Absolute Solitude

Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems by Dulce Maria Loynaz Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems is a beautiful introduction to the poetry of Cuban Dulce Maria Loynaz. The Royal Spanish Academy awarded her the 1992 Cervantes Prize, the highest literary accolade in the Spanish language. Selected and translated by James O'Connor, the collection provides a view of many of Loynaz’s themes – from sadness, and difficulty of living, to love: the failure of love, loving too little, loving too much – to the joys of solitude, and finally, to death: “Every morning a rose rots in somebody’s coffin.” Other quotes from the poems:
“You have wings and I don’t. You flit through the air like a butterfly, while I go off to learn, from every last road on earth, what it means to be sad.”
“And I said to the pebbles, I know you are fallen stars. Hearing this they lit up, and for a moment they shone – they were able to shine – like stars.”
“But only love reveals, in a rapid flash of light, the beauty of a soul.”
“Like a river has no need of air, nor the sea of land, nor the sword of banquets, I have no need of the world if you are not in it.
“Within you, my river will never long for mud, my waves will never yearn for wind, my steel blade will never go without its sheath.
“Within you, there is everything. Without you, there is nothing.”
“I have dissolved you into my solitude, and myself into you, in such a way that I have given my solitude my desires and my dreams, my gestures and my traits, and now I wonder if our meeting has been anything more than two clouds passing in the sky, or two strangers passing on earth.”
“I won’t say the name, but it is in every star that opens and every rose that dies.”
“The word is an old cracked vessel where I must gather up the burning wine of my dreams.”
“My bones ache. The very blouse on my back aches. And my solitude aches, too, ever since you let me press my mouth to it and blow it into flames.”
“I wouldn’t trade my solitude for a little love. For a lot of love, yes. But a lot of love is itself a kind of solitude.”
“Only the banana trees are alive tonight, which might be the ghost of a night that died centuries ago.”
“Your dreams have no wings but they still want to fly. That’s because they know they have wings even before they grow them. They know that life is made for the heights, that life becomes a sin, a piece of rot, if you don’t face your destiny at once.”
“The dream spoke and said, I am beyond death because I have yet to be born, and although I remain unborn, I am already stronger than death.”

The world gave me many things, but the only thing I kept was absolute solitude.
VII

Absolute Solitude: Selected Poems by Dulce María Loynaz is the first comprehensive English translation of Loynaz poetry. Loynaz, a Cuban, wrote most of her poetry before the revolution and her work was, for the most part, forgotten. At the age of ninety Royal Spanish Academy awarded her the 1992 Cervantes Prize, the highest literary accolade in the Spanish language. The translation is done by James O'Connor, and although I do not read Spanish, the English version of her work captures the power and beauty of the original.

The unnamed poems that make up this book are simply numbered to differentiate between them. Some poems are a single line making a title a little difficult. Each line, however, carries an exponential amount of information. If a picture is worth a thousand words a line from Loynaz is worth many times more:

XXV

And I said to the pebbles, I know you are fallen stars.
Hearing this they lit up, and for a moment they shone -- they were able to shine -- like stars.

CX

I neither destroy nor create. I do not interrupt Destiny.

Loynaz mentions pebbles a few times in the above poem and in another comparing pebbles to stars. Stars shine with beauty, but pebbles one can hold in their hand and move or possess, unlike a star. She writes of love, faith, death, and solitude. Our solitude is the one thing, perhaps the only thing we can control. On death, she writes of the seeds of a now dead rose bush trying to grow at the base of the dead bush. They are choked out by the roots dead plant. She warns the reader to never allow death to choke out life, not even a little.

Absolute Solitude is a lost treasure recovered too late to be built upon. Loynaz’s writing is near perfection and it makes one wonder how much more could have created if she had not quit writing, or if her work received more notice before her ninetieth year. It was three decades after she stopped writing before her work was noticed by the Royal Spanish Academy. This is truly a remarkable collection.