Citario. Derived from the Latin “citāre” (to quote) plus the suffix “-ārium” (repository), similar to “bestiary”. A 21st-century neologism, it emerged among the Spanish-speaking scholars of Bookish & Co., with roots in ancient anthologies and florilegia. “Citario” is related to medieval books of commonplaces (such as Erasmus’s) and 19th-century proto-examples, such as “Familiar Quotations”. This “Citario Lezama” celebrates the 115th birthday of the poet who made the image an event and difficulty a method of hospitality. His life — sedentary, oblique, insular — was the laboratory where Greco-Latin tradition, Baroque Catholicism and American invention recognised themselves as parts of the same verbal liturgy.
Be that as it may, the Danish glass, once admired in its palpable reality (so fragile and incredible at the same time), could open up a new path for me in interpreting Lezama’s work. In reality, an old path: that of the image, which is that of microscopy. Lezama theorised at length, in his own way, about the “image”, or imaginary eras, and although in his work the word is contaminated with the meaning of “metaphor”, I believe it coincides, or could be made to coincide without violence, with Deleuze’s idea of our current era as an “anti-imaginary era”. For an image to be truly an image, as it was in the imaginary eras (for example, the Renaissance), it must arise as an enigma, outside of language, definitively without explanation or justification: outside of any possible narrative, that is, as mystery and infinite possibility. Our era, unlike the imaginary eras, has specialised in neutralising the specific value of the image, nullifying it with some narrative or epigraph that explains or situates it. Of course, in a writer this is inevitable. If the image is truly refractory to words, the writer cannot avoid distorting it. But, I suppose, there are ways of suggesting, even within discourse, the silence of the image. Those ways, which I am not in a position to analyse, constitute a large part of Lezama’s style and method.
César Aira
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Dador was a great review of what he had experienced. A necessary review before undertaking the definitive work, that of maturity. I immediately noted the disappearance of the poet’s mother. These two events, objectively unrelated, have a secret and profound connection. Almost a year before his mother’s death, Lezama senses it and falls into a state of despondency that causes him to abandon his work, lose interest in everything, and withdraw into himself: he does not undertake that long-awaited work of maturity. When Rosa Lima dies, the poet sees everything that had hitherto constituted his world and his motive, his secret driving force, disappear with her. Faced with this event, which is followed by physical and emotional collapse, many think that Lezama’s end has come. But this is not the case. The strength that his mother had passed on to him through the complete identification they had achieved with each other enabled the poet to recover and, aware of his loss, to decide that the time had come to bring everything he had done during her lifetime to a close, to put the finishing touches to his work as a tribute to their profound relationship.
Armando Álvarez Bravo
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In a sense, Dador is like a creative equivalent of José Martí’s Diario de campaña. Compare, for example, this example from the Diario: ‘Lola, jolongo, crying on the balcony’ and this verse by Lezama: ‘the silly boy, with a measles forehead, pretty mummy’. Never before in the Cuban poetic tradition, as in both texts, had poetic language come so close to a radical, ultimate, primal, protoplasmic relationship with another perception of reality. In Lezama, this was like the culmination of an almost alchemical distillation process, which left behind, through an unusual consequence of a search for transcendent knowledge and a dream of mystical nuptials with the other reality, all culteran delight, all lyrical excellence, even all beauty, for which he was, on the other hand, so gifted, as can be seen, for example, in Muerte de Narciso or in many poems from Enemigo rumor. Perhaps because of this, after this experience, his language can, in Fragmentos a su imán, calm down for the first time and, also for the first time, access the confessional, without failing to take into account other terrible historical conditions that led him to this final dispossession.
Dador is, as I said, he alone, like an imaginary era, like a kind of poetic cosmogony, like the verbal realisation of that ‘myth that we lack’ (‘The bonfires of Ithaca, oh beggar,’ he says in my favourite verse from this inexhaustible book), where the one God coexists with the sacred world of pagan gods, where Paradise is confused with Hell (‘the abysmal,’ he calls it), where a hellish bestiary, as in Gothic cathedrals, runs through everything from beginning to end, where, in short, this world is confused with the other world.
Jorge Luis Arcos
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There is a huge difference between poets and writers who ‘create a style’ and those who simply possess a style. The latter, whose style is a way of thinking and being, of interpreting and describing, are very rare today, and yet they are the only ones whose work immediately stands out for its authenticity. The others sometimes produce brilliant paragraphs, but at some point the seams are revealed, the patches typical of those who do not have enough fabric and take from others appear. In Cuban literature in this century, the case of José Lezama Lima as a stylist is only comparable to that of José Martí in the 19th century. In both cases, the stamp of authenticity, of the personal-universal, of their own transcendental vision, permeates all their writings. Could Martí, at the age of sixteen, when he wrote El presidio político, have already ‘manufactured’ a style? Could Lezama, at the age of twenty-one, when he wrote Muerte de Narciso, have already acquired all the cunning astuteness of the old cabinet writer to construct a rhetoric that would justify them? No, neither of them had time to do such a thing. Their style is, quite simply, their primary condition as creators. It is an innate mystery that defies categorisation, yet lends itself to all interpretations.
