ABSTRACT

Emilio Ballagas’s first book of poems, Júbilo y fuga [Joy and Flight], appeared in 1931. This collection placed him amongst the foremost practitioners of the so called “pure” poetry, and thus a member of an innovative movement with other outstanding exponents in Cuba. These included Mariano Brull and Eugenio Florit and the movement’s theoretical bases were formulated by the Frenchman Henri Brémond. With Cuaderno de poesía negra, 1934 [Black Poetry Notebook] he ventured successfully into African-Cuban poetry, a sub-genre whose principal literary figure was Nicolás Guillén. Ballagas’s AfricanCuban poetry is restricted, in essence, to a markedly folkloric expression, though it contains social nuances. His poetic career is made up of three stages. Júbilo y fuga and Cuaderno de poesía negra correspond to the first stage, and represent, respectively, the cultured and popular aspects of “pure” poetry in Cuba. In these two initial books, the poet is essentially a voice that is trying out for the first time the joy of singing the delights of the world, with an almost childlike sensibility still innocent of passion and sexual couplings. This joy, which in his first book points towards a sensuality that the critics have called “Adam-like,” that is to say, innocent of the biblical notions of blame and punishment, turns into a real sense of pleasure in Ballagas’s African-Cuban poetry. The poet, through the vocabulary and rhythms of Cuban urban folklore, where the presence of the African tradition of nationality is strong, produces some texts where the verbal recreation broadens the repercussions of his poetic voice considerably. However, his Black poetry is no more than a pleasant parenthesis in Ballagas’s oeuvre, that achieves its first great moment of maturity in the shape of two poems in a markedly Neoromantic style: “Elegía sin nombre” [Elegy without a Name], and “Nocturno y elegía” [Nocturne and Elegy], both of which were incorporated into his book Sabor eterno, 1939 [Eternal Taste]. These poems constitute two of the most exceptional love poems in 20th-century Cuban poetry. Sabor eterno expresses, in relation to the previous stage, the moments of the fall and contrition within Ballagas’s poetry. The earlier innocent enjoyment of the senses has been transformed in Sabor eterno into knowledge, suffering, and solitude, which are reached through the experiences of love and the loss of love. The verse becomes broader and freer, and the expression carries images where the empty space and the growing presence of the night create an atmosphere that is apt for the dissolution of sensuality into loneliness. Because of its confessional style, where the “I” surrenders itself through obfuscating metaphors that constitute any given number of ways to stimulate the reader to unveil the poet’s message, making him his accomplice as well as the ultimate addressee of his voice, Sabor eterno can be placed in the line that—within the Spanish language poetry of the time—Pablo Neruda and Xavier Villaurrutia represented in Latin America, and Luis Cernuda and Vicente Aleixandre in Spain.