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Introduction

José Martí (1853–95) was a revolutionary writer in every sense of the word. Born of Spanish parents in colonial Cuba, he witnessed the oppressive measures imposed on the island by the Spanish colonial administration. Early in his life he made the decision to fight for the liberation of his country and similarly oppressed Antillean peoples. But Martí was not merely a political revolutionary: he was a revolutionary in literature who gave expression to the emerging ideas and emotions of a modernizing world in a language and style that perplexed and fascinated many of his contemporaries. Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera (1859–95), for example, wrote of the Cuban that at times he could not follow his ideas, “because his ideas have sturdy wings, strong lungs, and rise inordinately… [in his] magical style we lose ourselves from time to time, like Reynaldo in the garden of Armida…”

Martí’s conscious resolve to devote himself to revolutionary political and literary ideals became clear shortly after the first Cuban war against Spain (1868). During this period he participated in the publication of clandestine newspapers and circulars, including El Diablo Cojuelo (The Crippled Devil), and later, La Patria Libre (Free Homeland). In the latter, in 1869, he published a dramatic poem, “Abdala,” in which the main character sacrifices his life to defend his country against its oppressors. For a while the colonial regime took no action against Martí; but in 1869, when he and a friend, Fermín Valdés Domínguez, signed a letter questioning the political behavior of one of their classmates, Martí was accused of treason against the Spanish colonial regime. He was tried and condemned to six years’ hard labor in the quarries of San Lázaro in Havana.

The San Lázaro experience is recorded in a political essay “Political Prison in Cuba,” published in 1871, that is both moving and revealing: moving, because it records an adolescent’s reaction to the harsh, sometimes nightmarish conditions of a forced labor camp; revealing, because it foreshadows the expressive force of a mature writer. “Political Prison in Cuba” is directed to the Spanish authorities; it is a plea for humanity and reform in the administration of the island. It is also a milestone in the evolution of the prose in a period of metamorphic change called Modernismo in Latin American literature and culture. “Political Prison in Cuba” was followed by a companion piece entitled “The Spanish Republic and the Cuban Revolution,” written in Spain in 1873, where the young Martí was exiled after his sentence was commuted.

Martí’s Spanish exile marks the initiation of a lengthy period of peregrination: Spain, Mexico, Venezuela, and, finally the United States, a productive period during which he wrote, spoke to Cuban and Hispanic revolutionary and cultural societies, and organized the in vasion of colonial Cuba in 1895.

Spain is where Martí received his formal education: at the universities of Zaragoza and Madrid he earned degrees in philosophy and law. Late in 1874 he left Spain for Mexico, with a brief stay in France. After Europe, Martí found Mexico to be a hospitable environment. He participated widely in the country’s cultural life, wrote for the Revista Universal, helped found the Sociedad Alarcón, debated the merits of spiritualism and materialism in a national forum, wrote a play entitled Amor con amor se paga (Love is Repaid with Love), which premiered in 1875. It was in Mexico where Martí met Carmen Zayas Bazán, who was to become his wife and, subsequently, the symbol of a painful, frustrated domestic life. The rise of the dictator Porfirio Díaz signaled the end of Martí’s Mexican residence and the renewal of his wanderings in search of a place where he could work with personal freedom. He returned briefly to Cuba, responding to the pull of family and a desire to resettle in his homeland.

Guatemala was Martí’s next resting place. His stay there also proved to be brief. He was appointed to the faculty of the Escuela Central de Guatemala where he taught French, English, German and Italian literature as well as the History of Philosophy. For a while life seemed prosperous and serene; he married Carmen Zayas Bazán, contributed to Guatemala’s developing cultural life, and wrote of his gratitude to that country in a slender volume entitled “Guatemala” (1878). A shift in political factions made life there untenable for him. Once again Havana drew him; but while working in the Havana law offices of Miguel Viondi, his revolutionary activities resulted in his second deportation to Spain in 1879.

