The Metronome of the Cuban Soul
by Nancy Naomi Carlson & Esperanza Hope Snyder
The place that Cuban poetry holds in the landscape of Latin American literature written in Spanish is marked by the voices of Cuban poets living not only in Havana and the island but also living abroad. The critically acclaimed poets represented in this folio are no exception, and are diverse in age, gender, politics and worldview.
Like other Latin American poets, these Cuban poets honor the past while considering the present and glancing towards the future, drawing on universal themes of distance, isolation, feelings of displacement, memory, love, and longing. For example, Reina María Rodríguez, in her poem “Objects for Surviving Death,” mentions nineteenth-century poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s poem, “Upon Departure,” an ode to Cuba. Some of Amando Fernandez’s poems bring to mind works by Vallejo and Rubén Darío. The poets in this folio write with urgency about the present, adding their voices to the chorus of Latin American poets who, like Guerra and Hondal, grew up in the seventies, and as a result face a different Cuba, a different Latin America, a different world. These Cuban poets are unsure about the future. They don’t shy away from writing about death, yet cling to Fernández’s “vast sea of hope,” Víctor Rodríguez Núñez’s spider, “sure something was not in vain,” and Hondal’s scratch in the record that “makes its own music.”
Indeed, as Latin American scholar Ilan Stavans observed, “Poetry is the metronome of the Cuban soul.” We hope you enjoy this selection of soulful Cuban poetry!
NNC & EHS
Nancy Naomi Carlson has received two literature translation fellowships from the NEA, and her translations have been finalists for the BTBA and the CLMP Firecracker Awards. She is a poet, translator, essayist, and translation editor for On the Seawall, and has authored twelve titles (eight translated). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019) was named “New & Noteworthy” by the New York Times, and her translation of Mauritian writer Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude was published by Seagull Books in February 2021. Her co-edited anthology, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press), was also published this year, as well as her translation of Congolese Alain Mabanckou’s As Long As Trees Take Root in the Earth (Seagull). An interview of her as a poet-translator appeared in AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle (February, 2021).
Esperanza Hope Snyder is a native of Bogotá, Colombia. Her poems and translations have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry Northwest, Blackbird and other journals. Former poet laureate of Shepherdstown, West Virginia and Poet in Residence at Shepherd University, she’s assistant director for Bread Loaf in Sicily and co-coordinator of the Lorca Prize. Her poetry book, Esperanza and Hope (Sheep Meadow Press) was published in 2018.