Goodbye to a great poet and essayist | The death of Ro …

The accent of Roberto Fernández Retamar softens "I do not know what pain of the soul", could we say by paraphrasing some verses included in Una salvo de porvenir, an essential anthology of his poetry published by Colihue in 2012. The young Retamar wrote "El otro", dated January 1, 1959, the day of the triumph of the Cuban revolution. "We, the survivors, / Who do we need to survive? / Who died in the ergastula, / Who got the bullet from mine / The for me, in his heart? / On what death am I alive / His Bones that stay in mine, / The eyes that tore, seeing / Through the look on my face, / and the hand that is not his hand, / This n & n Is not already mine either, / Writing broken words / Where it is not, in survival? "When he presented the book in Buenos Aires, he pieced together how he was lived this historic moment. "I left and I went up in what they call collective and over there guagua, to the consternation of the Argentines, who, when they learn that we are going to take a bus, create a real fear", joked the poet. And in the bus, I felt the poem arrive. I can not sit down to write: the poems arrive or do not arrive. I had a paper in my pocket and wrote "The Other". I was thinking of the enormous joy that almost all Cubans and those who made this triumph could be and were no longer with us. "

Retamar, who died Saturday in Havana at the age of 89, was one of the most prominent intellectuals in Latin American literature for Calibán's collection of essays. Notes on the culture of our America (1971). He had headed the House of the Americas since 1986 and the magazine of the same cultural institution (since 1965), was a member of the Cuban Academy of Language and corresponding member of the Royal Spanish Academy. In his modest house at El Vedado he had a garden planted with many plants and flowers at the entrance; two dogs, Dolly and Homer; and in life several images. The books were scattered on shelves, on tables and in a strange chair.

Author of the hymn Elégie – the first book of poetry that he published in 1950 – Vuelta de la antigua esperanza (1959), From the same hand (1962), Historia antigua (1964), Que verremos arder (1970) and Juana and other personal poems (1981), among others, he met Borges in Buenos Aires in 1985, when he proposed to publish an anthology in Cuba. "At that moment, I invited him to come to Cuba." If I go to Cuba, they will give me a distinction and I do not want to talk about Cuba because I am against the Communists impartially, that I they are Chinese, Russians, Cubans, anywhere, "he said," I told him: "Borges, I wrote some difficult things about you, but not harsher ones. than the ones you wrote on Darío and Lugones ", remembers the author of Martí's Reading Books and For a Theory of Latin American Literature, received the National Prize for Literature (1989), the most important prize of its kind on the island, the National Prize for Social Science (2012) and the José Martí Prize of Unesco (2019), among other distinctions.