Instead of staying there, he left almost immediately for France, and then to the United States. While in New York, he met Charles A. Dana who invited him to write for the New York Sun; but New York was not to become Martí’s home until after he attempted life in Venezuela. In 1881 he went to Caracas with the hope of finding refuge and solace in “Our America,” as he called the Hispanic countries of the New World. Things went well in Venezuela, but again, for an extremely short period. Nevertheless, in that time he succeeded in founding an important Modernist magazine, the Revista Venezolana. In its second issue of July 15, 1881, he defended his magazine’s style, and in the course of this defense, developed one of Modernism’s early manifestos:

Some of the “simple” pieces that appeared in our last issue have been tagged and polished exquisite. What follows is not a defense, but a clarification. Private speech is one thing; passionate, public discourse, another. Bitter polemics speak one language; quite another, serene biography… Thus, the same man will speak in a different language when he turns his searching eyes to past epochs, and, when with the anguish and ire of a soldier in battle, he wields a new arm in the angry struggle of the present age… The sky of Egypt ought not be painted with London fogs, nor the youthful verdure of our valleys with the pale green of Arcadia, or the mournful green of Erin. A sentence has its adornments, like a dress, and some dress in wool, some in silk, and some become angry because their dress is wool and are displeased to see another’s is silk. Since when has it become a defect to write in polished form?… It is essential that notice be taken of the following truth about style: writers should paint just as the painter does. There is no reason for one to use different colors from the other.

When Martí left Venezuela for New York, he renewed his writing for the Sun. New York was to be Martí’s permanent home until he returned to Cuba, just prior to his untimely death fighting for Cuba’s liberation on May 19, 1895. In New York, which both attracted and repelled Martí, he wrote his best prose and poetry. Amidst the din and clatter of an industrializing society, plagued by labor strikes, anarchist terrorist attacks, and racial and religious conflicts, Martí peered into the fortune of a capitalist society, and from this vantage point drew conclusions he described in his prose pieces about life in the United States written for Latin America’s major newspaper, La Nación (Buenos Aires). His association during 1883 with this newspaper was followed by invitations from others, among them La República (Honduras), La Opinión Pública (Uruguay), and El Partido Liberal (Mexico).

To earn enough for survival, this extraordinary writer became a versatile professional: a translator for Appleton, a clerk for Lyon and Company, a consul for Uruguay (1887) and Argentina (1890). Writing and political organization took up the rest of his energy and time. Martí immersed himself in the careful planning of the Cuban revolutionary process. He organized patriotic clubs not merely in the New York area, but all along the Eastern seaboard, especially in Florida among the tobacco workers of Tampa and Key West. Addressing these working class groups he displayed a passion and fervor that transfixed his audiences. Unfortunately, many of these speeches have been lost. A few that have survived, such as “Los pinos nuevos” (“The New Pines”) show the hand of a writer of learning, passion, and rhythmic prose, and of an accomplished political tactician who skillfully swayed his audience.

With the generals of the revolutionary forces, Máximo Gómez and Antonio Maceo, Martí organized and monitored the émigré groups. In 1884 he had a falling out with the generals, especially Gómez; but later he worked with them again to raise the funds and provide the organization and arms for the 1895 invasion of Cuba. Martí’s was a Herculean task, superior to his dwindling physical strength, vitiated years before by lesions and diseases contracted in the quarries of San Lázaro. Yet such was his determination to see the liberation of his home land that will and desire sustained a calendar of activities which would have sent more robust souls to an early grave.

Patriotism and martyrdom in the cause of Cuba and Puerto Rico consumed his being. Writing and his faith in the revolution kept him alive. To be sure, there were frequent moments of despair. His experiences with human cruelty were such that at one point he wrote: “It is with horror that one looks within many intelligent and attractive men. One leaves in fright, as from a lion’s den.” This modern Machiavellian analyst wrote: “Men like to be guided by those who abound in their own shortcomings.” Cognizant of human foibles, but committed to social redemption, he noted: “Man is ugly, but humanity is beautiful.” Martí’s was an 18th century faith in the perfectability of humankind, in social progress and in the feasibility of socio economic reform. Like the thinkers of the Enlightenment, he needed to be persuaded of the inevitability of violent change, which he espoused only when all other viable channels were exhausted.

Martí found temporary release from anguish in poetic creation. Poetry had a double interface for him: “To create beautiful poetry one has only to turn one’s eyes outward: to Nature; and inward: to the soul.” Nature was an enchantress, who consoled, fortified and soothed. By contrast, internal suffering purified inspirations and provided release from the oppressive realities of everyday existence. Pain, said Martí, “matures poetry… Man needs to suffer. When he lacks real pain, he creates it. Pain purifies and prepares.” Convinced that suffering engenders art, the poet poured his personal anguish into his verses.

Martí wrote three major books of poetry: Ismaelillo (1882), Versos sencillos (Simple Verses, 1891), and Versos libres (Free Verse, 1913). A fourth volume, entitled Flores del destierro (Flowers of Exile, 1933), somewhat loosely organized by Gonzalo de Quesada y Miranda, and some other poems have been traditionally included in other volumes. Ismaelillo and Simple Verses were published in New York during the poet’s lifetime; he read the proof for both works. Free Verse was first published posthumously, transcribed inaccurately from complex manuscripts and corrected by the present writer.

