Hemingway, ese desconocido by Enrique Cirules, and: El vino mejor, Ensayos sobre Ernest Hemingway by Carlos Peón Casas

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hemingway, ese desconocido by Enrique Cirules, and: El vino mejor, Ensayos sobre Ernest Hemingway by Carlos Peón Casas Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera Cirules, Enrique. Hemingway, ese desconocido. Editorial Arte y Literatura: Havana, 2015. Peón Casas, Carlos. El vino mejor, Ensayos sobre Ernest Hemingway. North Charleston, SC: Create Space, 2017. Using Spanish to analyze Ernest Hemingway’s texts—especially those set in the Cuba or Spain—is a pursuit that produces many layers of nuance external to (or perhaps deep within) monolingual readings in English. Discussing The Old Man and the Sea or “Clean, Well-Lighted Place” in original version—i.e. mostly in English—while communicating in Spanish is an exercise in re-mate: es una actividad que nutre preguntas que no son accesibles en un inglés monolingüe (it is an activity that nurtures questions that are not accessible in a monolingual English). Since Hemingway’s texts first appeared, Cuban intellectuals have provided a rich set of critical views, and in that tradition, two recent studies in this category include Enrique Cirules’s Hemingway, ese desconocido and Carlos Peón Casas’s El vino mejor, Ensayos sobre Ernest Hemingway.1 Cirules and Peón Casas read Hemingway in English as well as in translation. When I pick up books like these, I find myself wondering: what is it like to read Hemingway in English in Cuba, and then in Spanish, for someone from Camagüey or La Habana? What can cross-lingual sensibilities reveal about what Hemingway’s was doing, what his works do now, and how such depths are lost or gained in translation? How do Hemingway’s texts (mis)fit into (trans)national literary canons—like the Cuban, American, or their hybrid molds? In the hands of Cuban intellectuals, do Hemingway’s Cuban texts [End Page 134] afford nuance and character about the places and people? What can Hemingway reveal to Cuban scholars about Cuban English, Cuban Spanish, and the literatures of the island? Peón Casas’s book, El vino mejor: ensayos sobre Ernest Hemingway, includes a prologue by Lino Luis García Espinosa and eleven chapters: “Translating Hemingway in Cuba;” “Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War Stories—Several Spanish Yarns and a Single Cuban Tale;” “The Transcendence of the Feminine Sea;” “Was Hemingway a Mute Catholic?;” “Hemingway and the Jesuits – a Fishing Tale from Key West;” “Between Texts and Contexts: Syncronicity in Hemingway’s Poetry and Prose, Reflections on a Translation;” “The Cuban Poems of Ernest Hemingway,” and “Ernest Hemingway: The Poet We Still Do Not Know.” Carlos Peón Casas is a master critic whose inquiries take on questions with critical and contextual relevances that transcend Cuba, English and Spanish. His appreciation and reverence for Hemingway’s language and his Cuban experience are grounded in perspectives attuned to the intricacies of local Cuban life and language, and its literatures. Peón Casas places specific attention on how Hemingway’s writings are often “created and set in Cuba” (21), a circumstance which makes “translating Hemingway In Cuba, here and now, not an easy task” (21). He eloquently describes this process as a “great responsibility” that “goes beyond the words themselves” (21, 22). For Peón Casas, Hemingway’s work transcends time, as well as political and cultural boundaries, and the Cuban texts “recreate … a vitalism that he had found at Finca Vigía” (24). This critic calls that space a “genesis” of his project and describes the act of translating “this unknown Hemingway” as a process that makes the work “more ours” (28). For Peón Casas, Hemingway’s poetry “is a pending task for the Cuban reader” (113), since those texts “restore the ambience and surroundings of the Finca Vigía, and portray his Cuban experience, for more than twenty years” (124). Peón Casas has intriguing perspectives on translating Hemingway’s poetry, and maintains that “making Hemingway legible in our rich language is without question a task that goes beyond words” (22).2 He understands Hemingway’s power derives to a degree from the context of “his Cuban home, this site that was so much his own, but also belongs to everyone who reveres his work” (23). Peón Casas...