Volume 30, Number 11 · June 30, 1983
Prophet
By J.M. Cohen
Legacies: Selected Poems
by Heberto Padilla, translated by Alastair Reid, by Andrew Hurley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 179 pp., $15.95
Like the Russian Revolution, the Cuban events of 1959-1960 coincided with a literary revival, intense but short-lived. This rapid flowering was chiefly visible in the Monday supplement of the newspaper Revolución, and among the founding editors of this supplement, called Lunes, was the poet Heberto Padilla, newly returned, like many other radical intellectuals, from ten years of exile in the United States. It was characteristic of this group that, in contrast to the Orígenes circle of their seniors who, being nonpolitical, had remained at home during the Batista regime, they tended to write social poetry, variously influenced by the poets of the countries that had given them refuge. The poetry of the Lunes group is direct and economical, and happily free from the prevailing Hispano-American rhetoric.
Review, 3391 words
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