All of the volumes have one element in common: one which Karl Vossler described as the characteristic of all poets of intense fantasy: a capacity for liberating themselves from the norms of the linguistic community; by passing under or over words, such poets create works by means of notes, melodies, rhythms, images, gestures and dances. This is the case with Martí and that of other Modernist poets of his generation: they were subjective creators, attentive to internal flux. In this connection, Fina García Marruz finds syllabic groupings of suffering in Free Verse, and Cintio Vitier senses the voice of a poet of light and movements, who creates a baroque, obscure, foaming, volcanic, abrupt and strange world. Martí’s is a highly original verse, in which there is both innovation and tradition, a paradoxical admixture common to the poets of the Age of Modernity, intent upon recasting the past to express an unstable present.

Of Martí’s three principal poetic works, Ismaelillo is a free, luminous volume, written largely in Caracas, and published in New York. Its imagery is so singular that the poet felt compelled to comment on its oneiric quality in a letter to Diego Jugo Ramírez on May 23, 1882:

I’ve seen those wings, those jackals, those empty goblets, those armies. My mind was the stage, and on it all those visions were actors. My work, Jugo, consisted of copying. There isn’t one single mental line there. And, how should I be responsible for the images which come to me without calling them? I have done nothing more than put my visions into verse.

The volume is dedicated to the poet’s absent son. The poet occupies the center of a visionary space in which the perils of modern life assault the poet/narrator. “Alarmed by everything, I take refuge in you,” he writes to his son in the brief introduction. The absent son is ever-present in verses whose levels of reality and dreams reach beyond the limits of 19th century positivism and reason. “I dream with open eyes,” reads the first line of “Sueño despierto” (“I Dream Awake”). The visionary quality is sometimes surrealistic: “And on the backs/Of giant birds/Endless kisses/Awaken.” Though a process of inversion, a metamorphosis is effected by filial love; the father conjures up the vision of the son, and in this vision is reborn through the son: “I am the son of my son!/He remakes me!” This identification of father and son orchestrates and unifies the metaphoric eruptions of a volume, which, at bottom, is a musical concert centering around three motifs, filled with chaotic, tender and troubled leaps to a loosely associated poetic space. Ismaelillo’s motifs are the poet, the son, the world; the leaps are executed in the form of voyages in which traditional time and space concepts are unhinged so that the poet-son can move freely outside the limitations of a traditional Logos. In “Musa traviesa” (“Mischievous Muse”) he writes: “Often, a rider/In momentous dreams,/I ride long hours,/Through the air./I pierce rosy clouds/I fathom deep seas,/And in the eternal bowels/I travel.”

In these travels the poet/son/seer comes upon battles, visions of martyrdom, caves, dances, erotic scenes, heights of idealism and depths of materialism; it is a confusing world the narrator captures: reflecting the frightening realities of modern life. We witness torments, confused scenes, temptations, moments of disarray, and spirited battle. It is a spectacle of “splendid transformations” that boils, creaks, bites and assaults the agonists of modern life. In keeping with these decentered, fragmented visions, the son is Ismael, Jacob, the object of pleasure, love, tenderness, the heart, the soul of the father and, finally, not merely his reflection but his very being. Thus, this volume, more than the lyric prayer book Rubén Darío found it to be, more than the “Art of Being a Father” which he saw in it, is rather a voyage that incarnates a modern mythic sense of experience and existence.

Equally personal, and equally anguished are the poems of Free Verse. Darío said of them that they were free verse, produced by a free man. Martí called them “my irritated Free Verses,” “my rough hendecasyllables, borne of great fears, or of great hopes, or of an unbridled love of liberty, or of a painful love of liberty…” In his preface, Martí insisted, once again, as in his Ismaelillo, upon the visionary quality of his verses, visions that he “copied” and for whose strangeness, singularity and passion he alone was accountable. These are verses written, “not in academic ink, but rather in my own blood,” an image used by the poet to refer to their personal quality as well as the aura of sacrifice and martyrdom that pervades so many of the poems. Their key words are love, liberty, unconquered, passionate, natural, vigorous. To this linguistic base, José Olivio Jiménez adds another that centers around the terms circumstance, nature, transcendence, and three concepts: love, suffering, duty. The originality of these poems consists in their anguish. It is a poetry of existence in which the poet/narrator confronts the imperative to transmit an authentic, sincere, necessary reality. “What matters in poetry,” he wrote, “is to feel, regardless of whether it resembles what others have felt; and what is felt anew, is new.”

