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The Beauty of Simplicity - José Martí

by George Zamalea Legend and Life

The name of José Martí for many people has been associated with the roll of drums of liberties that has been explored mercilessly in 1950 by the young idealist Fidel Castro and with such favor his personality has become a propaganda tool of governments and, fail, at least, to give him such level of respect and normality to his manhood of universal varsities. In this version of his life we see a revolutionary fighter, a political outspoken, a journalist, a profiler pursued by death warrant who, always in black, shuddering with anger of what he has seen, the truth composure of his executive feeling, which it can be argued by many as a profit to the last exude that has nothing to do with his ethos. His persona has been always of act of action, mental strength, and physical boldness, to the things that he has sensed when he was eight years of age. The question of Excellency, with any-thing else that hold on his archetypal patterns of his own complexity, the purity and the symbolic proportions of his actions, moving upon his own standard self-sacrificed human experience, it's more than a process that no one can imagine. In the prominence features of José Martí, the essential that his name has been reduced in that complexity of Marxism, whether it is true or false, as the significance of works and actions, a threatening of fear, a historic figure of danger frontier, his personality is known highly by his "Versos Sencillos", and with these unending series of events, we have praised him in a level of definition, a stimulus for other's pleasure and convenience, not an immortal and worldwide greatness that either in United States or in Hispanic world, he is such a man combined all power in one being and blended it up into a wide pool of extraordinary entities.

Healthful Emotion

There is no writer who has achieved a natural power of details, of expression for remarkable effects, whether in the presence of letters, events or articles like José Martí could. In "Versos libres, for instance, José Martí bring to the readers an enormous feeling of self-respect that is the certainty in the healthful version he is projecting beyond any geographic symbolism. At the same time the interpretation of form of evil toward those tyrants. Those poems from "Versos libres" reflect a vigorous appeal of appearance. He reveals what he has in mind. In "Banquete de tirano" he exalted in such effective dislike to them. There is no fear but boldness in the ways he opens the poem: "Hay una raza vil de hombres tenaces"...The people who eat their own disjoin symbols of cruelty. While love is not part of that voice that Martí in "Noche de mayo" because there is indeed a well message in the following:

En un banquete se siente los tiranos,
Pero cuando la mano ensangrentada
Hunden en el manjar, del mártir muerto
Surge una luz que les aterra, flores
Grandes como una cruz súbito surgen
Y huyen, rojo el hocico, y pavoridos
A sus negras entrañas los tiranos.

There is no hesitation in the meaning of the poem. The third lines and what it follows there is no illusion of what he meant. Nightmare is not different from the reality, which in Martí's desire it appears to rise toward a first level of emotional state. The deepest meaning of love is reduced to a kiss and the empowerment of that kiss is the luminescence Martí seems to face in the sense of the universe. The comparison of a Martian promise of tentative vision is full with the deepest sensibility making it is more challengeable.

Oh, amor, oh inmenso, oh acabado
En rueda o riel funde el herrero el hierro;
Una flor o mujer o águila o angel
En oro o plata el joyable cincela;
Tú sólo, sólo tú, sabes el modo
De reducir el Universo a un beso! (ii)
(Versos libres: "Copa Con Alas")

(ii) O love! O immense love! O faultless artist!
On wheel as the smith forges the ingot
A flower or a woman or an eagle or an angel
In gold or silver from the enjoyable chisel;
Only you know a way to reduce the Universe for a kiss!

"Copas Con Alas" ("Cups with Wings") also draws powerful sensibility from the crucial qualities of love. If the meaning has the lovely vision and the fulfillment is the sensational question is better to wheel it, but there is no fear from the Cuban poet to have the celebration of that relationship. In another section of the poem, Martí could not exactly create a code of refusing, not also a romance that flow; instead the contemplation so much what he feels such as: “\Tu cabeza de negra cabellera (...)”Porque de mí tus labios generosos \No se apartaran (…)”.

La vida entera
Sentí que a mí abrazándote, y abrazaba!
¡Perdí el mundo de visa, y sus ruios
Y su envidiosa y bárbara batalla!
Una copa en los aires ascendía
Y yo, en brazos no vistos reclinado
Tras ella, asido de sus dulces bordes.
Por el espacio azul me remontaba!

Your head of black hair
........………................
Because of your generous lips
Never have they separated (…)
......................................
The whole life
I feel it embraces me, and I hold to it!
I lost the world from my sight, and its noises
And its envious and barbaric battle
A cup through the airs descend
And I, between arms never seen, declined
After her, grips from her sweet borders,
For the blue space it remounted me.

The poem is one of Martí many examples of exaltation that brings a combination of lyricism and that unique language that gesture beyond a character of romanticism and the healing stance he has. While in "Yo Sacaré Lo Que En El Pecho Tengo" he tells himself that "I shall take what I've from the chest/ Anger and horror" is the exactly ideas he dares to write, and it exquisites as well as to claim: "No esta canción desoladora escribo/ Es hora de dolor:/ Jamás se escriba/ En hora de dolor! We recognized a little blindness. A declaration that is very wise, but it’s infinitely Martí indeed: It isn't a desolated song I write/ It is the hour of pain:/ It will never be written/ It's the hour of pain!

Perhaps more than any other American writers or poets, José Martí has unearthed in his sensibility so openness. It says that "Versos libres" do not have the quality and impact to the world as "Versos sencillos" may be. I think the strength of "Versos libres" is based in the sensibility of Martí who may think by himself. The poems have such rich metaphors and images and there are the candors and the spirited courage. Both creativities and the transformation of Martí have the essential of his beauty and simplicity. Like this one from "Versos sencillos":

Verte, corazón, tu pena
Donde no se llegue a ver,
Por soberbia, y por no ser
Motivo de pena ajena
(Versos sencillos, "xlvi)

Your sorrows, my heart, you should hide
Where no man can e'ver discover,
So that you may spare my pride,
Don't trouble with them another.

The invocation and exploration are the language that Martí uses and that feeling that seems to lift us into that articulation of blood and through it ones to fix there conformably. Like this:

Si ves un monte de espumas
Es mi verso la que ves:
Mi verso es un monte, y es
Un abanico de plumas.

Mi verso es como un puñal
Que por el puño echa flor:
Mi verso es un surtidor
Que da un agua de coral.

Mi verso es de un verde claro
Y de un carmín encendido:
Mi verso es un ciervo herido
Que busca en el monte amparo.

Mi verso al valiente agrada:
Mi verso, breve y sincero,
Es el vigor del acero
Con que se funde la espada.

If you've seen a mount of sea foam,
It is my verse you have seen:
My verse a mountain has been,
And a feathered fan become.

(My verse is like a dagger
At whose hilt a flower grows,
My verse is a fount which flows
With a sparkling coral water

(My verse is a gentle green
And also a flaming red,
My Verse a raven wounded
Seeking forest cover unseen.

(My verse is brief and sincere,
And to the brave will appeal:
With all the strength of the steel
With which the sword will appears