More than a bird's-eye view of my labor. (Essays And Occasional Pieces).

Fernandez Retamar, Roberto

FIRST OF ALL, I would like to express my gratitude for the generous invitation to be the 2002 Puterbaugh Fellow, which links me, throughout the years, with colleagues of valuable work, many of whom I personally know or have known. I have been enriched with the friendship of some of them, including, for example, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortazar, Edouard Glissant, and Luisa Valenzuela. I am also thankful for the open criteria of World Literature Today and he University of Oklahoma, which enables me to be with you and is proof of one of the worthier virtues of North American academia. I started belonging to this academic world as no doubt many of you know--and I will have the opportunity of repeating--forty-five years ago, when, in 1957 and 1958, I was visiting professor at Yale; and I have always felt a member of it. Though I haven't been a regular professor at a university in this country since then, I have given lectures or readings, sometimes more than once, at the Universities of Columbia, New York (NYU), Harvard, Brandeis, Illinois, Iowa, California at Berkeley, Stanford, and Purchase; I have also collaborated in meetings and publications sponsored by them and other North American universities. At all times, I have verified the open criteria already mentioned, which allows today the professorship of persons as nonconformist (and necessary) as Noam Chomsky at MIT, whom I called the Bartolome de Las Casas of his own empire; Edward W. Said at Columbia; and Fredric Jameson at Duke. I have had the honor of publishing texts by them all at the Casa de las Americas. It made me happy to have just read in your journal the letter in which Paul A. Bove, editor of boundary 2, stated: "The recent outstanding issue of WLT on the Arabic novel courageously makes the point that at this moment in American history nothing is more important than the free and unfettered presentation of other literatures and cultures" (WLT 76:1, p. 107). I have felt it useful in this initial lecture to offer a panoramic view of my intellectual work, adding something more. (1)

As I was born in 1930, my intellectual labor began (in Cuba, my birthplace) somewhat more than half a century ago. It's obvious that, at the start, it was quite immature. And several of the things I will refer to have already been evoked by me on other occasions. For example, that my parents thought I would become an artist because I covered walls and papers with my scrawls, as children usually do. I didn't turn out to be a painter, though I have maintained intense relations with the visual arts, which I have on occasion commented on, while I have felt and feel close to artists like Victor Manuel, Portocarrero, Mariano, and Lam; Matta, Saura, Le Parc, Rauschenberg, and younger artists. Or, that in the first years of my high-school studies, I felt more attracted to mathematics than to literature. I don't know if something of this has been left over in my work as a writer--perhaps if you consider a well-turned-out text as having a fragile but immovable being as numbers have (anyway, I didn't become a mathematician either). That, when I was thirteen, the bewitchment of poetry was revealed to me by some "sad and jewel-like" verses, as Jose Marti called them, written by Julian del Casal and read by me as simple examples of quatrains in a mediocre schoolbook. They also revealed what only later I was able to articulate: that pain could engender beauty.

I should explain that, on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, authors of the late nineteenth century such as Marti and Casal (and others who lived into the twentieth century: namely, Ruben Dario) initiated modern poetry in Spanish, in what was called "modernismo," not to be identified with English "modernism," which for us is rather the avant garde. When I was fifteen, the reading of Miguel de Unamuno's Mi religion y otros ensayos breves shook me again and, which was to be expected, made me passionately read Del sentimiento tragico de la vida. If I add to the names mentioned above those of Jose Marti, the leading figure of my intellectual, moral, and political life, as well as that of so many Cuban men and women; of George Bernard Shaw, whose voluminous book Everybody's Political What's What, urbanely translated into Spanish in 1946 as Guia politica de nuestro tiempo, contributed in making me, to this day, a romantic socialist; and Ramon Gomez de la Serna, who intoxicated me with his 1943 book, Ismos. And I also mention quite diverse readings, from Plato (who helped me bear insomnia) to the classics of various literatures; from the poetry written in Spanish to that written in French, or Whitman; from Dostoevsky and Kafka (all of them translated into Spanish, for then I did not read another language), to the detective stories I inherited from my father and which Jorge Luis Borges augmented--I think I offer a fairly accurate panorama of what I was (or what attracted me) when I made my life's first voyage of initiation. It was to the United States--namely, to New York, when I had just turned seventeen. That is why, in the preface to Caliban and Other Essays (1989), I wrote that I arrived in that city in the summer of 1947, like Stingo in Sophie's Choice. I also mentioned there and in other texts some other things, which I won't repeat literally, but cannot avoid mentioning now. For example, that in New York I spent several months appreciating its atmosphere of freedom, visiting museums, discovering people and works of art (mainly Stieglitz and Steinberg); rejecting, accepting, and finally falling in love with the city described by Marti, who lived there as an exile during almost fifteen years of his mature life, earning his living above all as a journalist. He wrote about it, as he did with other North American realities, in numerous and vivid chronicles probably unsurpassed by any other foreigner of his time, to the point that his most fervent and brilliant literary disciple, Ruben Dario, said in 1895, when Marti died, that "the United States of Marti is a stupendous and charming diorama that can almost be said to enhance the color of the actual vision." I would like to recall that, among the numerous chronicles Marti wrote, there is one of April 1889 that has to do directly with your own past: "Como se crea un pueblo nuevo en los Estados Unidos," which has been translated as "Oklahoma Land Rush." (2)

