Virgilio Piñera un cubano de sombras en Buenos Aires
Por Jorge Carrol
Corría los primeros años de los ’50 y por esas cosas de las ciudades como Buenos Aires, un muchachote como este memorioso escribidor lo era por entonces, encontrarse en la calle o en un café o en una librería con Miguel Ángel Asturias o con Rafael Alberti o con Witold Gombrowicz, era tan fácil como hacerlo como con Juan Carlos Onetti o con Octavio Paz o con Virgilio Piñera. Precisamente a Virgilio lo conocí cuando era funcionario de la Embajada de su país, Cuba, en Argentina, y solía reunirse con mi compañero de LRA Radio del Estado –hoy Radio Nacional- el crítico musical Carlos Coldaroli y con otros personajes de la locura porteña, como los patafísicos Esteban Facio y Álvaro Rodríguez. Piñera venía precedido de un alto honor, haber sido el director, por llamarlo de alguna manera, de un equipo de cerca de 50 escritores y poetas, que habían traducido la trascendental novela de Gombrowicz: Ferdydurke. (Traducido del polaco “vía el francés” que hablaba Witold y la mayoría de los traductores, no todos).
Buenos Aires era un hervidero de ideas artísticas, el mundillo culturoso iba del existencialismo a la política, pasando por el surrealismo, el invencionismo y el concretismo, la música atonal y el dodecafonismo. Muchos de los afectados por la fiebre cultural, pensaban viajar a París, cuna de todos los sueños y otros a Roma, para dedicarse al cine o algo parecido. Una de esas tardes en que la nada y la nausea jugaban parejo sobre las mesas del Florida Bar, se sentó en mi mesa para hacer tiempo, pues debía encontrarse con alguien. Hablamos de todo y de nada y como quien no quiere la cosa, hablamos de Asturias y su tropicalismo bananero y acto seguido puso en mis manos un libro que él llevaba consigo: El reino de este mundo, de Alejo Carpentier.
No recuerdo exactamente lo que me dijo Piñera, sólo recuerdo o quiero querer recordar, que todo el arte caribeño comenzó en la real corte haitiana de Henry Christophe, a la sombra verde y húmeda de Sans-Souci, que permanecía imponente e intacta aún a pesar de los rayos, los terremotos, los franceses, los haitianos y los yanquis. Hablamos naturalmente de Wilfrido Lam y de lo fantástico. Aquella tarde y gracias a Virgilio Piñera se me otorgaron las llaves de la lectura de Alejo Carpentier y de lo maravilloso obtenido sin trucos de prestidigitación, algo parecido a la vieja y embustera fórmula del fortuito encuentro de la máquina de coser y el paraguas sobre una mesa de operaciones.
Con El reino de este mundo en mi poder, regresé a mi casa, para asumir, a través de la lectura de Carpentier, una vez más los cantos de Lautréamont (hay todavía demasiados “adolescentes que hallan placer en violar los cadáveres de hermosas mujeres recién muertas”) iniciando así una amistad con la obra de Carpentier que sigue impertérrita a lo largo de los últimos casi cincuenta años. Y todo gracias a Virgilio Piñera que una tarde supe se había marchado de Buenos Aires para regresar a su Cuba, donde junto a Lezama Lima –los dos grandes de la llamada generación de Orígenes- hizo de la poesía, su secreto refugio, en un mundo seudo revolucionario.
Nos quedan hoy sus obras para júbilo de las mejores letras cubanas y en lo personal, me queda la sombra de sus andares por la calle Florida en busca de la ausencia que supo cosechar en La Habana. También el agradecimiento de haber puesto en mi vida la obra de Carpentier y de Lezama Lima, también algunas canciones de Beny Moré, como Dolor y perdón, que tantas veces tararié en las no pocas vueltas de un amor…
(Concluyo esta Memoriabierta con las tres primeras líneas del poema de Virgilio Piñera, Solicitud de canonización de Rosa Cagí)
Por la presente tengo a bien dirigirme a usted
para solicitar una plaza de santa laica
en la Iglesia del Amor.
Tomado de Palabra virtual
miércoles, 23 de diciembre de 2009
domingo, 13 de diciembre de 2009
Algunos poemas de mi última etapa que cubre 20 años (1959-1979)
En la puerta de mi vecino
un papelito me dejó helado.
“No me molesten. Estoy llorando.
Y consolarme ya nadie puede."
Ahora yo sueño con mi vecino.
Y mientras sueño, abro la puerta.
Adentro veo mi propia cara,
mi propia cara bañada en lágrimas.
(1962)
EN EL DENTISTA
¿Qué puede hacerse contigo? ¿Qué podría encontrar tu frescura en mi piel ajada?
Te engalanas para el amor, gimes por el amor, te hundes en su noche.
