Mariano Brull
Encyclopedia
Mariano Brull Caballero was a Cuban poet usually associated with the French Symbolist movement. Two Symbolists who strongly influenced him were Stéphane Mallarmé
and Paul Valéry
. Among Cuban poets of the first half of the 20th century he was the most outstanding of those who wrote poetry
for poetry's sake, as opposed to poetry that addressed social issues or poetry that was inspired by the culture of Cubans of African descent. Because of his interest in the sounds of words, he is known for a type of poetry called "jitanjáfora" in which the words are virtually meaningless, their sounds all-important. A diplomat by profession, he lived many years in various countries of Europe and the Americas.
, in eastern Cuba
, where his father, Miguel Brull, a Spanish army officer, was stationed. His mother, Celia Caballero, was descended from a family that had resided in Cuba for many generations.
(a Spanish colony on the north coast of Africa
) and Málaga
(a city in southern Spain
). It was during his teenage years, as a student in Camagüey, that he discovered his passion for poetry. He and other students founded a short-lived magazine for which they wrote poems and essays. Eagerly reading all the poetry he could, young Brull was especially struck by the work of the French Symbolist poets.
In 1908 he moved to Havana
where he attended the university, graduating with a Doctor of Law degree at age 22. He worked in a law office but also wrote poetry for the magazine El Fígaro. During 1914 and 1915 he was a member of the small group that formed around the Dominican literary critic, Pedro Henríquez Ureña
. Henríquez, believing Brull had a future as a poet, became his mentor, introducing him to editors and suggesting he read poets whom Brull was not familiar with.
In 1916 Brull published his first book of poetry, La casa del silencio. Shortly afterwards he married Adela Baralt and, switching careers, entered the Cuban diplomatic service. Brull was determined to leave Cuba where, exhausted by years fighting for independence and preoccupied by problems facing any new country, the arts were confused and anemic, uninterested in the great experiments (Cubism
, futurism
, etc.) taking place in Europe.
, the first two countries he was sent to as a diplomat were the United States
and Peru
. In the mid 20s he was stationed in Madrid
. There he had the good fortune to participate in the reunions of the literary cafés frequented by many of the best poets Spain was to produce in the 20th century: Federico García Lorca
, Rafael Alberti
, Jorge Guillén
, Vicente Aleixandre
, and many others. While in Madrid, some of Brull's early poetry was published in Paris
in a French translation.
In 1923 Brull joined about 60 young professionals of Havana who decided to take a public stance against the reigning passivity and mediocrity in politics and culture. Called El Grupo Minorista (the Minority Group), they demanded an end to years of cultural backwardness and an aggressive affirmation of the new artistic tendencies coming out of Europe. In politics, they denounced dictatorships and called for the formation of a Cuban government more responsive to the people.
In 1928 he published his second book of poetry, Poemas en menguante. Though also published in Paris, where he was now living, it was written in Spanish. All of his books were small editions for friends and family, paid for out of his pocket.
The Brulls lived in Paris from 1927 to 1934 with only two interruptions: a year, each, in Berne and Havana. The return of the Brulls to Havana coincided with numerous riots and demonstrations as students clashed with the police of the government of President Gerardo Machado
, an increasingly ruthless dictator
.
Brull spent the Great Depression
back in Paris. Two or three times a year found him traveling. He frequently visited Havana, on business; southern Spain, the land of his childhood; and Mexico City
where he called on his friends Gabriela Mistral
, the Chilean poetess, Alfonso Reyes
, the Mexican man-of-letters, and others.
In 1934 his third book of poetry, Canto redondo, was brought out in Paris. He was stationed in Rome
between 1934 and 1937 where fascism
was alive and thriving.
After moving to Brussels
(for the second time) at the end of the 1930s, Brull was in charge of attending to the many German Jews
who, seeking visas
to emigrate, had lined up before the legations and embassies of numerous countries. During these years he was Cuba's delegate to the XVII Reunion of the Assembly of the League of Nations
and, also, Commissioner for the repatriation of Cubans fleeing the Spanish Civil War
. Brull had decided that an all-European war was imminent—though most of his colleagues and friends disagreed—and pressured the Ministry to be sent back to Havana. He left in June, 1939. The ship carrying all of the Brull's household effects to Cuba, a year later, was torpedoed by the Germans and sank.