Reinaldo Arenas
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One of these poets who live poetry in solitude, who do not work with their hands full of extra-poetic references, who do not invite the public or rely on it to create, is José Lezama Lima. Enemigo rumor is a book that bears no relation to what is commonly called poetry. However, if we have ever come close to a poet and a poetic work, it has been in the presence of this man and this book.
Gastón Baquero
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We met at the newly created Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, of which he, like me, was vice-president, and I remember very well the last time we spoke in an office at the headquarters of what is now called the National Council of Culture. There, where there might have been, if not microphones, at least attentive ears, Lezama protested against the growing total anti-Americanism. ‘They forget,’ he told me, “that hygiene was brought to Cuba by the Americans, like many other positive things. It was they who put an end to yellow fever and other plagues.‘ He also spoke bitterly of Alejo Carpentier, already embarked on his career as an official sycophant. ’He makes such a show of culture,‘ Lezama complained, ’only to come and ask me for the most trivial references.” But what made the occasion memorable was a cryptic warning he offered me, knowing my private opinions were becoming increasingly public: “In adverse times, the fox must disguise itself as a sheep”. I understood what he meant, and he understood that I had understood.
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
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I doubt that in those twelve years Lezama’s work achieved the active presence that Jorge Luis Borges or Octavio Paz achieved in an equivalent period of time, although it is undoubtedly on a par with theirs. Instrumental and essential difficulties are the primary cause of this ignorance; reading Lezama is one of the most arduous and often most irritating tasks imaginable.
The perseverance required by frontier writers such as Raymond Roussel, Hermann Broch, or the Cuban master is rare even among ‘specialists,’ and that is why there are so many empty seats in the club. Borges and Paz (I mention them again to place the target at the top of the tree in our lands) have an advantage over Lezama in that they are meridian writers, almost Apollonian from the point of view of perfect expressive adjustment and the coherent system of their spirit. Their difficulties and even their obscurities (Apollo can also be nocturnal, descending into the abyss to kill the serpent Python) respond to the dialectic evoked by Le cimetière Marin: “Mais rendre la lumière / Suppose d’ombre une morne moitié”.
Julio Cortázar
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His pace is somewhat slow. The cobbled street helps to slow down his movement through the zócalo. However, this does not prevent José Lezama Lima, spellbound by the Baroque architecture dancing before his eyes, from being dazzled, confirming what his imagination had previously prefigured between the walls of his library on Havana’s Trocadero Street, on the one hand, and before the humble Baroque of some colonial buildings in Havana, on the other.
Lezama continues his walk across the plinth, climbs the steps leading to the Cathedral of Puebla de los Ángeles, and immerses himself in it. Once inside, the spell continues to cast its spell and he begins to formulate in his mind these lines that we will later read in La expresión americana: ‘In the Cathedral of Puebla, the relationship between temple and square disappears, giving way to a large cluster of angels defending the heavenly square.’ If anything, Lezama’s trip to Mexico in 1949 refined his poetic thinking and provided him with the final touches to articulate his idea of an American expression. His vast literary experience was now complemented by his experience of the Mexican Baroque. However, and this must be emphasised, Lezama had already defined his fascinating idea of poetry and the Baroque in Muerte de Narciso.
(…)
If there is one enduring poetic thought in José Lezama Lima, it is the one that echoes between the words and verses of his poems. His intellectual biography must be sought in that unique interplay of words, phrases and metaphors that resulted in a prosody that no longer corresponded to the language in which he had begun, because it had become independent of it. A poetic worldview, but the world understood as a writing/text already irretrievably separated from reality. The much-discussed concept/figure of Lezama’s image has been stripped of its main meaning. To focus only on the possible projections of the image in his writing would be to ignore the creative sound mechanisms (the prosodic and tonal impulses) that operate at the foundation of his texts. Lezama’s writing would fit well with Pound’s diagnosis: “The image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas, endowed with vibrations. The good artist is, perhaps, a good seismograph‘ (Pound, Essays: 152). To enter Lezama’s ’poetic orb” is to immerse oneself in a reality where the eyes hear; that is, where the ears see.
Pablo de Cuba Soria
◾️
What is the function of Casalian snow in Lezama? Snow is antipodal and antonymous: the opposite extreme of any matter, world or language.
If a hole could be opened connecting Cuba with its Anti-Cuba, we would find snow, a polar landscape. Snow is the antithetical relationship and the antagonistic double: the ontic reversal. It is the transfiguration of liquid—which is the metaphysical ingredient of the island, its spritus—into solid, into crystalline structure.
