Nicolás Guillén
Personal Information
Description
Nicolás Guillén was born in Camagüey, Cuba. He studied law at the University of Havana, and worked as a typographer and journalist. He began publishing poetry in various magazines in the 1920s. His first collection of poetry, Motivos de son, was published in 1930. He wrote poems critical of the government and was arrested and jailed in 1936. In 1937 he travelled to Spain to attend a Congress of Writers and Artists and to report on the Spanish Civil War. In 1940, having returned to Cuba, he ran in local elections as a member of the Communist Party.
Books
Cuba
The poetry of the Negro, 1746-1970
For other editions, see Author Catalog.
Sóngoro cosongo y otros poemas
Cuban poetry about both being black and denouncing injustices.
Man-making Words
From the Publisher: The Cuban poet Nicolas Guillen, who was born in the eastern province of Camaguey in 1902, died in 1989. This new edition of his selected poems, reissued thirty years after its original publication, includes an extensive new introductory essay by Roberto Marquez, one of the original translators and a leading authority on Caribbean and Latin American literature and culture.
New Love Poetry
In 1966, Nicolas Guillen, the acclaimed poet of Cuba, wrote a book of 15 poems dealing with a rupture in his affair with Sara Casal. His poems take the form of a conversation with the absent loved one, and also a series of subtle dialogues with figures in world literature, including Dante, Becquer, Neruda and Rulfo. The volume is bilingual, presenting in Spanish and English, Guillen's poems and Ellis' commentary and notes. As an epilogue, Ellis includes a previously unpublished sonnet by the Cuban poet Eliseo Diego, 'A Sara Casal'. The book is beautifully illustrated with 13 drawings by the Buban painter Ernesto Garcia Pena.