Going back to my first New York visit, that is where I confirmed myself as a writer-to-be and a person of the left. As to this last condition, it is true that, at the time, the Cold War as well as McCarthyism were taking their first steps (I didn't know then that I wouldn't come back to the States for ten years); but it is also true that, as to fundamental issues, my lot was already cast in 1947, though I didn't belong to any party or movement. After all, I was little more than a child. But between my sixth and ninth years, I hadn't been indifferent to the Spanish civil war (my parents were ardent followers of the Republic); and, to the age of fifteen, certainly not indifferent to the war against Nazism and fascism, when my parents were also on the fair side, as they were against the tyrannies that bloodied my country and others in Latin America, usually with the encouragement or the imposition of what was then nakedly called imperialism (perhaps those were candid times). Here again Marti's teachings were decisive. If he spread throughout Spanish America the more creative output of Lincoln's country--which explains Juan Ramon Jimenez's statement that "Spanish and Spanish American poetry owe him, to a great degree, entry into the United States"--the fact of living as a critical analyst and a political revolutionary in the burgeoning capital of modern times favored Marti's becoming our first anti-imperialist. He admired North American radicals who influenced him such as Emerson, Whitman, and Twain, as well as such other, less-known figures as Helen Hunt Jackson and Wendell Phillips. A portrait of Phillips, the firm abolitionist and, it appears, member of the First International, was in Marti's New York office when he left for the War of Independence in Cuba, where he was to die in battle soon thereafter. I have often said that, in a way, and without abandoning his condition of loyal patriot of his country and his America, Marti also became one of those radicals. That is why I was pleased to see him included, though insufficiently, in the Encyclopedia of the American Left (1992). (3) I was also satisfied with the way Jose David Saldivar considered him in The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (1991)--a book that, in addition, is generous when considering me and my relation to the United States--and by the fact that a text by Marti should appear in the Heath Anthology of American Literature (1994). (4)

I cannot enumerate my many travels, nor would it make sense for me to do so. But as I identified my first excursion as one of initiation, I shall mention others somewhat similar in character. In 1952, newly wed, I ventured to Mexico and encountered what Marti called "our America." Between 1955 and 1956, I was off to Europe, where I studied linguistics in Paris with the structuralist Andre Martinet, undertook studies of varied subjects in London, and encountered the sources of Western culture, including Greece. Between 1957 and 1958, I again found myself in the United States as a professor at Yale (thanks to Rene Wellek and an acquaintance with Jakobson, who was teaching at Harvard at the time) and spent time with the Russian formalists and Prague Circle. In 1959 I am again in Havana, where I take up my post at Havana University, write a column in the journal Revolucion, edit--after my dear friend Cintio Vitier--the Nueva Revista Cubana. I then turn down an invitation extended to me by Columbia University the year before to teach there, in my beloved cosmopolitan New York. In 1960 I return to Paris as a diplomat and witness how African decolonization and the emergence of the Third World are appreciated from the city, from Europe, while in my own country the menaced revolution I represent becomes more radical and moves toward socialism. I'm back in Cuba by 1961, mobilized during the April invasion that year, and am secretary of the newly founded National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists, whose journal Union I edit, along with Nicolas Guillen, Alejo Carpentier, and Jose Rodriguez Feo.

