Translator's Note

Abstract

Translator's Note Greg Simon (bio) Our first introduction to the Cuban poet Gastón Baquero came on the luxurious AVE "bullet train" between Madrid and Seville, as it sped back to Atocha Station in the early evening of July 5, 1999. Steven F. White and I had spent a fabulous, productive but very hot day in Seville, a rich and sensuous city, not unlike Baquero's poems, of extreme density, complex, narrow passageways, and astonishing reservoirs of emotion. As my heat-stunned body tried to cool down in the comfort of the train, and my mind struggled to make sense of the wealth of images, information and personalities with which it had been bombarded during the day, I desperately wanted to drift off into sleep. But my restless friend had Baquero's Poesía completa (Editorial Verbum, Madrid, 1998) in his hands, a volume presented to us the day before in Madrid by its editor, Pío E. Serrano, and he kept shaking me awake every two or three minutes. "Greg!" he'd whisper fiercely. "Wake up! You've got to see this!" The book he was trying to show me, with which I have since become very familiar, is indeed an impressive publication, and well worth whatever sacrifice of comfort or sleep might be required to get to know it. An obvious labor of both integrity and love, it presents all of the known poetry in book or anthology form that Baquero published during his lifetime (1918–1997), in Cuba and Spain, as well as groups of uncollected and unpublished poems, and juvenilia. As we are among the first miners of this rich lode to be working in English, Steve and I, with Pío's permission, felt free to roam through the various collections and sequences at will. We then chose, for our selection, only those poems that seemed to make their presence most strongly felt in translation after we had ascertained, to the best of our ability, their strength in Spanish. This admission that our method was intuitive, and intended to represent neither a critical nor exhaustive approach to Baquero, should not be interpreted as a dictum that alternative approaches are impossible or even undesirable. Pío E. Serrano, for instance, has beentireless in his role as Baquero's editor, and the nine pages of bibliographical material he provided in Poesía completa would serve as a more than adequate starting point for any critical assessment of the poet's entire work. Baquero's name, Serrano informs us, was removed from dictionaries and textbooks in Cuba after he was exiled, his works were banned and further publication prohibited. Luckily for us, a totalitarian approach to literary criticism never succeeds, except perhaps to whet an appetite among those who are supposedly being protected from alleged heterodoxy. In his private library, for example, Serrano has a collection of Cuban poetry books and anthologies that were printed surreptitiously on grocery bags, illustrated by hand and bound with string, and then smuggled out of Cuba. I feel it is due in large part to the perseverance of these unsung poets (and their librarians) that a brand-new, comprehensive anthology of Baquero's poetry, La patria sonora de los frutos, edited by Efraín Rodríguez Santana, was published in Havana in 2001. Baquero's reaction to his exile was very complex. Not only did he seemingly forbid himself any direct mention of it in his poetry ("neither disenchantment nor resentment," Serrano says), he reached very deeply into the pocket of irony and called one of his books Poemas invisibles. But however cool his attitude, it is difficult for this reader not to equate [End Page 290] the many references in the late poems to Adam's expulsion from the Garden of Eden with the poet's own exile. The most irrefutable of responses, of course, is writing rooted so deeply in the lush garden he was expelled from that it effortlessly creates a concurrent, active nostalgia for places on earth any readers mighthave been separated from. Every exiled poet fights to return with his words. After his expulsion, Baquero plunged into his mentor José Lezama Lima's "absolute immersion in...