Saying the name of José Lezama Lima (Havana, December 19, 1910 – August 9, 1976) is equivalent to saying, with absolute propriety, the craft of the poet on a higher scale, and nothing better than his own definition in this regard: “The poet can be the blasé apprentice, the faithful or tireless craftsman of all things, but in his poetry he has to show us a possessed land, a cosmos governed by the unreal-real. That triumph of poetry over repeated experiences, or over quantitative culture, that triumph over the most inapprehensible of the subject”.
Such condition of poet, since his initial notebook Muerte de Narciso (Narciso’s death), published in 1937, is the guide of his vocation, and with it, of everything: books, his performance as founder and editor of the forty issues of “Orígenes”(9, published between 1944 and 1956 – “it was the best magazine of the language”, said the Nobel Prize for Literature Octavio Paz-, conferences, and -testimonies of his friends- even dialogues, occasional or formal “I would always like to have a magic time, to dedicate it to the pleasures of conversation”, he admitted to poet Armando Álvarez Bravo in a fascinating interview.
It is from that circumstance, precisely, in which his work as an essayist is deployed with plenitude of vision and style, which, in his case, constitutes one of the most enriching and challenging areas of the genre not only in Cuban literature, but in the area of language. Convergences of punctual certainty, penetrating gaze, seductive language, bold metaphors and avid curiosity, turn Lezama’s essayistic display into one of the most gratifying experiences, for a reader adept at such requests, in a turn that goes from the island to the world and vice versa.
This year there have been seventy of his first volume of essays, Analecta del Reloj, printed under the Orígenes seal, and as indicated in its colophon, “in the typographic workshops of the house Ucar, García y Cía., S.A., number fifteen, in the City of San Cristóbal de La Habana, Cuba”, which, in the words of the Spanish essayist José María Valverde—translator into our language of Ulysses, by Joyce, and Moby Dick, by Melville—, “is a book as delicious as it is strange.” (…) “a book that no one writes, and that, tired of known clarity, finds its unique moment to hypnotize us with its strange dialect.”
It is worth remembering that there are four books of essays that Lezama published, an exceptional quartet: in addition to the aforementioned, The American Expression (1957), Treatises in Havana (1958), and The Bewitched Quantity (1970). Made up of works of varied benefit – from research on Cuban literature, and the world of the baroque in Latin America, circumstantial texts about writers and works, approaches to figures of the fine arts, investigations into poetry and its most diverse lines, to name a few. feasible routes—it is an extremely fertile area for learning and enjoyment.
“My only carriage is the imagination, but not just: mine has eyes of a lynx,” the poet once said, and from the beginning you can distinguish the powerful vision of such an illustrious feline: Analecta del Reloj. When alluding to the lessons of Confucius, the famous Chinese thinker of antiquity – the “Analectas”, sections associated by themes and outside of any private order, completely casual and without any pattern of correspondence between them –, the essayist places first his adherence to the strictly unforeseen, to display an inventory of affections, examinations and recreations.
The anniversary book has the great fortune of including four of the capital essays written by Lezama: The Secret of Garcilaso, Julián del Casal, Las Imagenes Possibles and Sierpe de Don Luis de Góngora; and it would not be risky to say that there you can see the four cardinal points of the poet who sails gracefully through the waters of the essay; Thus, Garcilaso or the crucible of the poem in its highest definition; Casal or the destiny of the poet in his labyrinth; the potential images or the displacement of the fertilizing word; and Góngora or the broader perspective of the poem and its essence.
A full stop in Analecta del Reloj is the Colloquium with Juan Ramón Jiménez, the fabulous conversation between the Andalusian poet, passing through Havana in 1937, and the outstanding Creole disciple. The Spanish note at the front of the text is emphatic: “In the opinions that José Lezama Lima forces me to write with his plethora of pens, there are ideas and words that I recognize as mine and others that I do not. But what I do not recognize as mine has a quality that also forces me not to abandon it as someone else’s.” (…) “I have preferred to collect everything that my friend allocates to me and make it mine as much as possible, rather than protesting it with a firm no.”
Shorter plots of the Analecta, but always overflowing with spell and wit, are, among others, those that give an account of Joyce’s Death – “Now that you have enough silence, the answer will emerge”; Picasso’s Precautions —“Defined fishbowl, living entelechy: the circus, the mountebank on the ball, the naked ephebe and the laughing horse”—; and Montaigne and his best readers —“…he knows the antiquity of Greece and Rome before the affairs of his house, and late in the morning the violas enter his chamber to scare away the mosquitoes and the religious wars of his time”—.
It is worth noting, in the shadow of such a distinguished title, that the poet and the essayist – it is worth repeating: both – move like a fish in water in his novel Paradiso, and in the extension of that one, Oppiano Licario. And more: it would not be unreasonable to look for how the traces of these essays linger in the novelist’s terms. One of his statements is illuminating: “Do I have a style? Can I be considered a writer who has a style? What has always interested me is to penetrate the dark world that surrounds me.” Congratulations on the confirmation of Lezama, seventy years with his Analecta.
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