Of the other trips I have taken, I shall only mention two more. In 1963 I went to the now dissolved Soviet Union, with which Cuba had at the time tense relations born of the 1962 missile crisis, but where I saw Nikita Khrushchev wearing in his coat lapel a golden seal with Fidel's image; I also saw the mustached General Budionny, hero of the legendary Red Cavalry, who had not understood Isaac Babel and was reproached for it by Maxim Gorky. In 1970 I went to Vietnam to take part in the making of a documentary film (Tercer Mundo, Tercera Guerra Mundial), directed by Julio Garcia Espinosa, about the terrible war suffered by that nation. There I wrote the poems of Cuaderno paralelo. Since then, for over thirty years, I have visited many other countries, especially of our America (for example, I witnessed the revolutionary processes of Chile and Nicaragua), but those I have named have a certain symbolic value. And I have named them, though it is expected that I speak more of my texts than of myself, because, to some degree, several of them are related to one another.

My first texts date back to 1945: poems and notes about books that in time would become essays (on authors like Shaw, Whitman, Unamuno, Kafka, Carpentier, Ballagas, Borges and Bioy Casares, Apollinaire, Stravinsky, Mayakovsky, Gomez de la Serna, Cardoza y Aragon...). None of those initial texts is worth a trifle, but I mention them because they point to a certain vocation. I first published book reviews in children's magazines (for one of which I interviewed Hemingway, in 1948). After a few of them were published in journals, the poems appeared in my first poetry chapbook, Elegia como un himno. It was printed in 1950, when I was twenty, by my friend Tomas Gutierrez Alea in his home; he was later to become the famous film director of Memories of Underdevelopment and Strawberry and Chocolate. The booklet, dedicated to Ruben Martinez Villena (who, in the 1920s, gave up his intense poetry to dedicate himself to the social struggle then died, quite young, in 1934), revealed, my early reading experiences and more recent ones as well. Among the first were Spanish poets of the Generation of '27--Garcia Lorca, Alberti, Aleixandre, and Jorge Guillen, for example--and their contemporary Latin American counterparts, especially Neruda, Vallejo, Nicolas Guillen, Florit, Ballagas, as well as the younger Spaniard Miguel Hernandez. Among the second were some of the members of the Origenes group (Eliseo Diego, Cintio Vitier, Fina Garcia Marruz). I would become close to that memorable group the following year, when I started publishing in Origenes myself. (5) The work of one poet in particular, however, would become masterly for me: that of Alfonso Reyes. (6)

My second collection of poems, Patrias, was published in 1952. Though it was, as the Elegia, a mere labor of apprenticeship done between my nineteenth and twenty-first years of age--shielded by Marti's great verse used as an exergue, "Dos patrias tengo ye: Cuba y la noche" (Two homelands have I: Cuba and the night)--a jury that included Emilio Ballagas and Regino Pedroso chose it for the National Poetry Award. In general, my first volume of poetry, as well as Patrias and the collection that was to follow--Alabanzas, conversaciones, more in the spirit of Origenes--were met with unexpected critical praise. The last title mentioned was published in 1955 by Alfonso Reyes at the Colegio de Mexico and would provoke the Handbook of Latin American Studies to call me "a rising protagonist of Cuban letters." (7)

Before 1959, a decisive date for me as for so many, I published two other titles, not of poetry, but of critical analysis. Though not suspecting it at the time, they were to be the only organic books I have written. One was my thesis, La poesia contemporanea en Cuba (1927-1953), which Jose Lezama Lima, the main creator and centralizing figure of his group, asked me to publish with Origenes, which I did in 1954. It surely was a factor that moved Jose Juan Arrom to invite me, as visiting professor at Yale, to offer a course on contemporary Spanish American poetry. Before going there, and having found the criteria then used to study our poetry quite insufficient, I prepared the second of those books, being the new linguist that I was, as notes for a course at Havana University that was never to be taught, for the university, after welcoming me in 1955 as its youngest professor, was shut down for well-known political reasons. That was how Idea de la estilistica was born; its original version traveled with me to Yale, where Rene Wellek read it and generously commented on it, besides stimulating me to enrich the text with what was probably the first mention of Mukarovsky, to be made in Spanish. The book would eventually be published by the Central University of Las Villas, in Cuba, during the last days of 1958, in what was to be the end of an epoch. In a few hours, so much did the world change--of course, not only for me--that when, in 1960, shaken by the Argelian war, by Fanon, by my own revolution, I witnessed in Paris the initial number of the journal Tel Quel, it left me quite indifferent. And so I was very surprised when I read that Helmut Hatzfeld and Yves LeHir considered my Idea "la meilleure mise au point des theories et de methodes stylistiques actuelles" and also when, in a letter of February 24, 1964, former Puterbaugh Fellow Damaso Alonso, to whose labor, as well as that of Amado Alonso, the book was very indebted, asked me to update the work so as to include it in his Biblioteca Romanica Hispanica of the Editorial Gredos. (81) couldn't comply with his request for the simple fact that it was no longer I who had written the small volume.

