Ernesto Cardenal transcended to be the contemporary poet of this global village that we call the world

Ernesto Cardenal or the stone in the cosmos. Born in Granada (1925), he is the most important living poet of our planet. Its importance should not be measured solely by its international renown.

His name, badociated with his poetry, tells us that they are able to fill the small space of the Museum of History and Culture of Diriamba, the Yankee Stadium in New York or the Olympic Stadium Luznhiki in Moscow Russia.

Cardinal is transcended to be the contemporary poet of this global village that we call the world. The writing (in its two variants verset and prose), the Christian ethic and the image of Cardinal, became the main satisfactory literary aesthetic because of its high quality, for people like us, who lived in a period dreadful uncertainty, terrible crisis and little hope.

Cardinal is contemporary of two extraordinary poets: Ernesto Mejía Sánchez and Carlos Martínez Rivas. After generations of Nicaraguan writers, we have always had great difficulty in elucidating who is the "greatest" of the three.

Read: Ernesto Cardenal receives the letter of Pope Francisco who exonerates him from the "canonical censorship"

Ernesto Cardenal. Image taken by the filmmaker Paolo di Paolis in a gazebo in the countryside in the Marche, Italy. THE PRESS / Courtesy

To get out of this mess, personally, I have about 10 years to mature the following hypothesis:

Ernesto Mejía Sánchez (Masaya 1923) is the highest degree of perfection of a paradigmatic and canonical writing that participates in a prodigious balance between poetics and rhetoric;

Carlos Martínez Rivas (Guatemala, 1924) is the renunciation of perfection with a perfect knowledge of the poetic and rhetorical canon, to achieve a singular poetry with aesthetic imperfection by the poetic option;

Ernesto Cardenal (Grenada, 1925) is the total revolution of Spanish language poetry and a transcendental contribution to universal poetry, in the 20th century and into the 21st century, to create the current extiristist and achieve an unprecedented result. world-wide, to create the mystic-scientific poetry of the Cosmic Canticle and other more recent works.

Read also: Ernesto Cardenal: – God sleep with me in the hammock

The quality of the transformation of poetry in the Spanish language realized by the work of Cardenal was preceded only by the contributions of Garcilaso de la Vega, who incorporated in the 16th century the Italian poetic forms and our Rubén Darío which at the end of the nineteenth century was appropriate for the Spanish of those of French origin.

In contemporary times, Cardenal transformed poetry into the Spanish language by incorporating into the twentieth century a powerful side of American poetry (EzraPound, William Carlos Williams, Archibald McLeish) and the simplest and wisest tradition of universal poetry. , which in the Bible and in the epic of Homer. This poetry which, thanks to José Coronel Urtecho and to Father Cardenal himself, is today known as the externalism and which is nowadays the most vigorous flow of poetry of the Spanish language. contemporary

The famous Cuban poet and essayist Roberto Fernández Retamar is categorical when he states: "In the twentieth century, Spanish-language poetry began and ended with two Nicaraguans: Rubén Darío from one side and Ernesto Cardenal of the other ".

This affirmation begins by considering the transcendental weight that Cardinal's work has in the poetry of our language and in the universal.

On his thought contained in his work Love life – A candle of Christian mysticism, his teacher Thomas Merton, tells us: "Ernesto Cardenal's lucid and Franciscan simplicity" shows us the world not as we see it with our fear and mistrust, but as though it were not the same. he is really. Because love is not a dream: love is the fundamental law of creatures that have been created, free to give themselves, free to participate in the infinite abundance of life which God fills us with. Love is the heart and true center of the creative dynamism we call life. Love is life itself in its state of maturity and perfection. "

You can read: Psalm 1, by Ernesto Cardenal

Happy man who does not follow Party slogans, does not attend his rallies and does not sit down at the table with the gangsters or with the war council generals.

