No sé. Lo ignoro. / Desconozco todo el tiempo que anduve
sin encontrarla nuevamente. / ¿Tal vez un siglo? Acaso.
Acaso un poco menos: noventa y nueve años.
¿O un mes? Pudiera ser. En cualquier forma,
un tiempo enorme, enorme, enorme…

Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista, Cuba National Poet, was born on July 10, 1902, in Camagüey, Cuba. He was one of the greatest authors of the Cuban arts and one of the most important person within the Spanish language. He died in Havana on July 17, 1989 after a long disease.

Love is one of the most transcendental topics in Nicolás Guillén’s poetry, sometimes more lyric and some others more realistic, but always with a magnitude that reveals the whole romantic world of his verse. Although in almost all the poet’s books you can find compositions dedicated or related to love in a way, it was not until 1964 that one of them got released dedicated exclusively to that topic. It occurred when Fayad Jamís, poet and editor, published the number 6 of Ediciones La Tertulia, Poemas de amor book, in which 24 known and unedited texts were included. El corazón con que vivo, edition to which 16 more texts were added up, appeared in 1975.

Gullén’s love poems has also been published in anthologies inside and outside Cuba, as in the famous anthology Poesias de amor hispanoamericanas, by Mario Benedetti, in which it is included the title Mi chiquita that belongs to the book Motivos de son. All this is possible, as it has been said by some intellectual people who have studied Guillén´s poetry, since his works are characterized by a diversity of topics: Eros, woman, race, sensuality and other carnalities as double moral, texts also known as madrigales, in which according to poetess Nancy Morejón… “Guillén faces the esthetical battle of the black man to recover his beauty, corrupted and demoted by the system. And the woman is the most suitable way to carry out such esthetical recognition

Tu vientre sabe más que tu cabeza / y tanto como tus muslos.
Esa es la fuerte gracia negra / de tu cuerpo desnudo.
Signo de selva el tuyo, / con tus collares rojos,
tus brazaletes de oro curvo, / y ese caimán oscuro
nadando en el Zambeze de tus ojos.

The new edition of Poemas de amor, that was published by Editorial Unión at the beginning of the new century, on the occasion of the centennial of his birthday, was prefaced and compiled by Angel Augier, poet and intellectual. The critic has considered it as the work in which the magnitude of his texts about love is best perceived, due to the appearing of all his poetic work, putting together diverse topics and styles. En algun sitio de la primavera is the name of the composition that closes this volume. This poem was written on April 1966, but does not appear publicly until 1992; since then it has been published four times in Cuba. This poem is one of Guillén’s greatest love text, it is the poem of abandon and love permanency after death, another Guillén’s great topic.

The editorial success of the anthology Poemas de amor shows that the loving work of the Poet reaches a preferable place on people and market, whether it is about the body and the thousand forms of Eros, or a private and spacious place, but it will always has its location somewhere in the springtime. Investigator Roberto Zurbano Torres wrote… “ His love poems: clear, sensitive, with an organic seduction capacity, charming and musical words, written not to be thought but to be shared, said loudly or exclaimed to someone with certain urgency or barefacedly…”

Verla partir y amarla como nunca; / seguirla con los ojos,
y ya sin ojos seguir viéndola lejos, / allá lejos, y aun seguirla
más lejos todavía, / hecha de noche,
de mordedura, beso, insomnio, / veneno, éxtasis, convulsión,
suspiro, sangre, muerte...
Hecha de esa sustancia conocida / con que amasamos una estrella


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Read some other articles about Nicolás Guillén:

Nicolás Guillén, el periodista

Nicolás, el poeta de la ardiente lira