Down a Path of strange condition: Por un extraño camino

A Path that Turns into a Man (About a Bestiary)

To walk. To retrace one's steps. To walk again.

A road can be paved or just be a boundary path. It can be directed forward: to the future, to well-being... and also backwards. It may not get anywhere, or have detours contrary to our presumed destination. It may never end.

If, in addition to this, its passages are full of (strange?) creatures, from land, water and sky, like a good compendium of beasts humanized with non-compliance, to delve into that road only a little literary expectation rather than an adventurous spirit is enough for us.

Cuban professor, writer and translator Felicia Hernández Lorenzo (Güines, 1957), well known on the insular scene mainly for her high-flying ten-verse stanzas and her essays, (without detracting from the rest of her creative work, inserted in practically all literary genres), proposes a bestiary which she herself tries, modestly, to distinguish from some of her most illustrious predecessors, whom she reminds us of since the very opening of the booklet. Such reminder, in my opinion, is unnecessary because, although she refers to the 20th century two most important Cuban poets: Nicolás Guillén and Dulce María Loynaz; and to the immense Argentinians Julio Cortázar and Jorge Luis Borges, the poet's animalia -plagued by beings that, in her good words, "mark premises all over with garbage, mud, feces and leftovers"- has features so adjusted, in situ, to a society and a contemporary world that, in all its dimension, it becomes distinctive as compared to preceding literature without this preventing us from recognizing it as being in its intellectual debt.

Male chauvinism (prehistoric beast, the Tyrannosaur's cousin) bureaucracy (day by day feeds on red tape, someone else's troubles and others' wait), corruption (steps like a wall crushing all that's most holy, no possibility for rehabilitation), racism (living fossil), intolerance (boasts of pristine truths, veracities resounding, absolute...), animal violence (the worst of the beasts with evil habits), stridency (takes the sounds out of the toilet), among other sociocultural topics to be concerned about, are themes dealt with ease and visceral forcefulness, each of them carrying its own animality.

The poet does not pass over her need of shaking off other fierceness worthy of defense, those of the soul, where she pays homage with intimate exquisiteness to a crucial inheritance linked to her: creation, poetry and knowledge in the broadest sense, thus including poets such as Oliverio Girondo (also Argentinian), Antonio Machado, Samuel Taylor Colerigde or the rapaillé Canadian (québécois) Gaston Miron, whose close irreverence and attempt to compile what is "dispersed" is evident at times.

La profesora, escritora y traductora cubana Felicia Hernández Lorenzo (Güines, 1957), bien conocida en el panorama insular fundamentalmente por sus décimas de alto vuelo y sus ensayos, (sin desdorar el resto de su obra creativa, insertada prácticamente en todos los géneros literarios), nos propone un bestiario que ella misma pretende desmarcar, con modestia, de algunos de sus más ilustres antecesores, a quienes nos recuerda en la propia apertura del cuaderno. Innecesario es, a mi juicio, pues si bien se refiere a los dos poetas cubanos más importantes del siglo XX: Nicolás Guillén y Dulce María Loynaz; y a los inmensos argentinos Julio Cortázar y Jorge Luis Borges, la animalia de la poeta, plagada de seres que a su buen decir "van marcando el territorio con heces, lodo y basura", tiene características tan ajustadas in situ a una sociedad y a un mundo contemporáneo, que en toda su dimensión se vuelve inconfundible con la literatura precedente, sin que ello nos impida reconocerla como su deudora.