Fina García Marruz turned 98 years old

May 27, 2021

When the Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez saw the two little sisters, he asked: "What school are these girls from?" Bella and Fina García Marruz wore similar shoes, skirts of the same cut, berets slightly tilted. They had not yet turned 20 years old. In 1941 and in the juanramonian orbit, the sisters met two friends, Cintio Vitier and Eliseo Diego. In 1946 Fina would marry Cintio and two years later, Bella married Eliseo.

There has not been a more valuable encounter of writers in the history of Cuban literature than that one. In the house of the two sisters, while courting the poets, the gatherings began of those who would end up collaborating with Revista Orígenes, founded in 1944 and directed by José Lezama Lima and José Rodríguez Feo, one of the most ambitious literary projects in Latin America. The publication, Eliseo would say, "was one of the few real things in a world of phantasmagorias" and "the discovery of a universal Cuban reality, the provocation of our hardest and most resistant substance," Cintio would add.

An entire lifetime has passed and of the people named here only Fina is physically present. She is the greatest living poet of Cuba, she just turned 98 years old in Havana and continues with rigor the mandate of her first verses: "I want to write with living silence."

Being the wife of Cintio, the sister-in-law of Eliseo Diego –both Juan Rulfo Prize winners–, the sister of Bella and the mother of two brilliant musicians, Sergio and José María Vitier, Fina has a work that is untransferably personal with some of the most beautiful poems in the Spanish language.

Reading her scant solo production –barely a dozen titles– has a physical effect: "It's not that it lacks / sound, / it's that it has / silence," she says in one of her most well-known poems dedicated to Charlot. "His suit moves me / like an obscure music / that I don't quite understand. / I touch poor word," she adds in another, where she describes one of the few known photographs of Cuban national hero José Martí. It is the physical effect of Whitman or the Old Testament, that of Campos de Castilla or Poet in New York, that of Les Fleurs du mal or Moby Dick.

Photo taken of Martí in October 1892 in Jamaica: "I touch poor word."

She is not hermetic at all and does not avoid verses with great political weight, although her three great themes are —Cintio would recall— "the intimacy of memories, the flavor of Cuban things and Catholic mysteries": "My God, you will not give to those who suffered atrociously / for justice, to those buried alive, / to those from whom you took their eyes or tore out / their testicles, to those threatened / in their most vulnerable, their wives or children, / you will not give them the fleeting glory of a name / that repeats itself vaguely in patriotic commemorations."

One must adapt one's ear to listen to Fina's voice, as when one becomes familiar with rare music and gradually becomes captivated by it. We have never heard her and we have heard her many times. She resembles no other, but we live with her. The everyday and the mystical overlap in the same poem, the intimacy of "small things" and the great questions of philosophy and religion, the sordid heaviness of solitude and the frank joy of love. Sometimes the form is contained to the conciseness of a haiku: other times it expands in the manner of Eliot or the enjambments of Whitman or the epic expanses of Derek Walcott and the free verses of José Martí, with their confidence in poetry's power to encompass the world. But in Fina there is, before any possibility of excess, an almost Franciscan restraint. "Poetry was not for me in the new unknown, but in a new dimension of the known, or perhaps, in an unknown dimension of the evident," she says.

I was fortunate to visit her house for years and publish in Juventud Rebelde unpublished texts by Cintio and several conversations, almost always with him. When Fina was given the Pablo Neruda Iberoamerican Poetry Prize in 2007, I asked her why it was so hard for her to give interviews and talk about herself: "In those cases I feel like a violinist who is asked to perform a flute concert. I communicate better with silence, without which poetry, music, and the encounter with oneself could not exist."

Thank you for all of this and congratulations, dear Fina.

By Rosa Miriam Elizalde. (Originally published in La Jornada de México)