In 1939, a bilingual (French-Spanish) book, Poëmes, came out in Paris, with a preface written by one of the greatest literary figures of France at the time, Paul Valéry. Brull worked for many years on a translation into Spanish of Valéry's most famous, and difficult, poems: "Le Cimetiére Marin" (The Graveyard by the Sea) and "La Jeune Parque" (The Young Fate).
In Cuba, Brull was one of the principal organizers of a conference of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, held in 1941. This organization was made up of major intellectuals who believed that the interchange of ideas would help lead to a solution to the tension of the 1930s and the violence of the Second World War. Brull admired people who were capable of both action and thought. He had no use for the static attitude of Rodin
´s famous statue, "The Thinker". Brull's hero was the Cuban journalist and poet, José Martí
, who was responsible for organizing the Cuban resistance to Spain and died in a skirmish with Spanish soldiers during the War of Independence.
His fifth book of poetry, Solo de rosa, appeared. His poems also were printed in the foremost literary publications: Social, Gaceta del Caribe, Espuela de Plata, Clavileño, Orígenes and El Fígaro. He had long conversations with the exiled Spanish poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez
, who wrote a similar type of poetry.
During the Second World War, Brull was stationed in Washington, D.C.
, and in 1945 was sent to Ottawa
to establish the first Cuban diplomatic mission in Canada
.
In Brussels, once more, in 1950, he published Temps en peine. Tiempo en pena, a bilingual edition. Here, too, his wife died after many years of fighting cancer
.
His last post was as Cuban ambassador to Uruguay
. However, he refused to comply with an order from the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista
, and he resigned abruptly, ending a career of 47 years in the Cuban diplomatic service. That same year (1954) the final book of poems he would publish, Rien que... (Nada más que...), came out in Paris.
weakened him bit by bit and eventually left him in a coma
. He died at the age of 65 in 1956.
modernismo
, though it has its share of intimate, Symbolist influence and a touch of tropical romanticism
. Already one finds themes that would stay with him always: the ideal of beauty and the exploration of the interior world of one’s heart as an escape from the ungrateful reality of the world, of time and of history.
Evident is the influence of the Spaniard, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and the Mexican, Enrique González Martínez
. But these poems are the works of an apprentice. Nine years pass between the publication of his first and second collections of poetry, years in which he matured, especially after he arrived in Europe.
In his second book, Poemas en menguante, Brull embraces Symbolism (pure poetry) though the poems show him still struggling to assimilate the new style completely. He finds himself immersed in the heated discussion of the poets of his generation as to whether Symbolism, art as pure abstraction
, meant the dehumanization
of art. Brull made clear that poetry was the purification of thought and form, but never abstraction. Nevertheless, Symbolism and dehumanization were firmly linked in the minds of many. Harsh criticism of Symbolism was heard frequently, including in Cuba.
of the Spanish poetic tradition—a source that attracted other poets writing in Spanish, most famously García Lorca. Similar experiments involving playing with the sounds of words were to be found in Italian, German and English literature of the 1920s and before.
Brull's creativity involving the use of sounds, through tongue-twisters and various phonetic experiments, could create a world of “magical enchantment.” These sounds and lexicological permutations combined, at times, to reach a level of senselessness which resulted in poetry that has come to be known as “jitanjáfora” after the use of this word in Brull's poem “Filiflama…”, a poem entirely made up of invented words.
Yet such an extreme interest in sound was but one strand in Brull's poetry. The “jitanjáfora” was “a verbal joke, created by Brull at the margin of the main body of his work, but as an extreme consequence of this work’s development”.
and metaphors abundantly, there are features of his work that differentiate it from the work of others. These include:
Brull favored free verse
, followed by blank verse
, though he occasionally turned to the sonnet
and other poetic forms. His poems are usually short, and the total number of poems he wrote was rather limited, both rare attributes in comparison with most Hispanic poets.
in Brull's poetry, his preferred symbol for “a standard of perfection and permanence in a transitory world.”
Mallarmé had defined a flower as the absence of the stem and leaves, his way of stating that the finality of art is the concentration on the essence
. No other Cuban poet went as far as Brull in immersing himself in this conception of poetry. But his Latin American origin do not allow him to forget the stems and leaves altogether. Brull's contribution to the poetry of Cuba is this counterpoint between the concrete and the ideal.
