Seventy years have passed since the publication of Salterio y lamentación (Psalter and lamentation), Pablo Armando Fernández’s inaugural book of poems, born in the central Delicias, in the former province of Oriente, on March 2nd, 1929, and died in Havana on November 3rd, 2021, author whose work constitutes one of the most significant moments of Cuban lyric poetry of the second half of the 20th century. He was a member of the called the “Generation of the Fifties” – in correspondence with the dates in the first books of poets as relevant as Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Fayad Jamal, Heberto Padilla, César López, Manuel Díaz Martínez, among others, were also in his domain the novel, short stories and memorial prose.
gentle botany of an unforgettable poet
As can be seen from his initial texts -and throughout all his books-, the poet was a persevering observer of the natural environment, widely all his books, widely collected in his work. From the notebook that is on its anniversary, through Toda la poesía (Ediciones R, Havana, 1962), to the texts of splendid maturity that cover a good part of his poetics between 1963 and 1983, gathered in (Field of love and battle) Campo de amor y de batalla (Editorial Letras Cubanas, Havana, 1984), and without leaving aside the vigorous works that are prolonged in titles such as Reinos de la Aurora (Jorge Guillen Foundation, Valladolid, 2001) or il dilettoso monte (Ediciones Holguin), the writer left evidence of that other vocation that was part of his life: that of botanist.
gentle botany of an unforgettable poet
A very meticulous connoisseur of flowers and trees, foliage and vegetation, especially those of Cuba and its most vegetation, and especially those of Cuba and its most different places, the writer was always the writer was always seduced by everything that surrounded such areas, a matter also present in his predilections for the painting of great Cuban masters who, in one way or another, were predilections for the paintings of great Cuban masters who, have made their personal readings of the primitive nature of the island and its infinite trails. Such conditions are not only articulated as a support to exalt explorations and affinities, but also express the visions he kept in his most predilection preserves, fixed in the paths of his writing: the reservoirs of learning, family and love.
gentle botany of an unforgettable poet
“Pablo Armando’s kind botany” -he told me on one occasion during an interview- his friend Heberto Padilla called Heberto Padilla to the devotion he felt for nature and for plants in their most varied demarcations: a search of the landscape as an affective reminder, spiritual food, arborescence to describe or emphasize the limits of time in its passage, but also the sum of affections and traces that invite to expansion in the depths of his writing. Poppies, crocuses, ferns, hyacinths, pomegranates… The inventory of nature that can be found in his books is expanded in luminosities and shadows, in tune with the representations of memory.
gentle botany of an unforgettable poet
The elegiac character that marks a large part of Pablo Armando’s poetry -almost an invisible thread that guides the steps of a reading as meticulous as it is delightful Pablo Armando’s poetry, both in the texts of prompt and solicitous vivacity, as well as in those that are dilated in the constraints of remembrances as dissimilar as vehement -the certainties of love, the passing of the years, the hints of pain, the recounting of the past-, opens not few times with the “kind botany” pointed out by the author of Infancia de William Blake as its best presentation. Such is the case of the serene, sorrowful and luminous Suite for Maruja -included in Campo de amor y de batalla-, which already in the initial verses has in the flora its support:
“Spring, you say, and I choose honeysuckles,
geraniums and begonias.
You return home with wet feet,
your skirt full of rough guisasos.
verbenas without scent in your hair
and between your hands, rosemary and hollyhocks”.
gentle botany of an unforgettable poet
In his novel Los niños se despiden, which won the Casa de las Américas Prize in 1968, nature and its most expansive power have an exceptional vigor, which expands in visions of calm and acquiescent eroticism, with a prose that is a sort of facsimile, in many parts, of the Cantar de los Cantares (Song of Songs), as a collateral reading of the famous biblical text: “And his scent was intoxicating, and when he touched her forehead, he awoke in her the memory of the ancient mountain of precious woods: “And the scent was intoxicating, and when he touched her forehead he awoke in her the memory of the ancient mountain of precious woods, and she was lying on a bed of fragrant leaves as the dew, and her flesh was inside clean and smooth as the flesh of the anon, and outside polished and luminous as the crystal of the beads…”.
gentle botany of an unforgettable poet
Other examples can be found in his novel (Another roll of the dice) Otro golpe de dados (Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1993), a family saga set in the 18th century, around the establishment of French coffee settlers in the mountains adjacent to Santiago de Cuba. The novelist’s gaze confirms this without forgetting his condition as a poet: “The resedas were in bloom. Their clusters of varied colors challenged the flowers of the coffee trees that, from the copious and round branches, made ostentation of their whiteness. And it was a feast to see the amber and gold, the gualda and jalde and all the shades of green and yellow in oranges, grapefruit, grapefruit, tangerines and lemons. And it was a feast for the nose. I walked slowly in the shade of the dense fronds of mango trees…”.
gentle botany of an unforgettable poet
Twenty years ago, in an interview included as an epilogue in Lo sé de cierto porque lo tengo visto (I know this for a fact because I have seen it), an anthology of his poems that I had the satisfaction of writing for Plaza Mayor Publishing House in Puerto Rico, Pablo Armando Fernandez admitted to me something that is essential in relation to that gaze of his: “The infinite search for the Cuban always led me to the landscape”. On that search, precisely, could be placed the words of Jose Lezama Lima when he warned, about the author, that “his poetry has something of the yagruma tree with moon, but then wakes up in the mother of the great American river”. In that current nests the gentle botanical breath of an unforgettable poet.
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