I have taken some time about all this in order to clarify how, in 1959, when I was twenty-eight and the Cuban revolution came to power, with goals, that I would assume forever, of independence, anti-imperialism, and social justice springing from Marti, I had considerably read, published, traveled, studied, and taught. I was already a writer, but realities experienced since that date would turn me into another person, who is usually known (if at all) by my name. Nevertheless, I wouldn't want that first person, whom I once was, to be forgotten; I haven't disowned him as I haven't disowned any part of my work. I have simply grown, with the rhythm of a vertiginous time, that I already know that, as in Dante's verse, "chiameranno antico." However, it is much too premature to do so now, as some inattentive persons try.

I have always considered myself essentially a poet, though parallel to my verses I have been writing essays, especially following the publication of those two university books--that is to say, after January 1959. In April of that year, I published in Havana Vuelta de la antigua esperanza, a collection that mainly consisted of poems written in late 1958 and dealt with what was happening at the time. About those poems, I received the following letter:

Miraflores de la Sierra, September 1959

Dear Roberto Fernandez Retamar,

Here on this mountain, I read, or rather, I breathe, the fresh air of your poems from Vuelta de la antigua esperanza. Thank you very much for the gift and for its words of dedication. These taut poems, dense in form, respond to a necessary interior tension and identify, with demanding expression, a moral imperative, realized and communicated in its full poetic manifestation. They are an example of responsible poetry (and what poetry isn't?) that is compelling and stirring, moving and touching. From solitary human pain, these poems offer a double victory. And because they are poetry, they are everything you want them to be: they have an admirable reality! I feel they belong to the best you have written. Moreover, I am happy to note their "accent."

I remember you always, especially now with these poems that seem important in the new Cuban poetry. Un abrazo, Vicente Aleixandre

I believe that since the publication of those poems and others written before them, I developed a poetic voice of my own. Not that I did not have further influences, for I agree with Eliot when he said that an absolutely original poet is an absolutely bad one, but that I had left behind the apprenticeship of poetry and could already fly on my own. I shall always be indebted to the poets I have mentioned (and to many others, who are often dissimilar, like Borges, Saint-John Perse, and some French surrealists or former surrealists, Edgar Lee Masters, Eliot, and other poets of the English language, Rilke, and Brecht ...). But my poetic output is no longer a more or less fortunate addition of the things I have read. On the contrary, I consider my poems as the center of my labor. It is true that issues pertaining to my essays will appear in some of them; however, they are not essays but poems, whose particular language I hope to have found, for authentic poetry demands its discovery or its invention. In 1971 Angel Rama wrote, "Colloquialism, prosaism, straightforward street talk, baroque twists, mistrust of images, flowing rhythms of speech: Is poetry surviving? Fernandez Retamar, who writes poetry of today, a poetry of constant risk, distilled from age-old poetic traditions, answered this eternal question: `Everything to be possible, that's what poetry is.'" (9)

I shall now mention some titles of my verse collections published since 1959: Con las mismas manos (1962), Buena suerte viviendo (1967, which includes a previous book, Historia antigua), Que veremos arder (1970, simultaneously published, with some censored verses and its title taken from Mayakovsky, as Algo semejante a los monstruos antediluvianos), Circunstancia de poesia (1974; 2nd ed., 1977), Juana y otros poemas personales (1981), Hacia la nueva (1989), and Aqui (1995; 3rd ed., 2000). For Alejo Carpentier, "An intellection of the world by way of poetry: such is the task undertaken by Roberto Fernandez Retamar in a work that advances with his life and the big and small events, the encounters, the human intercourse that give it its meaning.... In Latin America, everyday talk, without emphasis, which renounces the possibility of a verbal baroque always offered by the language, acquires a unique significance." (10)