Quizás no sepas quiénes fueron Baudelaire y la señora Sabatier, ni lo que entre ellos ocurrió. Pero es tan divertido (o tal vez sea otra cosa) escribir estos renglones dedicados a ti, que para mí no eres más que un fantasma.
(1965)
Lo que estuvo a mi lado tantos años, lo que veía sin ver, y sentía sintiéndolo apenas, lo he reconocido.
Aunque ignoro si llegaré a saber realmente lo que es, ha empezado a formar parte de mí. Cuando no lo veo ni lo siento, tiemblo. Su ausencia corta mi respiración, y muero un poco.
Cuando regresa, me vuelven los colores a la cara.
(1976)
ÓYELO BIEN
Si alguna vez tuviste bellos días, tardes apacibles, amables conversaciones; si en un instante magnífico viste crecer la rosa y colorearse el aire; si decir “buenos días” era algo perfectamente natural; si...para qué seguir cuando el corazón de todo se ha secado. En tu diccionario personal no aparece la palabra salvación. Y en cambio, fueron sustituídas las demás por una sola: “condenado”, infinitamente repetida.
(1976)
PARA TI
Para ti ya no habrá formas ni contornos. Esperas por un sol que no ha de salir. Sin estar ciego, aún ignoras -en tu casa todavía hay luz-, que todo se volverá negrura en un instante, y en un instante nunca más te verás como eres.
¿Qué dices...? El genio del hombre, la tecnología, los adelantos de la ciencia...
Amigo mío, esa mano que busca otra mano, tus ojos que pugnan por insertarse en otros, pronto sabrán que no son ojos ni mano. De modo que asómate, y disfruta el último paisaje.
(1977)
NADIE
Cada vez que el empleado levanta la sábana que cubre tu cuerpo, el que mira exclama: Nunca lo he visto.
Tuviste amigos, una esposa, hijos, jefes y subordinados.
Todos desfilan. Escrutan tu cara, y suponiendo que podrías ser al que amaron u odiaron, se consternan ante tu calculada inescrutabilidad.
(1977)
un papelito me dejó helado.
“No me molesten. Estoy llorando.
Y consolarme ya nadie puede."
Ahora yo sueño con mi vecino.
Y mientras sueño, abro la puerta.
Adentro veo mi propia cara,
mi propia cara bañada en lágrimas.
(1962)
EN EL DENTISTA
¿Qué puede hacerse contigo? ¿Qué podría encontrar tu frescura en mi piel ajada?
Te engalanas para el amor, gimes por el amor, te hundes en su noche.
Quizás no sepas quiénes fueron Baudelaire y la señora Sabatier, ni lo que entre ellos ocurrió. Pero es tan divertido (o tal vez sea otra cosa) escribir estos renglones dedicados a ti, que para mí no eres más que un fantasma.
(1965)
Lo que estuvo a mi lado tantos años, lo que veía sin ver, y sentía sintiéndolo apenas, lo he reconocido.
Aunque ignoro si llegaré a saber realmente lo que es, ha empezado a formar parte de mí. Cuando no lo veo ni lo siento, tiemblo. Su ausencia corta mi respiración, y muero un poco.
Cuando regresa, me vuelven los colores a la cara.
(1976)
ÓYELO BIEN
Si alguna vez tuviste bellos días, tardes apacibles, amables conversaciones; si en un instante magnífico viste crecer la rosa y colorearse el aire; si decir “buenos días” era algo perfectamente natural; si...para qué seguir cuando el corazón de todo se ha secado. En tu diccionario personal no aparece la palabra salvación. Y en cambio, fueron sustituídas las demás por una sola: “condenado”, infinitamente repetida.
(1976)
PARA TI
Para ti ya no habrá formas ni contornos. Esperas por un sol que no ha de salir. Sin estar ciego, aún ignoras -en tu casa todavía hay luz-, que todo se volverá negrura en un instante, y en un instante nunca más te verás como eres.
¿Qué dices...? El genio del hombre, la tecnología, los adelantos de la ciencia...
Amigo mío, esa mano que busca otra mano, tus ojos que pugnan por insertarse en otros, pronto sabrán que no son ojos ni mano. De modo que asómate, y disfruta el último paisaje.
(1977)
NADIE
Cada vez que el empleado levanta la sábana que cubre tu cuerpo, el que mira exclama: Nunca lo he visto.
Tuviste amigos, una esposa, hijos, jefes y subordinados.
Todos desfilan. Escrutan tu cara, y suponiendo que podrías ser al que amaron u odiaron, se consternan ante tu calculada inescrutabilidad.
(1977)
Piñera: Rule Breaker & Provocateur
By Leonardo Padura Fuentes
HAVANA TIMES, July 4 (IPS) - As we immediately approach the 30th anniversary of the death of writer Virgilio Piñera, we can also make out in the not too distant horizon the centennial of his birth, which will be marked in 2012.
