Jose Lezama Lima

Jose Lezama Lima (Havana, December 19th 1910 August -19 1976) is a cuban writer , novelist, poet and essay writer.

Biography

Of military father, it took part in the demonstrations coeds against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. It obtained a license in right. From 1929 and until its death, it lived in a house of the old workings of the town of Havana, initially with his/her mother then with died of this one with María Luisa Bautista, its secretary, whom it married although it is homosexual.

It founded several successive reviews: Verbum in 1937, Espuela de Plata , of 1939 to 1941 and Nadie Parecía (1941). It is made known for its poetry invaluable and hermetic, near to that of Luis of Góngora or Stephan Mallarmé.

It founded with Jose Rodríguez Feo the review Orígenes , one of the most important periodicals of the Années 1940. It published there the first five chapters of its major work, Paradiso .

It accepted in 1972 the Maldoror Price of Poésie of Madrid, and in Italy the price of best work hispanoaméricaine translated into Italian, for the novel Paradiso . It however left Cuba only for briefs voyages to the Mexico and the Jamaica, the cuban authorities prohibiting to him to leave the island for remote destinations.

Lezama Lima had a great influence on the writers of Spanish language, in particular the Cubans Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy and Reinaldo Arenas, but also Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa. The capacity castrist, on the other hand, condemned a work whose esthetics did not have any political value for the people, at the time of the Congress on the instruction and the culture in 1971.

Lezama Lima died into 1976 of the complications of the Asthme from which he suffered since childhood.

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