic vanguard and politics.
4. "The artist and the era", in Casa de las Americas, Havana, a. XII, n º. 68, Sept. / Oct. 1971, p. 16.
5. Nicolás Guillén: Anthology most 2 nd ed., Havana, ed. Hurricane, 1969, p. 27.
6. This way of speaking of the African slave has conditioned largely Cuban popular speech. Many American poetry brings these idioms, which correspond to a similar phenomenon in English.
7. Aimé Césaire: Cahier du retour au pays natal. Préface d'André Breton, Lyon, ed. Bordas, 1947. There are Cuban edition published by the Casa de las Americas.
8. The only history, and English, is that of Langston Hughes in his poem "I, too" (Me too) or the "Prelude" (Prelude) Weary Blues (1926). Matching contexts, not influence.
9. Nicolás Guillén: Anthology more, 2nd ed., Havana, ed. Hurricane, 1969, p. 36.
10. Guillén: op. cit., p. 39.
11. Guillen, op. cit., p. 40.
12. "The militancy of students and intellectuals in those early days of the communist movement leaves no room for doubt. The most confident among them, Diego Rivera, Cesar Vallejo, Rubén Martínez Villena, visited the Soviet Union. Besides his work in or near the Communist Party intellectuals of that period were associated with the union movement and the anti-imperialist leagues. "Jean Franco, op. cit., p. 145.
13. When he returns to Cuba displays an intense journalism, especially in the Midi magazine, which he founded.
14. Nicolás Guillén: Anthology more. 2 nd ed., Havana, ed. Hurricane, 1969, p. 107.
15. "A comment to The harvest of Agustín Acosta" in Bohemia, La Habana, a. LV, No. 32, August 9. 1963, p. 70.
16. Mella: art. cit., p. 71.
17. Agustín Acosta: The harvest; poem combat. Havana, ed. Minerva, 1926, p. 5.
18. This poem, which appeared in Songoro cosongo (1931), was released on July 27. on page 1930, "Ideals of a race 'of the Journal of the Navy. There are also two earlier poems with the same implication: "Future" (1927) and "Ode to Kid Chocolate" (1929), we now know as "Little black ode to a Cuban boxer."
19. The importance of West Indies, Ltd. is that he fulfills all the issues Guillen, and most of the natural resources that the poet formal exercise now (1934) onwards until his last poems (Newest suppose the diary that daily).
20. As an illustration of this kind of trend, see Adriana Tous: The poetry of Nicolás Guillén, Madrid, ed. Hispanic Culture, 1971.
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