Perhaps these moments should stimulate reflection and homage to someone whose life deserves celebration as one of the most controversial yet essential figures of Cuban culture of the 20th century.
Piñera was a great renovator and modernizer of Cuban theater, one of its most revealing poets and an important figure among the nation’s most significant and daring narrators.
To begin to understand and read him, it should be kept in mind what he wrote about himself in an insurmountable and provocative self-portrait:
“As soon as I was old enough, I demanded thought be translated into something more than spit spraying or arm waving; I found three fairly dirty qualities of which I would never be able to clean myself: I learned that I was poor, that I was homosexual, and that I liked art.
“The first because one fine day they told us that ‘nothing could be found for lunch.’ The second because, also one fine day, I felt a wave of blushing cross my face when discovering, throbbing under his pants, the swollen organ of one of my numerous uncles. The third because, on an equally fine day, I heard my very fat cousin convulsively griping a glass in her hand singing the toast of ‘La Traviata.’”
Perhaps Virgilio Piñera’s greatest cultural merit was his vital and artistic iconoclasm. The rule-breaker, the essential provocateur, a searcher for novel ways of expression and structure, conceptually diverse and challenging, his work today conserves aesthetic greatness, while his life has become the best representation of the torture of marginalization and silence into which the writer was driven.
This fate was his and a significant part of the country’s intellectuals, subjected to the orthodoxy and exclusionary methods of Cuban cultural prescriptions of the 1970s. In that marginalization - “civil death” as it has been called - he spent the last 10 years of his existence, until he died physically.
However, the despairing circumstances and disrespect a part, his artistic work itself continues to be the best way to understand his significance for the culture of the island and the literature of the language.
As a playwright, Virgilio Piñera is the unquestionable creator of modern Cuban theater. His work “Electra Garrigó” (1948) was in its day a jolt of modernity to a stage that had been paralyzed between crude realism and the superficiality of the vernacular style recently transcended.
No less significant was the contribution of “Aire frío” (Cold Air), 1959, perhaps the height of Cuban theater of the 20th century; a work in which everything harmonizes around the story of a family obsessed by a dream and a reality.
The dramaturgy of Piñera provoked scandals. The Association of Theatrical and Film Editors banned “Electra” for years, and efforts were made to boycott the premiere of “La boda” (The wedding), 1958, by the Association of Catholic Youth, who considered it immoral. However, the reaction to his work was a transformation so deeply rooted - based on his treatment of absurdity, cruelty, surrealism and existentialism - that Cuban theater became conceptually and formally different.
Piñera’s poetry, for its part, is the antithesis of the directions marked by all orthodoxies. It included the group Origins, with which he initially had a close relation but would later break with. Collected in the volume “La vida entera” (All of life), 1969 - what would be the last his books that Piñera would see printed in his life - was perhaps the most emblematic work: the long poem “La isla en peso” (The island weighs), 1943. It is an essential work on the abundant and polyphonic history of Cuban poetry.
But it was perhaps in the narrative, especially the short story, where the renovating spirit of Piñera was sharpest, even though it was less influential on future admirers if we compare it to his theater.
His three novels and three books of stories all appeared posthumously (given the impossibility of publishing them in the 1970s). He was the most renovating of Cuban narrators of the golden epoch of the 1940s and 50s thanks to those stories in which he merged absurdity, surrealism, cruelty and even parody of diverse genre, such as science fiction, to produce ironic looks into the emptiness of existence and the irrationality of many people’s lives.
Since the 1980s, fortunately for Cuban culture, Virgilio Piñera’s work was again published, exhibited and commented upon. The victorious return of the “black sheep” was so overpowering that a Piñeria “explosion” even occurred.
“La vida tal cual” (Life as such), an autobiographical account published by Union a magazine of the artists and writers association (UNEAC) in 1990 began what would be the printing of his unpublished stories and theatrical works, bringing his works onto the stage and restoring him to the stature that he always merited.
Perhaps the most curious aspect of the posthumous restoration of this figure has been the fact that the life, character and tribulations of this writer have transformed him into a character of diverse narrative and dramatic texts. He is almost always shown as a representative of marginalization and a spirit of artistic resistance that possibly Virgilio Piñera embodied better than any other Cuban creator of his time.
In this way - for his vital and artistic pioneering, for the renovation that his work brought in its time, and for the permanency that it has conserved - the occasion of the centennial that approaches could well be apropos to again put into circulation all of his writings - maybe an edition of his complete works. We could recognize him, once again, for his literary greatness and the revolutionary role that he played in the cultural life of his land, “surrounded by water everywhere,” the small country where Virgilio Piñera was born, lived, enjoyed, suffered and died.