Narcissus materialises in the snowy; his historical incarnation has a name: Julián del Casal. (‘That chill of Casal, for example, we have always suspected is testimony to the inner cold that exists in our country, which begins to be felt with him.’ Cintio Vitier, Lo cubano en la poesía, 1958). All Cuban tendencies toward the irrational and the melancholic, toward narcissistic impulses, toward otherworldly simulacra, take substance in the person of the poet (almost simultaneously, the solar myth of Martí rises above the horizon). The Martí-Casal confluence teaches us that all “incarnation” occurs in multiples, that it is not a singular event, and that Martí is not unique, for he coexists in his doubles: his death in Dos Ríos confirms this duality (chiralism). Narcissus dies choking on Lezama’s providential lunch, turned into a pillar of salt, a duplicated historical reflection.
Néstor Díaz de Villegas
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Until 1969, I lived in Arroyo Naranjo, in the house that belonged to my father. The distance between Lezama’s home and mine made it impossible for us to visit each other often. He would call me on the phone and we would have long conversations. I had a car at the time, and sometimes I would pick him up to go for a drive together. On one of those outings, we were accompanied by Father Gaztelu, a friend of his since his youth. Lezama launched into a long discourse on the existence of hell, which, according to him, was uninhabited. He based all this on the philosophers of the Middle Ages. The dissertation seemed endless, and the priest intervened: ‘Come on, Lezama, stop talking nonsense.’ The writer’s response was immediate: ‘Leave me to my little follies, they don’t hurt anyone. Besides, I am a Catholic in my own way.’ To which Gaztelu replied: ‘That’s the only way not to be one.’
Eliseo Diego
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I resign myself, once again, to commemorating: a relatively easy task in the case of Lezama Lima, as he is one of those authors that one is always reading, one of those who can hardly be said to be reread, since each time the book is opened to a different page and the words invariably mean something else: truly magical books.
(…)
Sometimes Lezama Lima annoys to no end (just yesterday David Huerta mentioned this to me in an email about that and other analects), but it is that weariness that precedes true epiphanies, those whose meaning is not entirely clear; as Severo Sarduy, Lezama Lima’s Tibetan disciple, said, referring to the beam of light that preceded the moment he received the news of his master’s death.
Christopher Domínguez Michael
◾️
It is not surprising that the theme of sterility tempted him (‘mules buried in my garden,’ ‘rhapsody’ for the mule that finally overcomes the original curse by planting trees in the abyss) as the breaking of a spell. His response to those who were scandalised by some pages of Paradiso, that the school experiences narrated in his novel belonged to a world before the split between good and evil — which made every poetic image a kind of second innocence — did not mean the denial of moral responsibility, no “Gidian” permission to place oneself “beyond good and evil”, as some understood with the startled joy of runaway schoolchildren, but quite the opposite: it placed the image exactly “beyond”,
in that indistinctness that can be achieved, in the beauty of some master canvas, by the images of Magdalene and Mary or Judas and the Baptist. In no way does Lezama extend the laws of the image to the “act”, justifying a kind of autonomous ethic, since he sees art and life as proceeding from the same root. Only that art, insofar as it creates a space of justice and beauty that history has not yet achieved, becomes that “herald of things to come” of which Martí spoke, and which Lezama preferred to call “a new habitability of paradise”. Goodness in Lezama is not the result of an Ignatian exercise, of an epic of the will, but a gift of grace that some beings, without any effort on their part, possess, such as the mother and sister in his Paradiso.
Fina García Marruz
◾️
And, as I have already said in these pages, I have not been able to resolve my resentment towards Lezama. But, in the months that I have been writing these pages, I have come to understand that he wanted me to tell this story of what happened, just as I have come to understand that, in my heresies, Lezama was, and continues to be, my teacher. No, I have not been able to resolve my resentment towards Lezama, nor have I been able to resolve my resentment towards those years of Orígenes. But I do not forget the exemplary struggle of the Orígenes writers, just as I do not forget Lezama’s greatness, nor do I forget Lezama’s Cuban and tender side. So I can say—I am fifty years old, I am a notary, not a writer, I am an exile—that, despite everything, I would not hesitate, in any other hell, to embark once again on the adventure of Orígenes. No, I have not been able to resolve my resentment towards Lezama. But I can end the story of these years of Orígenes with a Cuban meal on a Cuban night. There was Lezama, with his wild joy. Those were the early years of Orígenes. We had faith in our marginality then, but perhaps we already knew about this snow we were going to encounter. And it was somewhat naive, but it was something final. And I know that Lezama heard it, and I would like Lezama to hear it again. For it was oneself, all of us, someone, who said to Lezama what now I myself, all of us, someone, can repeat: ‘Lezama, we will never forget you.’
Lorenzo García Vega
◾️
But it is Lezama himself who develops a unique rewriting in Paradiso. His voracity—I have said somewhere that he is the most relentless black hole in Cuban literature, and one of the truly unusual ones in Spanish, I would now add—accounts for two utopian recreators, two meticulous creators of surfaces and depths. The cognitive journey structure that Lezama employs in Paradiso is a tribute to and appropriation of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Some link Paradiso to Proust (rightly so, in terms of surfaces) and to the other Joyce, the one from Ulysses. But from them, Lezama takes, I believe, certain inspirations capable of flattering the linguistic and stylistic ego of any total novelist. Paradiso remains a novel of learning and formation in the realm of the body and self-perception, for it is there that reality has its most fiery annihilating emulsion. From Joyce, the construction of the person (or the mask); from Proust, the sensitive construction of volumes and spaces with sufficient illusory quality.