HOWEVER, I AM AWARE THAT, in my written work, essays have drawn the greatest attention, especially those published from 1959, which includes most of them. In a way, they have arisen from the urge to deal with events I have felt the need to explain to others and to myself. Though I had collaborated (using the pen name "David") in the underground press prior to 1959, newspaper articles published that year opened up a new horizon. From journals read only by a few (Origenes) and university periodical publications (Revista Hispanica Moderna, Universidad de La Habana, Islas), I was thrown into the massive newspaper pages (above all, of Revolucion), which had many eager readers, though some of the previous tone would survive in the Nueva Revista Cubana. I used to remark to my friends that I had passed from philology to journalism. The truth is that, as I was to realize later, I would end up by merging both lines of work, as I brought acquired erudition, past and future, to the fire of the present. In my transitional book Papeleria (1962), I joined past and present essays with articles written for the newspaper.

As I have done with some of my travels, I shall now focus on one year, for the various things it meant to me: 1965. In January of that year, the journal Cuba Socialista published my essay "Marti en su (tercer) mundo," written between 1963 and 1964, after my having read anew, with care and asking myself a great many questions, all of Marti's work. My motive was to prepare an anthology of Marti's writings for an Italian publishing house, which went out of business before the project could be completed. As a result, however, I had laid the groundwork for future essays, the first of which was, of course, the one mentioned. If I am not mistaken, only one person among us had already worked with the already widespread concept of "Third World": Che Guevara. A magnificent chance encounter brought us together in March 1965 during a European trip. Our plane was grounded in Shannon, Ireland, which allowed me to spend two days and nights chatting with him. I will never quite know how much this meant to me. On my return to Havana, Haydee Santamaria, with whom I was to maintain a meaningful relationship, made me the editor of the journal Casa de las Americas, which was to be, and is to this day, my main forum. In the first issue under my editorship (number 30, May-June 1965), I commented on the Latin American Writers Congress that the Columbianum, which no longer exists, had organized in Genoa in January; in the next issue (number 31, July-August 1965), I published my note "Fanon y la America Latina"; number 33 (November-December 1965) was dedicated, one year after his death, to Ezequiel Martinez Estrada (my great non-Cuban maestro following the death, in 1959, of Alfonso Reyes), about whom I published "Razon de homenaje." (Also in 1965, my verse collection Historia antigua, edited by my great companero Fayad Jamis in Havana, was to become a turning point in the development of my poetry--and perhaps beyond it.)

My volume Ensayo de otro mundo (1967) collected prose selections, similar to those mentioned, and included additional pieces as well. Its second, enlarged edition (1969) received the following comment in Books Abroad: "The astonishing reality of the underdeveloped third world has, indeed, entered Hispanic ideology and literary criticism. Fernandez Retamar's book elevates including this perspective--once incidental in our studies--to making this new approach indispensable" (BA 45:1, p. 87). As is well known, of the many texts that I would continue developing along this line, the most widely known one is "Caliban" (Casa de las Americas 68 [September-October 1971]). I don't feel it is necessary to expound on it at this point, except to say that, as with "Marti en su (tercer) mundo" and many other essays of mine, it doesn't deal with literature, though it is also taken into account here and there. There was a tendency to classify such pieces as literary essays because an adequate term was not yet in use. But it is evident that Introduccion a Jose Marti (1978), Caliban y otros ensayos: Nuestra America y el mundo (1979), Algunos usos de civilizacion y barbarie (1989, which brings together texts from previous books), Todo Caliban (1995), of course, and Cuba defendida (1996) do not deal essentially with literary questions; other texts go beyond them, such as Concierto para la mano izquierda (2001). They all have in common, as in most of my essays, the anticolonialist perspective, the impugnation of the practice of centering on the West. In "Nuestra America y Occidente" (Casa de las Americas 98 [September-October 1971]), so unfortunately translated into English in the fall 1986 issue of Social Text, and in works that followed it, I postulated a more specific horizon: what I called "a post-Western society." Para una teoria de la literatura hispanoamericana (1975; rev. ed. 1995) is a different case: there I tried to bring the perspective, the critique, to the studies of literary theory that I had formally begun in my courses in 1961 at the University of Havana. I had done something similar when I focused on the poetry of a single author (Nicolas Guillen) in El son de vuelo popular (2972).