Images of nature, often traditional in origin, appear in this volume as in others by the Cuban, but it is man, not nature, that occupies the center of his poetic discourse. It is a poetry that speaks of daily cares, experiences, existences; it radiates in circular patterns, reaching toward the upper spheres, that is, toward a quality of transcendence noted by Jiménez, and which in spatial form points to the fundamentally realistic; it is based upon specific, concrete circumstances: those of his life, and of the emotions of his existence. Unamuno called Martí’s words “acts”; but when the Cuban poet harnessed his words to his thoughts he created novel structures which even today surprise us by dint of their modernity.

The visionary quality of his first volume persists in Free Verse; present also are the dualities of experience, the antithetical images that constitute Martí’s assumption of the contradictions of modern life and the aspirations of perfection and idealistic placement of his visionary poetics. The dualities sometimes represent a world truncated, or the poet’s simple vision of life: “I have lived: I have died.” The poet in his anguish wishes to sacrifice himself to his fellow man, for that is his mission in life. At times, he feels useless, unable to realize the martyrdom that will release him from his terrestrial struggle and allow him, finally, to seek an undefined solace in a vaguely expressed afterlife.

Less anguished, at least at first glance, are the poems of Simple Verses. Their apparent serenity is linked to their traditional, popular metrics, and to the poet’s insistence upon more direct and unencumbered forms of expression in comparison with the “volcanic eruptions” of the previous volumes. In this volume there is an emphasis upon the harmony of life and philosophy, or at least upon a system of transformation from crass, material forms to noble, ideal objects. And this search for and belief in idealism and harmony lends the volume a placid quality which has disquieting moments, for the Simple Verses are poems born of pain and anguish: “My friends know how these verses were born in my heart. It was in that winter of anguish, in which out of ignorance, or due to fanatical faith, or fear, or courtesy, the Spanish American republics met in Washington, in the shadow of the dreaded eagle,” wrote Martí in the introduction. Martí represented Uruguay at the International Monetary Conference in Washington, D.C., called by the United States to standardize currency in Latin America. Martí led the opposition of the Latin American countries to the plans of the United States to impose a silver standard.

Elsewhere, the poet explained that “To suffer is a duty. With what does one write well in prose or verse, but with blood?” The poet’s anguish is personalized. The verses speak of his individual view of the world, as the poet/seer turns his eyes upon the universe internalized, and describes its external and internal structures. The poet has assumed the universe, and from a symbiotic stance he offers new insights into its meaning. Martí’s experience is broad: it includes the divine spirit, the terrestrial clamor of voices, envy, hate, human ugliness, materialism, idealism, the metamorphosis of reality. The nature of writing poetry is also present here as in previous volumes. But, unlike these, experience is expressed from the viewpoint of a compendium, seen, to be sure, from the interior world (“I know,” “I’ve seen,” “I hear,” “I am,”) of the creator in search of harmony:

All is beautiful

and constant,

All is melody and reason,

And all, like a diamond,

Is dark before light.

In Simple Verses one finds the most frequently cited Martí verses: IX is devoted to “La niña de Guatemala” (“The Girl From Guatemala”), and X to “La bailarina española” (“The Spanish Dancer”). Other sections may be less musical and more anguished, but all point to the future in modern poetry. In VIII and XI the poet carries on a dialogue with his doubles: a page/skeleton; a dead friend. In the end, in XLVI a conversation is established between the poet and his verse in which he declares, “Verse, as one our fates are sealed:/We are damned or saved together!”

Both Martí and his poetry have survived; but not merely Martí the poet. Martí is one of Spanish America’s most original prose writers. “Verses,” he said, “can be improvised, but not prose; prose style comes with maturity.” His early prose works, mentioned above, were followed by a voluminous opus of imaginative, rhythmic, chromatic pieces that found their way into the cultural and literary life of his period through a network of contemporary artists and the columns of the most prestigious newspapers of both North and South America. It is perhaps as a cronista, a chronicler of contemporary events — political, social and literary — that Martí is best known. He read accounts of current events voraciously. Such was his imagination that he was capable of creating visions of them as they occurred, even when he was not a witness to them.

