For those of us who work in the profession we love, working is a pleasure, it is beautiful. This is how we find the best barber to fix us, the preferred doctor, choose the family psychologist or look for the carpenter or bricklayer when we need one.
For others, on the other hand, each new day is a torture that they must accept because it is the job that destiny has assigned them, and it is well known that this is the pretext of the unsuccessful, as the poet Pablo Neruda said.
But as far as the world of literature is concerned, we find an infinite number of poets, writers and journalists who have left their criteria, among them are: Alejo Carpentier, Grahanm Greene, José Lezama Lima, José Martí, William Faulkner, Roque Dalton and Ernest Hemingway, among other greats of Ibero-American and Anglo-Saxon culture.
Each of these personalities enjoyed or delighted in writing. Hemingway said that if inspiration existed, he should be caught writing, while for Greene “writing is a form of therapy”, while Rilke said “if you think you are capable of living without writing, don’t write”.
For the universal poets as Dalton defined: “Poetry forgive me for having helped you to understand that you are not only made of words”. And it is, precisely, that word turned into verb, adjective.
Martí once said that the truth went further when it was written in the most beautiful way, and that is why many Cubans and followers of his thought call him master, because his poems and journalistic articles, most of which make up Marti’s work, have reached this 21st century with full validity.
Faulkner expressed that the perfect house for a writer was a brothel, because in the morning hours there is a lot of calm, and on the other hand, at night there is a party. For the narrator J.D. Salinger the appropriate place, as well as for Truman Capote, was a cabin in the mountains in front of a lake, as the ideal refuge to write the great novel.
The Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz wrote her texts by hand, a method Carpentier followed, although today many prefer the computer and it’s connection to the Internet to find the data needed to weave the narratives.
Speed nowadays leads us to use the computer because the screen allows us to go back, without having to throw away the paper, and when we have the final text we click on the printer symbol in Word, and we get the text in the format we want.
In Cuba we have Carpentier and Martí, two great journalists who enjoyed their work very much, and who are still today our best teachers of letters, because their chronicles, reports and articles take us from the roots of Cuban culture to the universal; and His writings are a master class of good work and the best reflection of the fact that writing is a great pleasure.
Translated by Aliani Rojas Fernandez
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