DEATH OF NARCISSUS. One of José Lezama Lima's fears was becoming "fodder for professors." I say that it is almost equally dangerous for a professor to fall into Lezama Lima's labyrinthine trap

 

LEZAMA LIMA, POET AND CRITIC AGAIN, "THE DEATH OF NARCISSUS" (1937) ____________________GISELA BEUTLER____________________ Berlin According to Cinto Vitier, one of José Lezama Lima's fears was becoming "fodder for professors." I say that it is almost equally dangerous for a professor to fall into Lezama Lima's labyrinthine trap, especially with a theme as broad and almost grandiloquent as that announced by the title of this presentation. Therefore, I must first make a reservation: my topic will be restricted to certain aspects of Lezama's poetry in Death of Narcissus (1937) and to certain aspects of the young Lezama's prose writings between 1936 and 1938. I will follow the old path of philology, not that of theory. Before Muerte de Narciso was published in the magazine Verbum (2, July-August 1937) and as a "booklet", some "verses" by Lezama had already appeared (Grafos, January 1936) with a motto of Saint John of the Cross.2 In 1983, however, Emilio de Armas published a book of youthful poems, not published by the poet, with the title "Inicio y Escape" y "Otros poemas". These texts date from 1927 to 1931. They are of difficult diction and already show some of the vocabulary we will later find in Muerte de Narciso, such as "the antlers of the deer," "the thirstless prison of dolphins," "scales," "corals," etc., in addition to echoes of García Lorca and the pure poetry of Juan Ramón Jiménez. On the few occasions in which Lezama referred to his famous poem, which continues to inaugurate anthologies of his lyrical poetry, he characterized it as a poem of adolescence. He was no longer very sure of its date of composition: "around 1931." To Salvador Bueno he said: "I wrote it [...] when I was 22, it was published years later, but it is a poem that corresponds to my adolescence", to Ciro Bianchi Ross: "written when I was twenty-one or twenty-two", and on another occasion he explains: The poem, we could say, is a farewell to adolescence, and for me it is a mystery and an attraction to review it from time to time, because it has in its germ all the possibility of the development of my future work...7©1995 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. VII Nos. 14-15, July 1994 to June 1995 230______________________________________________________GISELA BEUTLER No poem by this Cuban poet has been the subject of more commentary.