José Martí Reader. Jose Marti
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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