José María Andrés Fernando Lezama Lima, was born on December 19, 1910, near Havana; his father, a military officer, died in 1919. Lezama He was a sickly boy, and while recovering from various illnesses he began to read widely and eagerly. After studying law in Havana, in 1937 he helped found three short-lived literary magazines: Verbum (1937), Silver spur (1939-41) and No one seemed (1942-44). When these publications ceased, Lezama he joined Cuban literary critic and editor José Rodríguez Feo (1920-93) and others to found the influential art newspaper Origen (1944-56). In it the works of several excellent young artists and musicians were published, along with the work of several young poets whose contributions revolutionized Cuban and Latin American letters.
The vast reading of Lezama It had given him a solid foundation in the Spanish classics of the Golden Age, as well as in the work of the French Symbolists, both of which greatly influenced his early writing. His prose style has been compared to that of the great 16th century Spanish writer Luis de Góngora. Narcissus death (1937), his first book of poetry, demonstrates his familiarity with cultures far beyond the island of Cuba. Rumor enemy (1941) reveals, in addition to aesthetic concerns about the essence of poetry, the poet’s belief that the act of creation is loaded with religious and metaphysical possibilities. On Stealth adventures (1945), recreates incidents from his youth and deals with the powerful influence of his mother on his artistic and cultural growth after the death of his father. (The writer continued to live with his mother – after his sisters married – until her death in 1964. He married, as promised, shortly after).
His novel Paradise (1966), published a few years later, is a story about the training of the poet José Cemí, from his childhood to his university years, set in Cuba. It is a complex story told in often obscure language, reaffirming the narrator’s faith in his art and in himself. The book is considered the masterpiece of Lezama; it was one of his few works translated into English during his lifetime.
The poems collected in Giver (1960) are spiritual in nature, and at the time of publication the paper of Lezama in an increasingly Marxist Cuba it had become uncomfortable. However, he maintained a series of cultural positions until the time of his death.
The unfinished sequel to Paradise, Oppiano Licario (the name of a main character in the previous work), was published in 1977, one year after his death, on August 9, 1976. A number of other writings, including short stories, essays, and letters, were also published posthumously.