Nicolás Guillén

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Nicolás Guillén (1942)

Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista (born July 10, 1902 in Camagüey , Cuba , † July 16, 1989 in Havana , Cuba) was a Cuban poet and writer whose works brought the long-neglected non-linguistic Afro-Cuban tradition of Cuba into literature.

Guillén saw Cuban culture as a mulatto culture and wanted to express this in his work by merging Spanish metrics with African elements. This mixture of elements of black and white Cuban cultural traditions is part of the Mulataje . By using onomatopoeic words ( Sóngoro Cosongo , Mayombe-bombe ) he tries to recreate the sound and rhythm of the son . The symphony Sensemayá by the composer Silvestre Revueltas and a composition of the same name by Werner Heider are based on poems by Guillén.

Nicolás Guillén was a mulatto and was born in 1902 to the journalist Nicolás Guillén and his wife Argelia Batista Arrieta. His father was shot dead by soldiers during a political uprising in 1917.

Nicolás Guillén began studying law, but soon switched to journalism. In 1920 Guillén published his first poems in local newspapers in Camagüey and Manzanillo . In 1922 he began to study law at the University of Havana , but dropped out a short time later. After a long stay in his hometown, Guillén went back to Havana, where he met Federico García Lorca , who had come to Cuba on a reading tour at the invitation of Fernando Ortiz . In 1937 Nicolás Guillén joined the Communist Party of Cuba . In the same year he traveled to the Second International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture in Spain, which was shaken by civil war .

In 1940 Guillén ran for the Communist Revolutionary Union , which was then known as Unión Revolucionaria Comunista ( Communist Revolutionary Union ), in the mayoral elections in Camagüey. In 1953 he had to leave Cuba and went to Paris . He only returned to Cuba after the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. In 1961, Guillén was elected the first chairman of UNEAC , the Cuban state association of writers and artists.

Works

  • Motivos de son (1930)
  • Songoro cosongo ; poemas mulatos (1931)
  • West Indies, Ltd. (1934)
  • Cantos para soldados y sones para turistas (1937)
  • España. Poema en cuatro angustias y una esperanza (1937)
  • El son entero (1947)
  • Elegía a Jesús Menéndez (1951)
  • Las coplas de Juan Descalzo (1951)
  • ¿Puedes? (1960)
  • Prose de prisa (1961)
  • Poemas de amor , Tengo (1964)
  • Antología mayor (1964)
  • El gran zoo (1967)
  • Cuatro canciones para el Che (1969)
  • La rueda dentada (1972)
  • Diario que a diario (1972)
  • Nueva antología mayor (1979)

Web links