Mariano Brull

Brull was determined to leave Cuba where, exhausted by years fighting for independence and preoccupied by problems facing any new country, the arts were confused and anemic, uninterested in the great experiments (Cubism, futurism, etc.)

There he had the good fortune to participate in the reunions of the literary cafés frequented by many of the best poets Spain was to produce in the 20th century: Federico García Lorca, Rafael Alberti, Jorge Guillén, Vicente Aleixandre, and many others.

In 1923 Brull joined about 60 young professionals of Havana who decided to take a public stance against the reigning passivity and mediocrity in politics and culture.

Called El Grupo Minorista (the Minority Group),[5] they demanded an end to years of cultural backwardness and an aggressive affirmation of the new artistic tendencies coming out of Europe.

The return of the Brulls to Havana coincided with numerous riots and demonstrations as students clashed with the police of the government of President Gerardo Machado, an increasingly ruthless dictator.

He frequently visited Havana, on business; southern Spain, the land of his childhood; and Mexico City where he called on his friends Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean poet, Alfonso Reyes, the Mexican man-of-letters, and others.

After moving to Brussels (for the second time) at the end of the 1930s, Brull was in charge of attending to the many German Jews who, seeking visas to emigrate, had lined up before the legations and embassies of numerous countries.

During these years he was Cuba's delegate to the XVII Reunion of the Assembly of the League of Nations and, also, Commissioner for the repatriation of Cubans fleeing the Spanish Civil War.

In 1939, a bilingual (French-Spanish) book, Poëmes, came out in Paris, with a preface written by one of the greatest literary figures of France at the time, Paul Valéry.

Brull worked for many years on a translation into Spanish of Valéry's most famous, and difficult, poems: "Le Cimetiére Marin" (The Graveyard by the Sea) and "La Jeune Parque" (The Young Fate).

[10] This organization was made up of major intellectuals who believed that the interchange of ideas would help lead to a solution to the tension of the 1930s and the violence of the Second World War.

His poems also were printed in the foremost literary publications: Social, Gaceta del Caribe, Espuela de Plata, Clavileño, Orígenes and El Fígaro.

Brull's first book, La casa del silencio, is a good example of Hispanic modernismo, though it has its share of intimate, Symbolist influence and a touch of tropical romanticism.

[18] In his second book, Poemas en menguante, Brull embraces Symbolism (pure poetry) though the poems show him still struggling to assimilate the new style completely.

[23] Brull's creativity involving the use of sounds, through tongue-twisters and various phonetic experiments, could create a world of “magical enchantment.”[24] These sounds and lexicological permutations combined, at times, to reach a level of senselessness which resulted in poetry that has come to be known as “jitanjáfora” after the use of this word in Brull's poem “Filiflama…”, a poem entirely made up of invented words.

[33] The rose is the principal motif in Brull's poetry, his preferred symbol for “a standard of perfection and permanence in a transitory world.”[34] Mallarmé had defined a flower as the absence of the stem and leaves, his way of stating that the finality of art is the concentration on the essence.

[35] An equilibrium between the sensual and the abstract is most fully reached in Solo de rosas, a collection of poems in which the poet praises the rose in its pure essence, fragile and wondrous, and not corrupted by the passage of time.

[36] Epitafio de la Rosa (Epitaph For a Rose) In his last works, Tiempo en pena and Nada más que…, Brull's poetry takes on a melancholy, somber and reflective tone, that of a journey toward the black hole of existentialism, possibly intensified by personal tragedy (the death of his wife) and the world around him seemingly falling apart (the Spanish Civil War followed by the Second World War).

Brull is consumed by a tragic vision of life in which all things, including beauty, are conceived of as subject to destruction or, a word he often chose, ruin.