Marcelo Pellegrini
Translated from Spanish by Adam Lifshey

On April 17, 2001, the Nicaraguan poet, Ernesto Cardenal, gave a public reading of his poetry and spoke about his life. Before a room packed with a public avid to hear him, the author discussed his greatest passions: poetry, politics, and God.

Ernesto Cardenal

Cardenal began by saying that despite being known for his anti-Americanism, he always distinguished between the government of the United States ("the Yankee government"), which has invaded many Central American countries on repeated occasions, and the people of the United States, who have always been in great solidarity with the cause of Latin American revolution. In his youth, Cardenal came to this country to study U.S. literature at Columbia University in New York, inspired by those whom he considered his teachers: Whitman, Pound, Carl Sandburg, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, Robinson Jeffers (whom he described as "a skeptical Whitman") and William Carlos Williams. All of them, according to Cardenal, wrote a type of direct poetry without adornment, close to the daily language of people and thus committed to and engaged with the average individual. This is the type of writing with which Cardenal always felt comfortable, and he cultivated it in his own work. According to Cardenal, the influence of U.S. poetry has always been prevalent in Nicaraguan poetry, distinguishing it from the rest of Latin American poetry, which is predominantly influenced by French poetry.

Ernesto Cardenal

At Columbia Cardenal first read the work of a U.S. poet and Trappist monk named Thomas Merton. Soon after, he felt the call of God, and went to the Kentucky monastery of Getsemany. There he met Merton, who was director of novices, and a great friendship was born, as well as a religious calling that has lasted ever since. Cardenal was 31 years old and had led, as he himself said, a very dissolute life. He described his encounter with God as a mystical calling where silence and seclusion, characteristics of the Trappist order, were the dominant factors. Cardenal said that his trip to the monastery had been "full of God" and that he found himself in a state of love; the trip was the equivalent of a honeymoon.

When Cardenal returned to his country, he founded the community of Solentiname in an island of Lake Nicaragua to organize communitarian endeavors. Solentiname was very much a poetic, religious and political utopia, and preparation for the work that Cardenal would take up when he was in the service of the Sandinista government as its Minister of Culture. The realization of the revolution was for him the concretization of a long-desired utopia. At the same time, as he himself noted, it meant entering the "tumult of the world," something that was difficult for a person like Cardenal with a calling to silence and withdrawal.

After explaining these episodes in his life, the poet read some of his more well-known Epigrams, fragments of his autobiography entitled Lost Life (which in its final version will consist of three volumes), and parts of what he considers his greatest poetic project, Cosmic Canticle. The latter is a poem of more than 500 pages in which he tells the story of the universe using linguistic recourses from the natural and physical sciences. The poem is also a dialogue with divinity, a characteristic that has been constant in Cardenal's work.

Finally, the poet answered question from the audience about the current state of revolutionary ideas in Latin America, Cardenal's contacts with the new generations of Nicaraguan poets, his position with respect to the Sandinista Front ("governed Stalinistically by Daniel Ortega," according to Cardenal), and his relationship with God, a passion that still grips him.

In sum, it was an afternoon to remember, for Cardenal, beyond the tumult of the world, brought to the fore sweetness and tenderness from his life.

With Prof. Rachel Moran, moderator, seated to the right, Cardenal addresses the audience of 120 students, faculty and community members.