His 1889 account of the opening of the Oklahoma frontier, for example, appears to have been written by a journalist astride a horse, who observed the excitement and violence of the events. His moving account of the 1886 earthquake in Charleston, South Carolina, contained the shrill cries and the emotional despair, the fervent, frightened prayers of the residents, as if the chronicler himself had experienced the tragedy. Martí wrote with vision, compassion, uncanny perception and a highly developed concept of innovative style on subjects as diverse as European monarchs, American anarchists, New York elevated railways, urban tenements, violent crimes, St. Valentine’s Day, Buffalo Bill, the Cody Brothers, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, American technology, and agricultural and floral exhibitions. On all of these, and others too numerous to mention, Martí informed his Latin American readers. He was especially careful to show them the advantages as well as the dangers of life in a modernizing, capitalist society such as the United States, hoping to interest his fellow men in technical innovations while avoiding the social, racial, and political strife he observed in New York. For his American readers of the New York Sun he wrote mainly of life in Europe, signing with a pseudonym, M. de S.

Another of Martí’s major undertakings while in New York was La Edad de Oro: Publicación mensual de recreo e instrucción dedicada a los niños de América (The Golden Age: A Monthly Magazine of Instruction Dedicated to the Children of Spanish America). He contributed his own writing to the magazine as well as selecting artists for translations. La Edad de Oro became a milestone in Spanish children’s literature.

Freedom from Spanish rule for his native Cuba, the liberation of Puerto Rico, and economic and political independence for the Antilles and Latin America were constantly on Martí’s mind. In essays, speeches and poems, this liberating discourse — a hallmark of Modernism — is a recurring mark. Though he suffered physically and emotionally at the hands of the Spanish colonial authorities in Cuba, Martí never expressed a sense of animosity toward Spain. Instead, he espoused a doctrine of love and brotherhood; he hoped that the war with Spain, if unavoidable, would be brief and swift. In his writings on Cuba he argued for political unity, economic modernization (without the pitfalls of US capitalism), respect for human rights, and a broad, democratic, participatory social compact. When it was clear there was no other road but revolution to achieve Cuba’s freedom from colonial rule, he organized a political party among exiled Cubans residing in the United States — the Cuban Revolutionary Party — and almost single-handedly planned the 1895 invasion of Cuba. As a political strategist his sights were set on achieving independence for his native island, hence, like so many other Latin American essayists, his political writings are fundamentally instrumental or programmatic. His grasp of contemporary and future social and economic institutions was stunning, so much so that critics such as Cintio Vitier perceive in his essays on Cuba a futurity that guided not merely Martí’s generation, but generations of writers and thinkers since. Martí wrote no single, organic political treatise on Cuba. However, he left a rich legacy of conceptualizations — perceptive and “necessary” — in separate, substantive essays such as “Con todos y para el bien de todos” (“With All and For the Good of All”), “El Partido Revolucionario Cubano” (“The Cuban Political Party”), or “El manifiesto de Montecristi” (“The Montecristi Manifesto”).

Less known, and less studied, are Martí’s letters. His epistolary art fascinated Unamuno and continues to attract devoted readers. Next to his poetry, the medium in which Martí expressed his most intimate thoughts are his letters, especially those to his closest friends and confidants. The letters to his friend Manuel A. Mercado, to María Mantilla, to his mother, are filled with the tenderness and anguish of Free Verse. In his letters Martí dared to bare his soul and allowed the solitude and suffering of a mission-driven artist and revolutionary to surface. The prose of these epistolary pieces is baroque at times, at others, limpid; sometimes convoluted, sometimes succinct; at others telegraphic. He once complained: “Words I cannot.” The reader at such moments is placed in the role of having to add, interpret, complete.

One other prose genre merits special comment: the novel — Martí wrote a single narrative without great enthusiasm as a favor to a friend. She had accepted to write the work for a New York magazine but could not. Under the pseudonym of Adelaida Ral, the Cuban agreed to compose a novel in her place in seven days; its format followed the prescriptions laid down by the editor: lots of love, a death, many young girls, no sinful passions, and nothing that might offend fathers of families or priests. And, it had to have a Spanish American setting. The narrative was not Martí’s favorite genre because, as he put it, one had to feign the existence of people, scenes and dialogues.

In this narrative, in his other prose pieces, his poetry, letters, and in his journals, Martí understood that man stood at the crossroads of an entirely new world order, the Age of Modernity. He understood its metamorphic qualities, he often felt anguished about their influence over man, the socioeconomic progress of Latin America, and the liberation of Cuba and Puerto Rico, always uppermost in his mind. He saw and understood the falling away of traditional institutions — religious, social and economic — and the accompanying cultural and ideological void. This visionary writer was thus able to write as early as 1882: “There are no permanent works, because those which are the product of reframing and recasting are by their very essence mutable and restless; there are no constant roads; the new altars, great and open as the woods, are barely visible.” Though they were invisible to most people, Martí was able to see and foresee, to write and speak the signs of both his age and the future, scanning the past and linking its universal values to an unstable chaotic present.

Ivan A. Schulman