An equilibrium between the sensual and the abstract is most fully reached in Solo de rosas, a collection of poems in which the poet praises the rose in its pure essence, fragile and wondrous, and not corrupted by the passage of time.
Epitafio de la Rosa (Epitaph For a Rose)
, possibly intensified by personal tragedy (the death of his wife) and the world around him seemingly falling apart (the Spanish Civil War followed by the Second World War).
Throughout the years one can find, beneath the formal and expressive clarity, Brull's increasing concern of what he saw as a world in permanent deterioration. The roots of this desolation are evident in his first poems in which absence and silence—often depicted as quietness—are present yet any discomfort is dispelled by the vision of ideal beauty. By the 1950s, absence is no longer a friendly notion as it veers into nothingness. Brull is consumed by a tragic vision of life in which all things, including beauty, are conceived of as subject to destruction or, a word he often chose, ruin. Once time has done its task, only nothingness remains. “Never had Cuban poetry reached so far into desperation with such discreteness and solitude.”
“Prose is written with the treasure of knowledge whereas poetry is written with the treasure of ignorance.”
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé , whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.-Biography:Stéphane...
and Paul Valéry
Paul Valéry
Ambroise-Paul-Toussaint-Jules Valéry was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. His interests were sufficiently broad that he can be classified as a polymath...
. Among Cuban poets of the first half of the 20th century he was the most outstanding of those who wrote poetry
Poetry
Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...
for poetry's sake, as opposed to poetry that addressed social issues or poetry that was inspired by the culture of Cubans of African descent. Because of his interest in the sounds of words, he is known for a type of poetry called "jitanjáfora" in which the words are virtually meaningless, their sounds all-important. A diplomat by profession, he lived many years in various countries of Europe and the Americas.
Biography
Brull was born in CamagüeyCamagüey
Camagüey is a city and municipality in central Cuba and is the nation's third largest city. It is the capital of the Camagüey Province.After almost continuous attacks from pirates the original city was moved inland in 1528.The new city was built with a confusing lay-out of winding alleys that made...
, in eastern Cuba
Cuba
The Republic of Cuba is an island nation in the Caribbean. The nation of Cuba consists of the main island of Cuba, the Isla de la Juventud, and several archipelagos. Havana is the largest city in Cuba and the country's capital. Santiago de Cuba is the second largest city...
, where his father, Miguel Brull, a Spanish army officer, was stationed. His mother, Celia Caballero, was descended from a family that had resided in Cuba for many generations.
Early life
As a child he lived in CeutaCeuta
Ceuta is an autonomous city of Spain and an exclave located on the north coast of North Africa surrounded by Morocco. Separated from the Iberian peninsula by the Strait of Gibraltar, Ceuta lies on the border of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Ceuta along with the other Spanish...
(a Spanish colony on the north coast of Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
) and Málaga
Málaga
Málaga is a city and a municipality in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia, Spain. With a population of 568,507 in 2010, it is the second most populous city of Andalusia and the sixth largest in Spain. This is the southernmost large city in Europe...
(a city in southern Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
). It was during his teenage years, as a student in Camagüey, that he discovered his passion for poetry. He and other students founded a short-lived magazine for which they wrote poems and essays. Eagerly reading all the poetry he could, young Brull was especially struck by the work of the French Symbolist poets.
In 1908 he moved to Havana
Havana
Havana is the capital city, province, major port, and leading commercial centre of Cuba. The city proper has a population of 2.1 million inhabitants, and it spans a total of — making it the largest city in the Caribbean region, and the most populous...
where he attended the university, graduating with a Doctor of Law degree at age 22. He worked in a law office but also wrote poetry for the magazine El Fígaro. During 1914 and 1915 he was a member of the small group that formed around the Dominican literary critic, Pedro Henríquez Ureña
Pedro Henríquez Ureña
Pedro Henríquez Ureña was a Dominican intellectual, essayist, philosopher, humanist, philologist and literary critic.-Early works:Pedro Henríquez Ureña was born in Santo Domingo, the third of four siblings...
. Henríquez, believing Brull had a future as a poet, became his mentor, introducing him to editors and suggesting he read poets whom Brull was not familiar with.
