José María Andrés Fernando Lezama Lima

Cuban poet, narrator and essayist, he is one of the most significant writers of Latin American literature of the present century.

Lezama was born in the military camp of Columbia, in La Habana, son of José María Lezama y Rodda, colonel of artillery and engineer, and of Rosa Lima. In 1920 he enters the Mimó school, where he concludes his primary studies in 1921. He begins his secondary education studies at the Instituto de La Habana, where he graduates as a Bachelor of Science and Letters in 1928. A year later he will begin his law studies at the Universidad de La Habana.
He worked in a law firm and subsequently was a civil servant.

He directed numerous magazines, among them Orígenes (1944-1956), which would greatly influence Cuban cultural life. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, he held various positions related to the world of publishing, although he would eventually isolate himself and dedicate himself entirely to his literary work, from 1961 until his death.

His first book of poems was Muerte de Narciso (1937), and with it he places the reader before a limit situation of reality whose dismantling gives rise to another reality artistically enhanced and reconstructed within a fascinating and baroque mythology.

There follow, among other poetic works, all influenced by the style rich in metaphors and full of distortions of Góngora, Enemigo rumor (1941), Aventuras sigilosas (1945), Dador (1960) and Fragmentos a su imán, published posthumously in 1977, in which he continues to demonstrate that poetry is a risky adventure.

In 1966 he publishes the novel Paradiso, where all his poetic trajectory of baroque, symbolic, initiatory character converges. The protagonist, José Cemí, immediately refers to the author in his external and internal becoming on the path to his conversion into a poet. Paradiso was classified by Cuban authorities two years later as "pornographic" due to the theme of homosexuality in its plot and this served as a prelude to the accusation of counterrevolutionary activities in 1971 that embittered the last years of his existence.

The Cuban, with its verbal deformations, plays a fundamental role in the work, as occurs in his collection of essays La cantidad hechizada (1970). Oppiano Licario is an unfinished novel, appearing posthumously in 1977, which develops the figure of the character that already appeared in Paradiso and from which it takes its title.

Lezama Lima has influenced immensely numerous Spanish American and Spanish writers, some of whom came to consider him their master. His cultured work is saturated with keys, enigmas, allusions, parables and allegories that allude to a secret, intimate reality, and at the same time, ambiguous. He developed an erotics of writing, thus anticipating European currents of structuralist stylistics. His essays are imaginative, poetic, open and constitute a recreation of texts and visions.

He died on August 9, 1976 as a result of complications from asthma that he suffered from childhood. Despite his limited editorial distribution, the work of José Lezama Lima continues to transcend beyond time and borders. Many Cuban, Latin American and Spanish poets and narrators after him continue to acknowledge the significant influence that Lezama's proposal has had on them: the most notable case is perhaps that of Severo Sarduy, who postulated his theory of neo-baroque based on Lezama's baroque.

Being hermetic by instinct and by expressive excess, he seeks the revelation of the mystery of poetry. He was a religious poet who, like San Juan de la Cruz, makes feeling prevail over saying.

Lezama managed to return to poetry its essence, for at some point it had descended to the uselessness of used words already stripped of music. He structured a poetic system of the world without concerning himself with the difficulty that its reading entailed for all readers: he wanted to explain the knowledge of the world from the other shore, of the unknown, of the other and in that journey achieve the unveiling of a new being born of darkness: poetry.

Lezama Lima, then, does not enjoy today and perhaps never enjoyed multitudes. His work is a work for writers, who in the end are usually those who most appreciate colleagues who clear paths and open new ways or add a special timbre to what is already well known. That is what Lezama Lima achieved: baroque style raised to the cube was until him a matter of the past, a style that had as landmarks Góngora and Sor Juana and lacked cultivators closer to us in time. It was then that there appeared, almost from nowhere, the fat Lezama Lima, who linked a thick thinking of poetic images with an expression (spoken and written) not baroque, but hyperbaroque, exuberant to the point of being wild.