Selected Writings (Dario, Ruben) (46 page)

Oh, Cuba! You are very beautiful, most certainly, and great and glorious service is done you by your sons who struggle because they wish to see you free. And bravo, too, to that Spaniard who will not yield peace because he fears to lose you, Cuba admirable and rich and a thousand times blessed by my tongue. But the blood of Martí did not belong to you—it belonged to an entire race, an entire continent; it belonged to a spirited generation of youth that lost in him perhaps the foremost of its teachers. He belonged to the future!

When Cuba shed its blood in the first war, the war of Céspedes, when the efforts stemming from a desire for freedom bore no fruit but death and fire and butchery, much of the Cuban intelligentsia left the country. Many of the best went into exile—disciples of José de la Luz, poets, philosophers, educators. That exile is still going on for some of those who have not left their mortal remains in a foreign land, or have not now returned to the jungle. José Joaquín Palma, who left when he was the age of Lohengrin, with a blond beard like his, and more elegant than the swan of his poetry, after traveling from republic to republic, cooing his
décimas
“to the solitary star,” saw snow invade that golden beard, though he always longed to return to that Bayamo from whence he had sallied out into the field to fight after burning down his house. Tomás Estrada Palma, cousin to the poet, an upright, discreet man, filled with intelligence, and today elected president by the revolutionaries, made a living as a school teacher in distant Honduras. Antonio Zambrana, an orator of well-deserved fame in the United States, was about to go off to the Spanish Cortes,
⁵¹
where he would have done honor to his Americans, when he took refuge in Costa Rica, and there opened his law office. Eizaguirre went to Guatemala; the poet Sellén, the celebrated translator of Heine, and his brother, also a poet, went to New York, where they made calendars for the Lamman and Kemp pill company, if rumors are to be believed. Martí, the great Martí, wandered from country to country, here in sadness, there in abominable penny-pinching due to a lack of income on foreign soil; now triumphing, because after all, the fighting spirit will always overcome misfortune, now suffering the consequences of his antagonism to human stupidity—newspaperman, professor, orator, his body wasting away and his soul bleeding to death, squandering the riches of his soul in places that would never know the value of his high intelligence (although he would also be assailed by the praise of the ignorant). He did derive, on the other hand, great pleasure from the understanding of his flight by the rare souls who knew him profoundly, from the abhorrence of the fools, from the reception given him by the
élite
of the Latin American press in Buenos Aires and Mexico for his correspondence and articles.

He wandered, then, from country to country, and at last, after remaining some time in Central America, he settled in New York.

There, in that cyclopean city, did that noble gentleman of thought finally land, and he worked and struggled there more than ever. Discouraged—he, so great and so strong, my God!—discouraged in his dreams of Art, he riveted into his brain, with three strong iron rivets, the image of his solitary star and, allowing things their due time, began to forge arms for war, using words for a hammer and ideas for a furnace. Patience, he had; he waited and watched, as though for some vague fata morgana, for his dreamt-of
Cuba libre.
He went from house to house, working in the many households of Cubans living in New York. He did not disdain the humble man; that serene and indomitable hero, that fighter who could have spoken, like Elciis, for four days straight to powerful Oton, surrounded by kings, spoke to the humble man like a good older brother.

His labor grew from moment to moment, as though the sap of his energy drew fire from the fervor of that great city. And he would pay a visit to the Fifth Avenue doctor, the stock broker, the newspaperman, the executive, the cigar-roller, the black stevedore, all the New York Cubans, trying to keep the fire alive, trying to maintain the urge to war, struggling against more or less clear rivalries, yet loved and admired by all. He had to live, he had to work, and so there poured forth those cascades of writing, columns that went off to dailies in Mexico and Venezuela. There can be no doubt that this was the best time of José Martí’s life. It was now that he showed his intellectual personality most handsomely. In those miles-long epistles, if you except one or another rare branch without flower or fruit, you will find . . . diamonds like the Koh-i-noor.

It was there that one saw Martí the thinker, Martí the philosopher, Martí the painter, Martí the musician, Martí the poet (always). With incomparable magic, he portrayed the United States alive and palpitating, with its sun and its souls. That colossal “nation,” the “plains” of years gone by, was presented in his columns, at every posting from New York, in thick floods of ink. Bourget’s United States delight and amuse; Groussac’s United States make one think; Martí’s United States are a stupendous and enchanting diorama that one might almost say heighten the color of reality. My memory loses itself in that mountain of images, but I do recall a martial Grant and a heroic Sherman, handsomer and smarter than I have seen anywhere else; the arrival of heroes from the Pole; the Brooklyn Bridge, the
literary
bridge, but so like the bridge of iron; a herculean description of an agricultural fair, as vast as the Augean stables; flowering springs and summers—oh!—better than any natural season; Sioux Indians that spoke in Martí’s tongue; the Manitou that inspired in him snowfalls that made one truly cold; and a patriarchal, prestigious, lyrically august Walt Whitman long before the French learned through Sarrazin of that biblical author of
Leaves of Grass.

And when the famous Pan-American Congress came, his letters were quite simply a book. In those dispatches he spoke of the dangers of the Yankee, of the careful watch Latin America needed to keep on its older sister, and of the depth of the words with which an Argentine speaker countered the words of Monroe.

This was the Martí of nervous temperament, the thin Martí with lively, kindly eyes. But his soft and delicate word in familiar conversation changed when it stood at the podium, to take on violent, coppery, oratorical tones. He was an orator, and an orator of great influence. He inspired multitudes. His life was a combat. He was soft-spoken and extremely polite to the ladies; the Cuban
damas
of New York held him in just esteem and affection, and there was one society of females that took his name.