In 1916 Brull published his first book of poetry, La casa del silencio. Shortly afterwards he married Adela Baralt and, switching careers, entered the Cuban diplomatic service. Brull was determined to leave Cuba where, exhausted by years fighting for independence and preoccupied by problems facing any new country, the arts were confused and anemic, uninterested in the great experiments (Cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
, futurism
Futurism
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.Futurism or futurist may refer to:* Afrofuturism, an African-American and African diaspora subculture* Cubo-Futurism* Ego-Futurism...
, etc.) taking place in Europe.
Diplomatic life
Though impatient to reach EuropeEurope
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
, the first two countries he was sent to as a diplomat were the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and Peru
Peru
Peru , officially the Republic of Peru , is a country in western South America. It is bordered on the north by Ecuador and Colombia, on the east by Brazil, on the southeast by Bolivia, on the south by Chile, and on the west by the Pacific Ocean....
. In the mid 20s he was stationed in Madrid
Madrid
Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...
. There he had the good fortune to participate in the reunions of the literary cafés frequented by many of the best poets Spain was to produce in the 20th century: Federico García Lorca
Federico García Lorca
Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads...
, Rafael Alberti
Rafael Alberti
Rafael Alberti Merello was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27....
, Jorge Guillén
Jorge Guillén
Jorge Guillén y Álvarez was a Spanish poet, a member of the Generation of '27.-Biography:Jorge Guillén was born in Valladolid. His life paralleled that of his friend Pedro Salinas, whom he succeeded as a Spanish teaching assistant at the Collège de Sorbonne in the University of Paris from 1917 to...
, Vicente Aleixandre
Vicente Aleixandre
Vicente Pío Marcelino Cirilo Aleixandre y Merlo was a Spanish poet who was born in Seville. Aleixandre was a Nobel Prize laureate for Literature in 1977. He was part of the Generation of '27. He died in Madrid in 1984....
, and many others. While in Madrid, some of Brull's early poetry was published in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
in a French translation.
In 1923 Brull joined about 60 young professionals of Havana who decided to take a public stance against the reigning passivity and mediocrity in politics and culture. Called El Grupo Minorista (the Minority Group), they demanded an end to years of cultural backwardness and an aggressive affirmation of the new artistic tendencies coming out of Europe. In politics, they denounced dictatorships and called for the formation of a Cuban government more responsive to the people.
In 1928 he published his second book of poetry, Poemas en menguante. Though also published in Paris, where he was now living, it was written in Spanish. All of his books were small editions for friends and family, paid for out of his pocket.
The Brulls lived in Paris from 1927 to 1934 with only two interruptions: a year, each, in Berne and Havana. The return of the Brulls to Havana coincided with numerous riots and demonstrations as students clashed with the police of the government of President Gerardo Machado
Gerardo Machado
Gerardo Machado y Morales was President of Cuba and a general of the Cuban War of Independence...
, an increasingly ruthless dictator
Dictator
A dictator is a ruler who assumes sole and absolute power but without hereditary ascension such as an absolute monarch. When other states call the head of state of a particular state a dictator, that state is called a dictatorship...
.
Brull spent the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
back in Paris. Two or three times a year found him traveling. He frequently visited Havana, on business; southern Spain, the land of his childhood; and Mexico City
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
where he called on his friends Gabriela Mistral
Gabriela Mistral
Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila de María del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat, and feminist who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945...
, the Chilean poetess, Alfonso Reyes
Alfonso Reyes
Alfonso Reyes Ochoa was a Mexican writer, philosopher and diplomat.-Early life:Alfonso Reyes parents were Bernardo Reyes and Aurelia Ochoa...
, the Mexican man-of-letters, and others.
In 1934 his third book of poetry, Canto redondo, was brought out in Paris. He was stationed in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
between 1934 and 1937 where fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
was alive and thriving.
