# Mariano Brull Caballero

**Date of birth:** February 24, 1891

**Date of death:** June 8, 1956

**Categories:** Arts, literature, diplomat, translator, Society, lawyer

A representative poet of Cuban avant-gardism in the 1930s.

Mariano Brull was born in Camagüey. While still very young, he was moved to Spain. Upon his return, as an adolescent, he studied secondary education and began publishing his first poems in magazines from his hometown. In 1913, he graduated with a Doctor of Law degree from the University of La Habana. He practiced his profession for several years (1913-1917). He was part of, from 1914 to 1915, the small group gathered around Pedro Henríquez Ureña. In 1917, he was appointed second secretary at the Cuban Legation in Washington. He also served in the diplomatic service in Peru, Belgium, Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy, Canada, and Uruguay.

He collaborated in El Fígaro, Gaceta del Caribe, Espuela de Plata, Clavileño, and Orígenes. He is considered a translator of Paul Valéry, whose two major poems, The Graveyard by the Sea (Paris, 1930) and The Young Fate (Eds. Orígenes, La Habana, 1949), he brought into Spanish after long and patient work. He also translated Joyce Kilmer, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Stéphane Mallarmé, and other authors.

He was a lecturer and wrote, among other works, an analysis of Martí's poetry; he left unpublished the essay "Poetry as Secret Experience." He participated very actively in UNESCO cultural tasks.

Mariano Brull is representative of Cuban avant-gardism in the 1930s. His work was framed within the pure poetry current, one of the three tendencies (along with social poetry and Black poetry) through which this movement would be expressed, together with Emilio Ballagas, Eugenio Florit, and Ramón Guirao.

Pure poetry (a term coined in France around 1925 to designate a poetry that, according to Valéry, suppresses prosaic elements and leaves only that which cannot be said in prose) appealed to perfection and formal exactness: beautiful and slender forms (the sonnet in classical form and regular verse, especially the hendecasyllable, for its traditional balance) and subjects drawn from the world of perfection, of intrinsic beauty.

Nourished by European culture, himself residing in Europe during that time, Mariano Brull received direct influence from the work of the French "pure poets." Poems in Waning (1928) initiated in Cuba the cultivation of pure poetry and his example was decisive for the poets who, for a time, expressed themselves in that mode. Poems from this book had already appeared in Social (1926) and Revista de Avance (1927). One of them ("I am going to the sea of June") was included in the anthology Modern Poetry in Cuba, published in 1926 by Félix Lizaso and José Antonio Fernández de Castro. Juan Marinello called Brull "the Cuban best endowed and disposed for this poetry," and Cintio Vitier has written that "his work will be defined by the symbols he uses: the nude before the mirror, the unknown rose, the phantom of ungraspable time, the eve of the I and the world; and by the capacity for sensory suggestion of his word."

These characteristics, as well as his "desire for intellective beauty," appear in Poems in Waning. The aura of serenity contrasts sharply with avant-garde fury, yet finding in the book audacities tangent to those of that movement (such as, for example, a constant use of metaphors, frequently placed between dashes, as a means of amplifying the concept: "Ash of sky –light-"; "Stone, –stump of wings-"; "The dust –ethereal ash-"; "...the flowers –invisible seraphim suspended").

According to Roberto Fernández Retamar, the most outstanding characteristic of Poems in Waning is the presence of a verbal freedom that, by abandoning the logical and affective sense of words, reduces them to their pure sonorous value and gives rise to what Alfonso Reyes called "jitanjáfora" (a term taken from Brull himself) to designate a certain tropological manifestation proper to avant-gardes, and of which the poem Verdehalago is exemplary.

Eluding the subject as much as possible, thinning it in favor of the formal, Brull creates this "oral babbling," which considerably influenced Cuban poetry —and even foreign poetry— of the era. The jitanjaforic play, in one form or another, was maintained in his remaining books, presided over by the same sense of selection of themes, forms, and words.

His remaining collections were Round Song (1934), Solo de rosa (1941), three books published in French and Spanish bilingual editions, Poèmes (1939), Temps en Peine. Tiempo en pena (1950), and Rien que ... (Nothing but ...)(1954).

He had already published The House of Silence (1916), still in the orbit of postmodernism, and Quelques poèmes (Brussels, 1926), a book of poems translated into French. This, together with the translation of Valéry's monumental works, gave him a solid literary reputation in the Spanish and French-speaking world as one of the most brilliant writers of the Latin American avant-garde.

He died in La Habana on June 8, 1956.