Burnt Sugar Cana Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish
By Lori Marie Carlson and Oscar Hijuelos
4.5/5
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About this ebook
Many of these poems have never been translated into English before, and taken together they, as the editors say, "produce a vibrant, satisfying sound and vivid imagery. They allow for some understanding of modern-day preoccupations, contradictions, feelings, and attitudes considered to be Cuban." Stirring, immediate, and universal in its sensibility, Burnt Sugar is a luminous collection lovingly compiled by two of the world's foremost authorities on the subject.
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Eon guter Einblick in die Welt der kubanischen Dichtkunst. Sehr unterschiedliche Texte mit verschiedenen Themen.
Book preview
Burnt Sugar Cana Quemada - Lori Marie Carlson
Introduction
Oscar Hijuelos
As I write this introduction to Burnt Sugar, I do so with a very strong memory of how my late mother, Magdalena Torrens Hijuelos—a native of Holguín, Cuba, who’d come to the United States in the 1940s—did not for one second of her sixty years in this country ever forget, not even for a single day, what she called la gloria y belleza de Cuba.
To commemorate this, for as long as I can remember she resorted to the practice, so common to Cubans, of writing poems. Hers were sometimes simple pictures of incidents she remembered from her youth; a portrait, circa 1928, of some vain dandy, dressed entirely in white, with a crush on her who might be strolling by her house with a bouquet of carnations—ese fulano, vestido en blanco, con una vanidad profunda
; the feeling that came over her when the sunlit afternoons, moving ever so slowly and tranquilly, were suddenly disrupted by a sudden fierce downpour, un aguacero de Dios.
She loved birds, los pajaritos, that sang in her garden, and often compared herself and her female companions to them, fluttering along in life, coquettishly. Angels and flowers were rife in her poems as well. One of them went:
Este es mi libro
Este es mi sueño
Esta es la flor
Que perfume mi alrededor
Este es el niño
Que llora porque
Sueña está perdido
Este es el agua
Que corre sin
Saber que es un río
Este es mi corazón
Que gime y
Ríe a la vez
Porque fue martirizado
Hoy no sufro
No padezco
Sólo confío en Dios
This is my book
This is my dream
This is the flower
that perfumes my room
This is the boy
who weeps
because he dreams he is lost
This is the water
that flows without knowing it is a river
This is my heart that laughs and moans
Because He was martyred
I do not suffer
nor do I