The subject of the American novel in the post-fascination world has something to do with that even relief gradually acquired today by culture (but not by human groups or societies). And when Lezama challenges us by alluding to possibilities and adventure, he confronts us with two creative instances that cannot be dismissed when discussing novelistic writing, even regardless of the fact that, fundamentally, the concept of the subject is no longer one category in North Africa and another in Central Europe, or that the city as an organism and ramification of stories is a universal fact.
Alberto Garrandés
◾️
Stupidity, the daughter of ignorance, driven by Lezama’s literary incomprehension, preferred to accuse him of being hermetic, cryptic, impersonal. Such is the conspiracy of those lacking in ingenuity who boasted of not even feeling the obvious convergences of his literary associations, unusual within Cuban artistic development, with American baroque and the natural wonder of Hispanic America. To deny this quality of his style as a transcendent fact was equivalent to recruiting his work into the avant-garde schools of the end of the century. Surrealism, magical realism and even Freudianism were in the consciousness of the era, forming part of the topics discussed in intellectual circles. It is their environment, yes, but not the atmosphere of their discourse. Nothing and no one can remain impassive in the face of history. Whether we like its events or not, we owe ourselves to them; we are history. So why blame the prodigious demiurge for his inspiration and virtue? The undeniable complexity of Lezama’s texts explains the different cultures that nourished his genius: European, Eastern and American. His literature exudes poetry through words that overflow their banks, an incitement to travel through the poetic tunnels of language, engendering the space of the miracle with allegorical imagery, just as the river hides the parable of the moon in the depths of its silvery waters. It is not the spell of his fine silverwork, nor his lanceolate eye. José Lezama Lima is the rare string of our lyre, which only when it vibrates names its ceremony, its Cuban-ness. Hence, it is impossible to approach his writing passively, without undergoing a creative transformation.
Iván González Cruz
◾️
In several interviews, Lezama repeated that asthma and insomnia were always his bedfellows: throughout his life, he felt compelled to read and write to overcome the wakefulness induced by his asthmatic complications. After his “fumigations”, he entered, like Cemí, a state of hallucination, a “second night” populated by the creatures and places of books. He often used the term “hallucination” to refer to very diverse perceptual or imaginative experiences, some of which could have come from an involuntary “artificial paradise”. Author and character roamed the hypnagogic world of light sleep, where the room around them was stirred by fantastic beings and things took on a new and strange meaning. That this altered state of consciousness, to call it something, was related to his medication is a fairly plausible hypothesis, although it does not, of course, explain the writer’s imagination.
In ‘Confluences’, one of his nocturnal anxieties is well described, also presented as an exercise in lucid introspection. It is the image of a hand that assimilates itself into the night and demands him with strange urgency: “Hesitant with fear, with an inexplicable decision, I slowly moved my hand forward, like an anxious journey through a desert, until I found the other hand, the other thing. I told myself, it’s not a nightmare, more slowly, because I might be hallucinating, but in the end my hand found the other hand.”
Ernesto Hernández Busto
◾️
I believe I have read José Lezama Lima’s poetic work in toto. Rarely, very rarely do I find flaws in his poems. On the contrary, his craftsmanship is impeccable, and in his peculiar context of authentic and unique voice, a voice hard-won from the rhetoric of the chorus of trite (majority) voices, Lezama almost never gives in to facile sentimentality. Each of his poems, from the most renowned, such as the overwhelming “Ode to Julián del Casal”, or his “First Gloriette of Friendship”, or “A Bridge, a Great Bridge”, or “Rhapsody for the Mule”, to the less explored ones such as ‘Himno para la luz nuestra’ (Hymn to Our Light) or ‘Telón lento para arias breves’ (Slow Curtain for Short Arias) (with its tenderness à la Marin Marais, à la Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe), has a firmness, a thick confidence of its own that I find in few poets, whether Cuban or Spanish-speaking, of the 20th century.
“From the intelligence of the mass/ to the pleasures of the table”, with which “Hymn to Our Light” begins, exemplifies Lezama’s ability to say, amid thickets and fronds of shadows, something simple and direct, as if he were a colloquial poet (which he partly is), and not only, nor always, that neo-baroque poet, a condition that everyone affirms is his most particular inspiration. Lezama has no truth, in the ideological or rhetorical sense; what Lezama has is the specific weight of moments systematically achieved, intuited and worked on from a respectful love of writing, which he recognises as sacred because it is mysterious, luminous because it is dark and difficult.