His culture was legendary, his honor intact and crystalline; any person who approached him, left him loving him.

And he was a poet, and he made verses.

Yes, that prose writer who, always faithful to classical Castalia, drank of its water every day, was unsatisfied with being “merely” classic, and so he communed with all things modern and savored his universal and polyglot knowledge, and in the course of things formed a manner most special and particular to himself, mixing in his style Saavedra Fajardo with Gautier, with Goncourt—with whomever you like, for it has a bit of everything—constantly employing English inversions, launching his fleet of metaphors, twisting his spirals of figures, painting now with Pre-Raphaelite minuteness the landscape’s tiniest leaves, now with broad strokes, or sudden touches, smears of the spatula, giving life to his figures. That strong huntsman made verses, and almost always small verses, simple verses—was there not a book of his by that title?—verses containing patriotic sadness, grief over love, rich with rhyme and harmonized always with great tact. A first, rare collection is dedicated to a son whom he adored and whom he lost forever: “Ismaelillo.”

The
Versos Sencillos
—
Simple Verses
—published in New York in a lovely little edition . . . contains true gems. There are other poems, and among the loveliest
“Los zapatitos de rosa,”
“The Little Pink Slippers.” I think that as Banville has employed the word “lyre” and Leconte de Lisle the word “black,” Martí has used “pink.” . . .

The children of the Americas were especially dear to the heart of Martí. There is a newspaper, unique of its kind, whose few editions were written especially for children. In one of them there is a portrait of San Martín, a masterpiece. There is also the collection called
Patria
and several works translated into English, but all that is the least of the literary
oeuvre
that will be read in the future.

And now, teacher and author and friend, forgive those who loved and admired you for bearing you some small ill-will for having gone off to expose, and lose, the treasure of your talent. The world will know soon enough who and what you were, for God’s justice is infinite, and to each man grants his due and legitimate glory. Still . . . Martínez Campos, who has ordered that your body be laid out for the public’s viewing, continues to read his two favorite authors: Cervantes and Ohnet. It may take Cuba some time to give you your due. The youth of the Americas, however, salutes you, and grieves your passing. Oh, Maestro, what have you done!

And it seems to me that in that voice of yours, kindly, warm, you are scolding me, you who adored La Patria until the death of that luminous and terrible idol, and you are speaking to me of the dream in which you saw the heroes—the hands of stone, the eyes of stone, the lips of stone, the beards of stone, the sword of stone. . . .

And then your voice repeats the poem’s vow:

On Poetry and the Poet

AN EXCERPT FROM “FROM A BOOK OF INTIMATE PAGES”

In my opinion, while on one side a poet leans toward nature, and in that he approaches the estate of the plastic artist, on the other side he is of the race of priests, and in that he rises toward the divine. Ergo, the symbol, which manifests an idea with the enchantment of form and is animated by a vague yet powerful mystery. To draw that rare spirit of the poet into the agitations that stir the common race of men is to cause him to trip on his own wings. That is the case of Baudelaire’s “Albatross”:

53. Though this translation is unattributed, it can be found at
www.shanegaron.com/Capra7/ArtStudio_htmls/poets_writers/baudelaire/34.html
.

AN EXCERPT FROM “THE LITERARY LIFE”

There are few, very few athletes of thought who in the midst of the rude battles of every day continue to worship the Muses and their arts. Most men, disillusioned by this age of positivism and scepticism, have closed themselves up into a despairing muteness that ill befits their artistic nature. . . .

A sad and disappointing fate is art’s among us!

Ask booksellers how many editions they have published and how many copies they have sold of great poetry, of books of travel, of novels—ask them, and the reply will be terribly mortifying to your spirit! . . .

It is not enough to have an Atheneum and an Academy; there must be what one might call an
artistic audience,
an audience that loves science, poetry, art, the beautiful things of the spirit, an audience that reads the verses of our conscientious historians, the scientific texts of our men of thought.

It is truly painful that in a city of six hundred thousand inhabitants like Buenos Aires, there are not a hundred readers of the nation’s books.

Here, aside from the gaucho poems of Estanislao del Campo, José Hern
á
ndez, and Hilario Ascasubi and the detective stories of Eduardo Gutiérrez—which are widespread in our pampas—the only works that have had the honor of more than a single edition are the histories of San Martín and Belgrano written by General Mitre. . . .

It is time to concern ourselves with Argentine thought, because (as Luther said) “the prosperity of a country depends not on the abundance of its rents, nor the strength of its fortresses, nor the beauty of its public buildings; it consists in the number of its cultured citizens, in its men of education, enlightenment, and character. This is where one finds a nation’s true interest, its principal strength, its true power.”

What can one add to those heartfelt and vibrant words? . . .

THE 1001 NIGHTS

A lovely and glorious work has just been completed by Dr. J. C. Mardrus: the complete translation of the
Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night,
brought into French literally from the Arabic. It is a priceless gift that we Westerners cannot sufficiently give thanks for. The last volume will leave in dreaming souls an inevitable nostalgia. A spirit as rare as it is subtle has made this complaint: “
The Thousand Nights and a Night
is a loving epic of the globe from the moment of its creation down to our own days. The globe is an egg incubated, in turn, by Love and Night. Is it possible that humanity is no more than the accident of a daydream? So long as Love and Night fan us with their wings, the earth will continue, I dare believe, to turn. But behold, the morning comes . . . ay!, ay!, the East turns white . . . the East grows old! Who will rock our dream of people of the North?”