La poesia, reino autonomo (2000) collects my writings of literary criticism. Materials for a possible future book of memoirs can be found in Entrevisto (1982), Fervor de la Argentina ... (1993), Recuerdo a (1998), and En la Espana de la ene (2001). My intellectual work is completed, among other labors, with courses, lectures, interviews, translations, critiques on artists, filmscripts, numerous anthologies I have put together (from Marti to Che Guevara, from Martinez Villena to Neruda, from Reyes to Borges, from Poetas espanoles del siglo XX to Cinco escritores de la Revolucion Rusa: Blok, Ivanov, Shklovsky, Babel, Mayakovsky ...), and, of course, editorial pieces drawn from over thirty-five years from the journal of the Casa de las Americas, the institution I have presided over since 1986.

For obvious reasons, I shall finish by reading several quotations regarding my work as an essayist. One is from Walter Mignolo, who, after presenting a paper about my work on literary theory and my having been the target of an impugnment, commented: "It seems fair that we take Fernandez Retamar as a point of reference for the discussion of problems that, several years later, were to be taken up by Said and Jameson." (11) The second is from Francisco Lasarte: "The [1971] essay by Fernandez Retamar brings Caliban to new life as a symbol and serves as an impetus for the many publications that have been, since then, dedicated to it by scholars who study Latin American literature and culture.... Caliban has proved to be a lasting and flexible symbol that has survived great changes in the political reality of Latin America and the world (and, it must be pointed out, in that center of Calibanology that is the university academic world, mainly in the United States).... Ironically, we then owe the publication of texts on canonical figures of Western civilization like Shakespeare himself, William Wordsworth, Ernest Renan, and W. H. Auden to that `subversive' essay of a Cuban critic, of a representative of the Third World." (12) The final quote I shall cite is from Gerald Martin: "Put aside and even proscribed by cultural, postcolonial and subaltern studies, Roberto Fernandez Retamar is, nevertheless, its unavoidable predecessor in Latin America and, sometimes, its bad conscience, the indispensable intellectual bridge between the Latin American nineteenth century and the twenty-first century." (13) May the gods, always unpredictable, make these amiable commentators, at least in part, be right.

Havana

(1) For this, I shall make use, with the natural changes, of a text I prepared for the recent LASA conference, held in Washington D.C. last September, where a panel focused on my work, then commented on by several scholars to whom I feel indebted.

(2) See The America of Jose Marti: Selected Writings (New York: Noonday Press, 1953), 121-35.

(3) Edited by Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle, and Dan Georgakas, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 452.

(4) Edited by Paul Lauter, 2nd ed., vol. 2.

(5) See my lecture "Origenes a medio siglo," in Tradicion y actualidad de la literatura iberoamericana: Actas del XXX Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, ed. Pamela Bacarisse (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1995), 2:183-207.

(6) See Alfonso Reyes and Roberto Fernandez Retamar, "Correspondencia (1951-59)," Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional Jose Marti, January-June 2000, 11-48.

(7) Handbook of Latin American Studies 20 (1958), 250-51.

(8) Helmut Hatzfeld and Yves LeHir, Essai de bibliographie critique francaise et romane (1955-1960) (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961), 35.

(9) See Acerca de Roberto Fernandez Retamar, ed. Ambrosio Fornet (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2001), 152.

(10) Fornet, Acerca de Roberto Fernandez Retamar, 40, 44.

(11) Revista de Critica Literaria Latinoamericana 33 (First semester, 1991), 116.

(12) "Caliban Superstar," in Estudio analitico del signo linguistico: Teoria y descripcion, ed. Bob de Jonge (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000), 107-8.

(13) Back cover blurb from Roberto Fernandez Retamar y los estudios latinoamericanos, ed. Elzbieta Sklodowska and Ben A. Heller, Serie Criticas (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, University of Pittsburgh, 2000).