José Kozer
◾️
Between the fine antelopes of “Ah, que tú escapes” and the celestial turtle of “El pabellón del vacío”, passing through the grotesque little beasts of Aventuras sigilosas, José Lezama Lima’s poetry is populated by a vast animalia. Mythical—but in a poetic sense—these animals express a constantly shifting drive, a certain bios unprecedented in Cuban literature. They come from all ‘eras’ and are arranged on a ‘fascinating and teratological surface’ full of playful elements, simulacra, and metamorphoses.
With the possible exception of Marianne Moore—objective, barely metaphorical—no other poet of the 20th century has created such an extensive and intense zoo. However, what is directly observable in Moore, the political quality of some of her allegories, is hidden in Lezama under the ‘fire cover of the image.’
Pedro Marqués de Armas
◾️
Writing by writing: nothing comes before or after, everything is decided in that incessant and proliferating activity, a little maniacal, a little ritualistic, whose celebration is a form of joy but also irony and agony. Writing not to de-realise after discerning, as in Borges; not to accumulate the intensity of lived transparency, as in Octavio Paz; not to inhabit and express the exception, its brilliance and nostalgia, as in Cortázar. Writing, rather, so that language occurs as incessant pre-figuration, and, from there, as the new perception of hyper-figuration. An act of origin and an act of ending, the poetic act occurs as the first day and is therefore foundational; but it also occurs as the fulfilled revelation and is, therefore, paradisiacal. Naturally, between both extremes, between those tensions, words abound, seeking to awaken a form, a dynamic process, a living verbal body. Many times, in his poetry, Lezama designs the path of that search, a path that is ardent and submerged, and perhaps the entire poem, the poem as origin and revelation, is only the paradigm, the totalised dream of this path of fragments and this route of figurations. Hence, from this adventure in the origin, in the figurations of the poem, Lezama had to move towards the more discursive organisations of the novel’s text.
But not before passing through the essay, through the theory of the poem and poetic knowledge, one of whose configurations, incidentally, is his American freedom.
Julio Ortega
◾️
Delhi, 3 April 1967
Dear friend: Thank you for sending me Paradisso and Órbita. Thank you also for the generous words that accompany them. I am reading Paradisso little by little, with growing amazement and wonder. A verbal edifice of incredible richness; or rather, not an edifice, but a world of architectures in continuous metamorphosis and, also, a world of signs—rumours that take shape in meanings, archipelagos of meaning that are made and unmade. The slow world of vertigo that revolves around that untouchable point between the creation and destruction of language, that point that is the heart, the core of language. Furthermore, it is the confirmation of what a few of us guessed when we first encountered your poetry and criticism. A work in which you fulfil the promise made to the Spanish of America by Sor Juana, Lugones and a few others.
Your brotherly friend,
Octavio Paz
Octavio Paz
◾️
Someday it will be necessary to reconstruct (as Lezama does in relation to the golden baroque) the unfolding of surrealism in its Latin American implantation, how it served on these wild shores to radicalise the enterprise of de-realising official styles —realism and its derivatives, such as “social poetry”. In Argentina, the power of surrealism is decisive, through voices such as those of Aldo Pellegrini, Francisco Madariaga and, above all, Enrique Molina. Lezama himself felt the impact of surrealism, on which the baroque construction is mounted or carved (this can be seen in poems such as “Un puente, un gran puente que no se le ve” [A bridge, a great bridge that cannot be seen]). However, Lezama himself takes care to differentiate between the procedures: what he does ‘is clearly not surrealism, because there is a metaphor that shifts, not achieved directly by the sudden clash of two metaphors’. Translational metaphor makes it impossible to stop the incessant shifting of meaning, like a mobile module.
Néstor Perlongher
◾️
Thus, with these options, with these soliloquies, with these atrocious thoughts of Posterity and Mortality, with these doubts, the writer carries on. This word gives the exact measure of the situation of estrangement in which Lezama found himself: on the one hand, he was doing the work, on the other, he was stumbling with his choices: some days he was a genius, others a ‘raté’; at times he preferred to be a poet rather than a novelist or vice versa; at others, he rejected both to remain a brilliant conversationalist. As if Possibility were a precipice, we see him forcing himself to throw his body first to one side, then to the other, in order to maintain his balance: between what is written and what is thought of what is written (in terms of his probable or improbable resonance as a writer), this unstable balance is inserted.
Virgilio Piñera
◾️
In the 1970s, José Lezama Lima wrote about the loss of a book of wisdom in his novel Oppiano Licario. A few years earlier, he had meditated on emptiness in his essays, pointing to the imaginary Chinese era of inspiring emptiness and the constants of Cuban culture, those shreds, tears, and gaps to be chronicled. The emptiness that a lost book seeks to denote is the emptiness of our expression, of our history. But it is also ontological emptiness, depopulated in being: we would have to read Lezama’s last poems, where the figures of Tokonoma and El Esperado appear. The Tokonoma is a point, a corner, a pinch of nothingness to symbolise emptiness in the house… The Esperado, which gains its paradigm from desire as a Tarot figure, a Chinese charade creature, an alchemical emblem, a Renaissance allegory… The lost book, the Esperado, the Tokonoma, are figurations for emptiness.