HAVANA TIMES, July 4 (IPS) - As we immediately approach the 30th anniversary of the death of writer Virgilio Piñera, we can also make out in the not too distant horizon the centennial of his birth, which will be marked in 2012.
Perhaps these moments should stimulate reflection and homage to someone whose life deserves celebration as one of the most controversial yet essential figures of Cuban culture of the 20th century.
Piñera was a great renovator and modernizer of Cuban theater, one of its most revealing poets and an important figure among the nation’s most significant and daring narrators.
To begin to understand and read him, it should be kept in mind what he wrote about himself in an insurmountable and provocative self-portrait:
“As soon as I was old enough, I demanded thought be translated into something more than spit spraying or arm waving; I found three fairly dirty qualities of which I would never be able to clean myself: I learned that I was poor, that I was homosexual, and that I liked art.
“The first because one fine day they told us that ‘nothing could be found for lunch.’ The second because, also one fine day, I felt a wave of blushing cross my face when discovering, throbbing under his pants, the swollen organ of one of my numerous uncles. The third because, on an equally fine day, I heard my very fat cousin convulsively griping a glass in her hand singing the toast of ‘La Traviata.’”
Perhaps Virgilio Piñera’s greatest cultural merit was his vital and artistic iconoclasm. The rule-breaker, the essential provocateur, a searcher for novel ways of expression and structure, conceptually diverse and challenging, his work today conserves aesthetic greatness, while his life has become the best representation of the torture of marginalization and silence into which the writer was driven.
This fate was his and a significant part of the country’s intellectuals, subjected to the orthodoxy and exclusionary methods of Cuban cultural prescriptions of the 1970s. In that marginalization - “civil death” as it has been called - he spent the last 10 years of his existence, until he died physically.
However, the despairing circumstances and disrespect a part, his artistic work itself continues to be the best way to understand his significance for the culture of the island and the literature of the language.
As a playwright, Virgilio Piñera is the unquestionable creator of modern Cuban theater. His work “Electra Garrigó” (1948) was in its day a jolt of modernity to a stage that had been paralyzed between crude realism and the superficiality of the vernacular style recently transcended.
No less significant was the contribution of “Aire frío” (Cold Air), 1959, perhaps the height of Cuban theater of the 20th century; a work in which everything harmonizes around the story of a family obsessed by a dream and a reality.
The dramaturgy of Piñera provoked scandals. The Association of Theatrical and Film Editors banned “Electra” for years, and efforts were made to boycott the premiere of “La boda” (The wedding), 1958, by the Association of Catholic Youth, who considered it immoral. However, the reaction to his work was a transformation so deeply rooted - based on his treatment of absurdity, cruelty, surrealism and existentialism - that Cuban theater became conceptually and formally different.
Piñera’s poetry, for its part, is the antithesis of the directions marked by all orthodoxies. It included the group Origins, with which he initially had a close relation but would later break with. Collected in the volume “La vida entera” (All of life), 1969 - what would be the last his books that Piñera would see printed in his life - was perhaps the most emblematic work: the long poem “La isla en peso” (The island weighs), 1943. It is an essential work on the abundant and polyphonic history of Cuban poetry.
But it was perhaps in the narrative, especially the short story, where the renovating spirit of Piñera was sharpest, even though it was less influential on future admirers if we compare it to his theater.
His three novels and three books of stories all appeared posthumously (given the impossibility of publishing them in the 1970s). He was the most renovating of Cuban narrators of the golden epoch of the 1940s and 50s thanks to those stories in which he merged absurdity, surrealism, cruelty and even parody of diverse genre, such as science fiction, to produce ironic looks into the emptiness of existence and the irrationality of many people’s lives.
Since the 1980s, fortunately for Cuban culture, Virgilio Piñera’s work was again published, exhibited and commented upon. The victorious return of the “black sheep” was so overpowering that a Piñeria “explosion” even occurred.
“La vida tal cual” (Life as such), an autobiographical account published by Union a magazine of the artists and writers association (UNEAC) in 1990 began what would be the printing of his unpublished stories and theatrical works, bringing his works onto the stage and restoring him to the stature that he always merited.
Perhaps the most curious aspect of the posthumous restoration of this figure has been the fact that the life, character and tribulations of this writer have transformed him into a character of diverse narrative and dramatic texts. He is almost always shown as a representative of marginalization and a spirit of artistic resistance that possibly Virgilio Piñera embodied better than any other Cuban creator of his time.
In this way - for his vital and artistic pioneering, for the renovation that his work brought in its time, and for the permanency that it has conserved - the occasion of the centennial that approaches could well be apropos to again put into circulation all of his writings - maybe an edition of his complete works. We could recognize him, once again, for his literary greatness and the revolutionary role that he played in the cultural life of his land, “surrounded by water everywhere,” the small country where Virgilio Piñera was born, lived, enjoyed, suffered and died.
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