After moving to Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
(for the second time) at the end of the 1930s, Brull was in charge of attending to the many German Jews
Jews
The Jews , also known as the Jewish people, are a nation and ethnoreligious group originating in the Israelites or Hebrews of the Ancient Near East. The Jewish ethnicity, nationality, and religion are strongly interrelated, as Judaism is the traditional faith of the Jewish nation...
who, seeking visas
Visa (document)
A visa is a document showing that a person is authorized to enter the territory for which it was issued, subject to permission of an immigration official at the time of actual entry. The authorization may be a document, but more commonly it is a stamp endorsed in the applicant's passport...
to emigrate, had lined up before the legations and embassies of numerous countries. During these years he was Cuba's delegate to the XVII Reunion of the Assembly of the League of Nations
League of Nations
The League of Nations was an intergovernmental organization founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. It was the first permanent international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace...
and, also, Commissioner for the repatriation of Cubans fleeing the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
. Brull had decided that an all-European war was imminent—though most of his colleagues and friends disagreed—and pressured the Ministry to be sent back to Havana. He left in June, 1939. The ship carrying all of the Brull's household effects to Cuba, a year later, was torpedoed by the Germans and sank.
In 1939, a bilingual (French-Spanish) book, Poëmes, came out in Paris, with a preface written by one of the greatest literary figures of France at the time, Paul Valéry. Brull worked for many years on a translation into Spanish of Valéry's most famous, and difficult, poems: "Le Cimetiére Marin" (The Graveyard by the Sea) and "La Jeune Parque" (The Young Fate).
In Cuba, Brull was one of the principal organizers of a conference of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, held in 1941. This organization was made up of major intellectuals who believed that the interchange of ideas would help lead to a solution to the tension of the 1930s and the violence of the Second World War. Brull admired people who were capable of both action and thought. He had no use for the static attitude of Rodin
Rodin
- People :* Auguste Rodin , French sculptor, for whom is named:** The Musée Rodin in Paris, France** The Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA** The Rodin Gallery in Seoul, South Korea** Rodin , a crater on the Moon...
´s famous statue, "The Thinker". Brull's hero was the Cuban journalist and poet, José Martí
José Martí
José Julián Martí Pérez was a Cuban national hero and an important figure in Latin American literature. In his short life he was a poet, an essayist, a journalist, a revolutionary philosopher, a translator, a professor, a publisher, and a political theorist. He was also a part of the Cuban...
, who was responsible for organizing the Cuban resistance to Spain and died in a skirmish with Spanish soldiers during the War of Independence.
His fifth book of poetry, Solo de rosa, appeared. His poems also were printed in the foremost literary publications: Social, Gaceta del Caribe, Espuela de Plata, Clavileño, Orígenes and El Fígaro. He had long conversations with the exiled Spanish poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón Jiménez
Juan Ramón Jiménez Mantecón was a Spanish poet, a prolific writer who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1956. One of Jiménez's most important contributions to modern poetry was his advocacy of the French concept of "pure poetry."-Biography:Jiménez was born in Moguer, near Huelva, in...
, who wrote a similar type of poetry.
During the Second World War, Brull was stationed in Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
, and in 1945 was sent to Ottawa
Ottawa
Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...
to establish the first Cuban diplomatic mission in Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
.
In Brussels, once more, in 1950, he published Temps en peine. Tiempo en pena, a bilingual edition. Here, too, his wife died after many years of fighting cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
.
His last post was as Cuban ambassador to Uruguay
Uruguay
Uruguay ,officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay,sometimes the Eastern Republic of Uruguay; ) is a country in the southeastern part of South America. It is home to some 3.5 million people, of whom 1.8 million live in the capital Montevideo and its metropolitan area...
. However, he refused to comply with an order from the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista
Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar was the United States-aligned Cuban President, dictator and military leader who served as the leader of Cuba from 1933 to 1944 and from 1952 to 1959, before being overthrown as a result of the Cuban Revolution....
, and he resigned abruptly, ending a career of 47 years in the Cuban diplomatic service. That same year (1954) the final book of poems he would publish, Rien que... (Nada más que...), came out in Paris.
Final years
Back in Havana, he turned to modernizing the cattle ranch he had inherited from his mother. But a growing brain tumorBrain tumor
A brain tumor is an intracranial solid neoplasm, a tumor within the brain or the central spinal canal.Brain tumors include all tumors inside the cranium or in the central spinal canal...
weakened him bit by bit and eventually left him in a coma
Coma
In medicine, a coma is a state of unconsciousness, lasting more than 6 hours in which a person cannot be awakened, fails to respond normally to painful stimuli, light or sound, lacks a normal sleep-wake cycle and does not initiate voluntary actions. A person in a state of coma is described as...