Two years before the publication of Oppiano Licario, in 1975, Eliseo Diego also recounts the loss of a book that combines wisdom and the essence of a nation. Rather than marking the precedence of one writer over another, rather than getting into chronological quibbles, I wanted to emphasise their strict parallelism. Two books and their similar fates allude to emptiness. With both lost (and this is more evident in the example of Eliseo Diego), we are left without memory of the island, without its most secret meanings. We do not know — to quote José Lezama Lima again — what the Cuban essence might be.
Antonio José Ponte
◾️
Suggesting the reading of Paradiso and its unfinished sequel Oppiano Licario as a parable of the Delphic Course, as an initiatory novel, seems essential for a full internalisation of the ‘classes’ that Lezama taught to a small group of privileged people of my generation. And of course, his narrative monument is much more than a story of someone who is just starting out, like Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, but there we can find, better than in any of our testimonies, the magic of the Course, its carefree combinations simultaneously clearing away and sowing ignorance and desires. There we find everything from Cuban universality to his communicative fervour, nothing ‘obscure’ or ‘cryptic’ for those of us who felt the exact stimulus, the difficulty as a welcome challenge. In his novel, the mixture of cultures, the unprejudiced combination of references and quotations, set the tone for what those ‘classes’ were like, without classrooms or semesters, without a homogeneous programme and without distancing from magister. The protean nature of the Course seems to come and go from the novel, as if they were rehearsing each other, like a firefly fluttering around each of the heteronyms, as if he were splitting himself between us and the characters in order to better recognise himself.
José Prats Sariol
◾️
I do not count myself among those who consider Paradiso: a) ‘a treatise, a manual or an apology for homosexuality’, in the manner of Gide’s famous Corydon, which you quote, b) ‘a strictly erotic product, a covert sodomite manifesto’. Nor do I support those who believe that c) ‘the militant defence of homosexuality constitutes the primary subject matter of Paradiso or is the key element in understanding the psychological and moral assumptions that motivated the author to write it’. My position on the novel is different: I believe it is a complex work, a linguistic creation of the first order (from this point of view, I discussed it in Mundo Nuevo with Sarduy, in an interview that you may have read in No. 2, August 1966), a novel in which there is everything.
But I also believe that the frankly homosexual aspect of the book is something that cannot be ignored in a general review such as the one you wrote for Amaru. I also believe that you are mistaken regarding the number and importance of the episodes or dialogues about homosexuality contained in the novel.
Emir Rodríguez Monegal
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Here Lezama was reacting against the Afro-Cubanism of the previous generation, that of Guillén, Ballagas, Acosta, Guirao, Tallet and Carpentier, and that is why his allusion to the “toques” was not harmless. As Juan Ramón Jiménez warned, the young Catholic poet, with his thesis of an ‘insular sensibility,’ was attempting to create the ‘reverse of a mestizo expression,’ since he considered the latter to be an ‘artistic eclecticism that can never exist.’ Although I have the impression that in the 1950s Lezama would abandon or, at least, attenuate his insular teleologism, until the end of the 1940s, this will be the symbolic matrix of a mythical reconstitution of Cuban culture, from its Hispanic-Creole-Catholic roots, which sought to compete with Afro-Cubanism, whose postulation was embodied not only by the poets of the Avance generation, but also by intellectuals and anthropologists such as Fernando Ortiz and Lydia Cabrera. Juan Ramón Jiménez understood, better than any Cuban, the limitations of both cultural ontologies, that of insularism and that of mestizaje, which were vying for intellectual dominance on the island: “The two theses stir up a different kind of pride, a dissociative solution based on dissimilarity and exclusion. The thesis of insular sensibility goes against continental sensibility, and that of mestizo expression goes against the expression of universal values and anxieties.”
But what I want to emphasise here is the different ways in which both quests confronted the anxiety of myth. For the early Lezama and some writers of Orígenes, unlike the poets of the 19th century, that ‘missing myth’ was not so much one of “origin” as of ‘destiny,’ since after the foundational work of Varela, Heredia, Luz, Martí… the recognition of that legacy and its historical impetus became imperative. Hence those disturbing words from the Coloquio: we are ‘forcibly bound by water borders to a teleology, to place ourselves on the trail of our only telos.’ It is precisely this ‘principle of futurity,’ whose virtual or utopian nature can shift between multiple reifications, that links the teleological thesis of the young Lezama with the formulas of authoritarian nationalism, whether right-wing or left-wing, that is, fascist or communist. But always in contrast to José Lezama Lima, and perhaps with even more reason, one can subscribe to Mario Vargas Llosa’s final words on Arguedas’ ‘archaic utopia’: his myths belong to Poetry and not to History, although the author of Paradiso never ignored, or suspected, the secret filtrations between the two.
