Reinaldo Arenas, Cuban writer and dissident, was born a day like today in 1943. To remember him today we bring this selection of poems of his work, of which his autobiographical novel stands out before nightfall, written while he was imprisoned, which he took to cinema in the year 2000 and he played Javier Bardem.
Reinaldo Arenas
Arenas was born in Clear waters, in a humble and peasant family, and in his adolescence he joined the revolution led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
His first and last novel published in Cuba at just 19 years old was titled Celestine before dawn, because the rest of his work was published abroad. In the sixties she was a victim of the measures of the Cuban Government against the homosexual. But it was in the seventies when fled after he was accused of sexual abuse and arrested and shortly thereafter arrested again and imprisoned in the prison of El Morro.
He counted everything in Before Night Falls. But there was other works as The palace of the very white skunks, The central , finish the parade, Arthur, The brightest star, the color of summer y The assault.
Reinaldo Arenas — Selection of poems
sonnets from hell
Everything that could have been, even if it has been,
It has never been as it was dreamed.
The god of misery has taken care
to give reality another meaning.
Another sense, never foreseen,
covers up to the wish fulfilled;
so that the pleasure still enjoyed
can never equal the invented.
When your dream has come true
(difficult, very difficult task)
there will be no feeling of having succeeded
rather it remains in the fatigued brain
the dark intuition of having lived
under perennial con subdued.
No, tenacious music
No, tenacious music, speak to me of heaven!
where it is obligatory to dig the earth.
I don't think there is such a consolation
where it is only to live perennial war.
Well, who of horror has already drawn the veil
knows that only horror the world contains.
Useless is your song, ardor and zeal:
I hear the last door closing.
And the stupor of that snap is so great
that the boldest voice already resents
to its dry noise, its deadly roar,
and even the most musical of sounds
before such a hubbub of gates
its rumor is also muting.
last moon
Why this feeling of going to look for you
where no matter how much you fly
I don't have to find you.
What timeless terror now impels me
above so much terror always evoke you.
Our grief will not find rest
(that finding it would be starting another sentence)
and for the same reason I will never stop contemplating you.
Luna, once again here I am detained
at the crossroads of multiple frights.
The past is all lost
And if I get up from the present
It's to see that I'm hurt
(and death)
because I have already lived the future.
That, indisputably, that is luck
that for coming from hell I face.
strange lover,
I only have to contemplate your face
(which is mine)
because you and I are a river
that crosses an incessant wasteland,
circular and infinite:
a single cry
So Cervantes was one-armed
So that Cervantes he was one-armed;
deaf, Beethoven; Villon, thief;
Góngora was so crazy that he walked on a stilt.
And Proust? Of course, fagot.
Slave dealer, yes, it was Don Nicolás Tanco,
and Virginia took a plunge,
Lautrémont died frozen to death on a bench.
Alas, Shakespeare too was a fagot.
Also Leonardo and Federico Garcia,
Whitman, Michelangelo and Petronius,
Gide, Genet and Visconti, the fatal ones.
This is, gentlemen, the brief biography
(oops, I forgot to mention Saint Anthony!)
of those who are punctual solid art.
you and i are doomed
you and i are doomed
by the wrath of a lord who does not show his face
to dance on a charred place
or to hide in the ass of some monster.
You and I always prisoners
of that unknown curse.
Without living, fighting for life.
Headless, putting on a hat.
Vagabonds without time and without space,
an incessant night surrounds us,
it entangles our feet, hinders us.
We walk dreaming of a great palace
and the sun, its broken image, returns us
transformed into a prison that shelters us.
It is not the dead who provokes
It is not the dead person who causes the stupor
It is the surprise to see how we forget
his own death, our great pain.
The dead man remains, we leave.
It is not the dead man, no, who retires.
We are the ones who are discussing,
on the corpse that silently looks at us,
the possibility of continuing to survive.
When in memory the dead we see
(time games, macabre scanner)
It is not, then, the dead person we are seeing:
It is us who remain gloomy
seeing how we look without horror
to the one who in the great horror is rotting.