. He died at the age of 65 in 1956.
Beginnings
Brull's first book, La casa del silencio, is a good example of HispanicHispanic
Hispanic is a term that originally denoted a relationship to Hispania, which is to say the Iberian Peninsula: Andorra, Gibraltar, Portugal and Spain. During the Modern Era, Hispanic sometimes takes on a more limited meaning, particularly in the United States, where the term means a person of ...
modernismo
Modernismo
Modernismo is Spanish for modernism, however the term Modernism also indicates a more specific art movement:* Modernismo refers to a Spanish-American literary movement, best exemplified by Rubén Darío...
, though it has its share of intimate, Symbolist influence and a touch of tropical romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
. Already one finds themes that would stay with him always: the ideal of beauty and the exploration of the interior world of one’s heart as an escape from the ungrateful reality of the world, of time and of history.
Evident is the influence of the Spaniard, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and the Mexican, Enrique González Martínez
Enrique González Martínez
Enrique González Martínez was a Mexican poet, diplomat, surgeon and obstetrician. His poetry is considered to be primarily Modernist in nature, with elements of French symbolism....
. But these poems are the works of an apprentice. Nine years pass between the publication of his first and second collections of poetry, years in which he matured, especially after he arrived in Europe.
In his second book, Poemas en menguante, Brull embraces Symbolism (pure poetry) though the poems show him still struggling to assimilate the new style completely. He finds himself immersed in the heated discussion of the poets of his generation as to whether Symbolism, art as pure abstraction
Abstraction
Abstraction is a process by which higher concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal concepts, first principles, or other methods....
, meant the dehumanization
Dehumanization
Dehumanization is to make somebody less human by taking away his or her individuality, the creative and interesting aspects of his or her personality, or his or her compassion and sensitivity towards others. Dehumanization may be directed by an organization or may be the composite of individual...
of art. Brull made clear that poetry was the purification of thought and form, but never abstraction. Nevertheless, Symbolism and dehumanization were firmly linked in the minds of many. Harsh criticism of Symbolism was heard frequently, including in Cuba.
Sound
A cornerstone of Brull's poetry is the word as sound material. This interest in sound can be found in the efforts of Mallarmé and Valéry to achieve pure poetry but also in the neo-popular romancesRomances
Romances is the fifteenth studio album by Mexican singer Luis Miguel, released on August 12, 1997, by Warner Music Latina. It is the third album of the Romance series, in which Miguel covers Latin songs from 1940 to 1978...
of the Spanish poetic tradition—a source that attracted other poets writing in Spanish, most famously García Lorca. Similar experiments involving playing with the sounds of words were to be found in Italian, German and English literature of the 1920s and before.
Brull's creativity involving the use of sounds, through tongue-twisters and various phonetic experiments, could create a world of “magical enchantment.” These sounds and lexicological permutations combined, at times, to reach a level of senselessness which resulted in poetry that has come to be known as “jitanjáfora” after the use of this word in Brull's poem “Filiflama…”, a poem entirely made up of invented words.
- Filiflama alabe cundre
- ala olalúnea alífera
- alveola jitanjáfora
- liris salumba salífera.
- Olivia oleo olorife
- alalai cánfora sandra
- milingítara girófora
- zumbra ulalindre calandra.
Yet such an extreme interest in sound was but one strand in Brull's poetry. The “jitanjáfora” was “a verbal joke, created by Brull at the margin of the main body of his work, but as an extreme consequence of this work’s development”.
Childhood
Brull revealed an interest in childhood in a number of his poems through the subject matter or through the use of language and rhythms associated with children’s verses or both. The verses he learned in southern Spain, as a boy, had a lasting impact on him. These verses were part of the traditional, popular poetry that was so appreciated by his generation of poets.Typical features
Though he used alliterationAlliteration
In language, alliteration refers to the repetition of a particular sound in the first syllables of Three or more words or phrases. Alliteration has historically developed largely through poetry, in which it more narrowly refers to the repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to...
and metaphors abundantly, there are features of his work that differentiate it from the work of others. These include:
- rare word associations
- using a word twice in the same line but in totally different ways
- punning
- combining or coupling words that mean the opposite or clash in their meanings (“the melody of the perfume”), usually placed within dashes, and
- illogical sound games and onomatopoeia where one sees the influence of futurism and Dadaism.