Rafael Rojas
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The greatness of this book lies in its openness to the reader’s gaze, in its revelation that man can come to see his own history in this other way, in this dazzling manner and without sterile conceptualisms more or less tinged with ethics or equally insufficient aestheticisms. Elsewhere, we point out that as we read, the darkness that pervades the classic works of poetry becomes denser, while the clarity offered to us in the baroque pages that critics have described with the impoverishing terms of inaccessibility and obscurity or hermeticism, or other similar terms, becomes more diaphanous, as can be seen,
for example, in the opposition between Garcilaso and Góngora or, in Cuba, between Diego and Lezama. Without going into detail about this issue, let us say that Dador dazzles precisely because of the overabundance of perceptions and the formidable fabric with which the hallucinatory cosmos of events is integrated. This clarity has nothing to do with the sharpness of the fabulist or thematic meaning of the texts, written with the intention of discovering another dynamic of happening that is not that of the pure, social or intimate lyric poet, in whose books a personal history with explicit references to the drama of the creator can be appreciated. Although moving within the sphere of the concerns of the greatest Western poets and the most important cultures of Eastern sensibility, Lezama distinguishes himself by the sudden illumination of associations, unrelated to any historical or personal causality.
Enrique Saínz
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The fact that we have had men of sublime impulse such as José Martí and José Lezama Lima, who have wanted to act on the level of History or Imagination, infusing Cuba with an almost infinite potential, places them in an uncomfortable situation with respect to almost all the men of their country and with respect to themselves. Either these men are the most pronounced expression of the country’s “delirious” lineage, or they are simply its exception, which gives them no advantage whatsoever but rather a stigma of strangeness, as if they were inhabitants of another world rather than inhabitants of the island.
In a country of parrots and mute dogs, such men may take the prize, or they may appear ridiculous. These men have certainly contributed to “distorting” our history; they have thrown a cloth over it, as one throws a cloth over busts or the dead, wanting to “build” a History: the first (Martí), “acting and writing”, and the second (Lezama), only “writing”, although in the “poietic” way in which Lezama understood writing, as an extension of the body.
Martí, with his pedagogical and redemptive zeal, placed us at a crossroads, in a problem of “interpretation” that we are still paying for, as if he had written the outline of an opera that we will all, in turn, interpret in our own way, even though the circumstances of reality have changed. Lezama, an obscure pedagogue through poetry, invented ‘imaginary eras’ and placed us in one of them, unfortunately, the final one: the Revolution embodying the last imago of his Poetic System, as he called his “method” or ‘methodical intuition.’
Rolando Sánchez Mejías
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Lezama Lima: ‘The poet may be the indifferent apprentice, the faithful and tireless craftsman of all things, but in poetry he must show us a possessed earth, a cosmos governed by the unreal-real.’
He adds: ‘That triumph of poetry over repeated experiences, or over quantitative culture; that triumph over the most elusive aspect of the subject. That imposition with unity, form and development, where things and their reflections end and begin, the only excursion of life into the unknown, or into the wildest joy.’
The poem, in effect, must ‘show us a possessed land’. Not a purely imaginary land, but a reconstructed territory. Poets of pure imagination tire us, overwhelm us. We do not possess the unlimited. We possess, instead, the land of memory because one day it also possessed us.
And this other land, moreover, is not made solely of the humus of the known; the act of memory also penetrates the unknown. Hence its purity and intensity.
It is not, then, only the land of memory. The image participates in I don’t know what corrected, controlled idealism, tied to the real basis. Lezama is right: it is a cosmos “governed by the unreal-real” – in an exact proportion, I would add; in an exact economy of the spirit.
Descent to earth. She also comes in search of us.
Andrés Sánchez Robayna
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I have always been surprised by the fascination that José Lezama Lima’s work exerts on his readers, including myself. To my knowledge, the history of this reception has never been written, but when it is, it will be seen how it occurred precisely under that sign. The fascination begins, in the first instance, with the cryptic poems that Lezama wrote between the 1930s and 1950s, which he published successively in his Havana magazines. I would venture to say that the fascination was not only due to the hermeticism and immense difficulty of those poems, but also to the spirit of a minor and exclusive elite that prevailed in his groups: a handful of poets and artists, some of them homosexual, who wasted their time talking in cafés or in their homes and publishing small magazines that very few people read. A rearguard that wanted to be at the forefront in the midst of an indifferent and sometimes hostile environment. This anomaly was embodied in the ‘Etruscan of Old Havana’ himself, an obese, asthmatic poet who worked in a prison and lived with his mother in a Havana neighbourhood of dubious reputation.
Thus, before being read or studied, Lezama was already the subject of mythology among Cubans and of admiration among poets and writers of the stature of Juan Ramón Jiménez, Jorge Guillén, Julio Cortázar, and Octavio Paz.