The writer and literary critic Anastasio Lovo, along with the poet Ernesto Cardenal, received the Reina Sofía Prize for Ibero-American Poetry (2012). THE PRESS / Courtesy

And about Cosmic Song The magnificent and dazzling work of Cardinal, Nicaraguan writer and scholar Julio Valle Castillo, says: "The poetic proposal, the ambition and the experimentalism of Cosmic Song they place it at the center of the tradition of modern poetry and, within this tradition, against the current. Close and open Closing and inauguration. (…) closes the poetic trend known as externalism and opens, opens the poetry of the twenty-first century, the poetry of the future (…) The scientific rather than the astral poetry , stellar or cosmic. Poetry which, without reducing emotion and imagination, is capable of badimilating and expressing the most veridical and verifiable scientific scientist. There is no in the Cosmic Song a single scientific postulate, a formula that is not demonstrable. "

Read also: "I really hate time," said poet Ernesto Cardenal on the occasion of his 93rd birthday

Cardinal's life and work have been important to many people around the world. Personally, I remember walking with Father Cardenal in October 2006, in Fermo Square, in the province of Ascoli Piceno, Italy, with Reverend Tomás Téllez, Mauricio Governatori, the famous painter and Italian muralist Paolo di Paolis, who was filming … When a Nona, an Italian grandmother with her 70 years well turned, with her handkerchief tied to her hair, detached herself from one of the high sidewalks that surround the square of gold near the stones and the light of autumn and are determined to find our group shouting: "Miracle! Miracle! Miracle! "

We were surprised, as the Nona approached us to kiss Ernesto saying: "All my life is expected for this moment, to have the chance to know it.I am a person who loves Nicaragua, the revolution and you have been a guide for me.All my life, I was waiting at the to know and God has today fulfilled my wish, Grazie, Grazie, they will not pbad, they will not pbad. "

Cardinal's work and life are built from a mystical vision, a conceptual foundation, and a historical praxis, which we could state in the following statement: "God is love and revolution. dialectical triad, three elements that have marked the pbadage through the earth and the universe of Cardinal.In every act of the cardinal called by God, there is love, its transformative (revolutionary) strength and its transcendence cosmic (divine).

In the plane of physical waves, so that we have a possible image of Cardinal's poetic work, I like to see it as a stone falling into a pond and producing the usual concentric circles:

1. First circle: The uninhabited city. Circle that takes the most intimate of the loving soul of the poet, love in his Granada and the Great Lake.

1. Second circle: Proclamation of the conqueror, The doubtful straitetc. They constitute the circle of appropriation of the geographical space of Nicaragua.

1. Third circle: Epigrams, Zero Hour, GethsemaniKy, Psalms, Prayer for Marilyn Monroethey signify the extension of love to national history, to the biblical dimension of history and contemporary times.

1. Fourth circle: Tribute to the Indians of America / UFOs in Goldit is the great circle that includes our continent, America which is AbyaYala. Cardinal endorses the voice of the indigenous people of America, appropriates the immense space of America (North-Central-Caribbean and South) and propels his poetry – the poetry of the people – to roots of the cosmogonies of our ancestors.

1. Fifth circle: National Song, Oracle on Managua, Victory Flightsetc. it is the circle of the Revolution in his country of origin not bound to the national borders but submerged by this same poetry and by a transcendental vision of this one.

1. Sixth concentric circle: The stone falls into the pond of the cosmos to generate in the universe more music from the poor spheres in the poetic forms of the Cosmic Song.

Concentric circles of a grain of mustard or a fish scale, which falls eternally in the pool of the cosmos. Ictius in the cosmos.

The reading of Ernesto's poetic work is inexhaustible. But I believe that we will not be deceived if we perceive and conceive Cardinal's work as a work of Christian love towards our neighbor, towards nature, towards art and towards the cosmos.

The writing of Cardinal is a fundamental part of the aesthetic, political, philosophical and scientific consciousness of the same universe.