Brull favored free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
, followed by blank verse
Blank verse
Blank verse is poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. It has been described as "probably the most common and influential form that English poetry has taken since the sixteenth century" and Paul Fussell has claimed that "about three-quarters of all English poetry is in blank verse."The first...
, though he occasionally turned to the sonnet
Sonnet
A sonnet is one of several forms of poetry that originate in Europe, mainly Provence and Italy. A sonnet commonly has 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound"...
and other poetic forms. His poems are usually short, and the total number of poems he wrote was rather limited, both rare attributes in comparison with most Hispanic poets.
The rose
The rose is the principal motifMotif (narrative)
In narrative, a motif is any recurring element that has symbolic significance in a story. Through its repetition, a motif can help produce other narrative aspects such as theme or mood....
in Brull's poetry, his preferred symbol for “a standard of perfection and permanence in a transitory world.”
Mallarmé had defined a flower as the absence of the stem and leaves, his way of stating that the finality of art is the concentration on the essence
Essence
In philosophy, essence is the attribute or set of attributes that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity. Essence is contrasted with accident: a property that the object or substance has contingently, without...
. No other Cuban poet went as far as Brull in immersing himself in this conception of poetry. But his Latin American origin do not allow him to forget the stems and leaves altogether. Brull's contribution to the poetry of Cuba is this counterpoint between the concrete and the ideal.
An equilibrium between the sensual and the abstract is most fully reached in Solo de rosas, a collection of poems in which the poet praises the rose in its pure essence, fragile and wondrous, and not corrupted by the passage of time.
Epitafio de la Rosa (Epitaph For a Rose)
- Rompo una rosa y no te encuentro.
- Al viento, así, columnas deshojadas,
- palacio de la rosa en ruinas.
- Ahora—rosa imposible—empiezas:
- por agujas de aire entretejida
- al mar de la delicia intacta,
- donde todas las rosas
- --antes que rosa—
- belleza son sin cárcel de belleza.
- (I take apart a rose and I don't find you.
- To the wind, thus, columns of floating petals,
- the palace of the rose in ruins.
- Now—impossible rose—you begin:
- by needles of interwoven air
- to the sea of the intact delight,
- where all the roses of the world
- --before they were a rose—
- are beautiful without the prison of beauty.)
Nothingness
In his last works, Tiempo en pena and Nada más que…, Brull's poetry takes on a melancholy, somber and reflective tone, that of a journey toward the black hole of existentialismExistentialism
Existentialism is a term applied to a school of 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual...
, possibly intensified by personal tragedy (the death of his wife) and the world around him seemingly falling apart (the Spanish Civil War followed by the Second World War).
Throughout the years one can find, beneath the formal and expressive clarity, Brull's increasing concern of what he saw as a world in permanent deterioration. The roots of this desolation are evident in his first poems in which absence and silence—often depicted as quietness—are present yet any discomfort is dispelled by the vision of ideal beauty. By the 1950s, absence is no longer a friendly notion as it veers into nothingness. Brull is consumed by a tragic vision of life in which all things, including beauty, are conceived of as subject to destruction or, a word he often chose, ruin. Once time has done its task, only nothingness remains. “Never had Cuban poetry reached so far into desperation with such discreteness and solitude.”
Quotes
"La prosa es escrita con el tesoro del conocimiento mientras que la poesía es escrita con el tesoro de la ignorancia."“Prose is written with the treasure of knowledge whereas poetry is written with the treasure of ignorance.”
Books of poetry
- La casa del silencio (1916)
- Poemas en menguante (1928)
- Canto redondo (1934)
- Poëmes (1939) (Bilingual anthology: Spanish-French)
- Solo de rosa (1941)
- Temps en peine/Tiempo en pena (1950)
- Rien que ... (Nada más que ...) (1954)
Further reading (sources not mentioned in references)
- Gastón Baquero. Mariano Brull. La casa del silencio (Antología de su obra:1916-1954) (1976).
- Diego García Elio. Una antología de poesía cubana (1984).
- Ricardo Larraga. Mariano Brull y la poesía pura en Cuba (1994).
External links
- http://www.cubaliteraria.com/autor/mariano_brull/index.htm Brull at CubaLiteraria.com