Enrico Mario Santí
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Don Quixote defines and establishes a syntax; Paradiso, a language. A Cuban ‘parlé’ whose set of verbal deformations, the diminutive, or rather the alternation between diminutive and augmentative, draws the primary networks. It is no coincidence that Lezama himself observed this phenomenon in gaucho poetry as an index of American expression: his findings are augmentative, involving expansion, “fandangazo”; diminutive, involving a graceful contraction, “hizo sonar cueritos”. One could trace, as in a tabular system, the ending curves of each page of Lezama’s work, its rhythm of contractions and dilations, almost always humorous, and whose antecedents can be found in the poems of Venturas criollas.
From the Cuban language, Lezama takes the formal distortion of endings, but also the conceptual distortion of proper names; nicknames are, in Cuba, the most cherished and treacherous custom. The people systematically nickname everything that represents them with sardonic accuracy; the nickname breaks with any intention of seriousness and grandiloquence, the hypertrophied name cracks every apparatus, mocks pomp, and throws reality into ‘choteo’ (mockery).
Severo Sarduy
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16 December 1967.
Visit to Lezama. Pepe Caballero arrives. The house is a motley and strange collection of objects, portraits (the father and mother in a visible, dominant position), paintings and books. Lezama is enormous, heavy, like a great idol. His face is young.
He immediately begins to talk about Cuba: Cuba below sea level (the Viñales Valley); Cuba where land and sea are equal (Havana-Matanzas-Varadero); Cuba of the definitive triumph of the land (Oriente, Santiago). The latter is the restless Cuba, the Cuba of high land and deep sea (there is in fact a basin, whose name I have not retained, which is one of the great oceanic abysses in the world). Cubans do not like to travel; they are held back by their light (I remember Dador‘s ‘Hymn to Our Light’). They regret a certain progressive disconnection from Spain. Lezama’s roots are Creole.
He talks about the Revolution, about Cuba’s transition from abundance to poverty. He speaks with some irony about communism and dialectics, but acknowledges that there was a genuine revolutionary event in Cuba: the uprising of the people. Like in the Commune, he says, or the Dos de Mayo. He says it as if an uprising of that nature left no other option. But he is against the cliché of ‘a smiling revolution’. There has been and there is suffering, deprivation, hunger. This country, he says, needs dialogue, an open dialogue, where no one is forced to be a ‘supporter’ in advance. We talked about Cuba’s current influence, about what it means for us, from the outside, to be Cuban today. He acknowledges this: he says that, from within, he cannot avoid criticism. He reiterates that it is necessary to maintain the position of the intellectual as a creator of values. He insists on the need for dialogue: he does not believe that the [Havana Cultural] Congress is the possibility for dialogue that Cuba needs. He reluctantly mentions Sartre and his “more or less dialectic”.
The topic of concentration camps and some people who have passed away comes up in the conversation. He talks about Lydia Cabrera. (A woman from the 18th century. He compares her to Newton’s translator, who later fell in love with Voltaire.) He evokes the passing of Juan Ramón Jiménez and Cernuda. He talks about María.
I touch on the subject of the poetic system. He is particularly interested in this; he considers it a central part of his work and wants to merge it with the novel (‘that gallop without spurs’) in Inferno.
I agree to come back. On Tuesday and Friday afternoons, he is busy with his asthma vaccine. We leave.
José Ángel Valente
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I say American, but perhaps it would have been preferable to say Cuban. Because Lezama Lima is an overwhelmingly ‘tropical’ writer, a prose writer who has taken that verbal excess, that garrulousness of which Latin American writers have been so accused, to a kind of apotheosis, to such an extreme climax that at that point, the defect has changed in nature and become a virtue. Not always, of course. There are many pages in Paradiso in which the convolutedness, the oceanic accumulation of adjectives and adverbs, the succession of parasitic phrases, the abuse of similes, parentheses, the overloading and embellishment and the zigzagging progression, the comings and goings of language are irresistible and discourage the reader. But despite this, when one finishes the book, these excesses are buried by the perplexed admiration that this expedition through the Paradiso conceived by a great creator and proposed to his contemporaries as a territory of infinite pleasures leaves in the reader.
Mario Vargas Llosa
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Lezama, although he is also a poet, is not essentially the poet who withdraws to do his work. There was always in him a vocation as a builder, a founder, an appetite for choral harmony. Thus, through whispers, obscure divinations and inexplicable encounters, in a totally magical way, a mysterious family of friends formed around him, with its inevitable fringe of successive and relieved enemies, who have made him the centre of Cuban poetic life for the last twenty years.
But this phenomenon, which could be interpreted as a generational sign, must be complemented by two other observations: first, that there is much more difference between the members of this group than between those of the previous generation; second, that while his workshop spans from Lezama, born in 1910, to Lorenzo García Vega, born in 1926, even more recent poets have felt at ease in Lezama’s space, momentum and masterful company. This indicates that, to the extent that the pettiness of the milieu allows, an attempt has been made to overcome chronological fatalities in order to integrate what Lezama himself has called “a state of poetic concurrence”, where, without a prior programme or aesthetic, within the most vivid individual freedom, the common granary is enriched and unknown lands are glimpsed.
Cintio Vitier
