Poet and novelist, short-story writer, essayist and aesthetic thinker; researcher and advisor of Literature and Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba, José Lezama Lima was until the mid-sixties of the past 20th century a practically unknown writer.
Born on December 19, 1910, he graduated as a lawyer in 1938, a profession he carried out for some time; in 1949 he became a civil servant in the Culture Department of the Ministry of Education and after the revolutionary triumph of January 1st, 1959 he became the head of the Literature and Publications Department of the National Council of Culture, and became one of the vice presidents of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.
Although he devoted himself mainly to poetry and essays, he is remembered for his facet as a novelist, specifically for his work Paradiso, published in 1966 with great international repercussion; the appearance of the poem Muerte de Narciso was a milestone in the Cuban literary context due to the renovation of its formal and conceptual proposal.
Lezama Lima founded and directed several literary publications of great quality, including Verbum, Espuela de Plata, Nadie parecía and finally Orígenes, considered by many as the best magazine of the Spanish language in his time and the most fruitful of all his publishing endeavors.
In poetry, he published Muerte de Narciso, Enemigo rumor, Aventuras sigilosas, La tijera, Dador, Posible imagen de Lezama Lima, Poesías completas and Fragmentos a su imán; and his imaginative and poetic essays Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez, Arístides Fernández, Analecta del reloj, La expresión americana, Tratados en La Habana, Las imágenes posibles and the collection La cantidad hechizada.
Baroque in style, and considered one of the most important authors of Spanish-American literature, he brought together poets of the stature of Gastón Baquero, Cintio Vitier, Eliseo Diego, Virgilio Piñera and Octavio Smith, among others, and his work has influenced a large number of writers of his time and later.
José Lezama Lima participated in the student revolts against the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, and together with Alejo Carpentier was one of the greatest figures in Cuban literature. He died at the age of 65 on August 9, 1976, and his house in Havana is now a museum.
