All around Latin America, there are rivers, farms, streets, neighborhoods, and towns named Salsipuedes, which means “Leave If You Can.” The original site bearing this name may be a tributary of the Río Negro, in Uruguay, where, in 1831, President Fructuoso Rivera’s army captured the few members of the Charrúa people who had survived the genocidal Salsipuedes campaign. The river flowed on from that moment of terror, carrying the trace of blood and dispossession inside a name that people would come to sing with sweet nostalgia: in 1948, the Colombian bandleader Lucho Bermúdez made it a popular song, “Salsipuedes, Tierra de Amor” (“Leave If You Can, Land of Love.”)

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It is the Celia Cruz version of the song that echoed in my ears as I read “Absolute Solitude,” James O’Connor’s recent translations of the Cuban poet Dulce María Loynaz, who died twenty years ago. Both Cruz and Loynaz were major artists of twentieth-century Cuba whose careers were permanently altered by the Revolution. In July, 1960, Cruz and her band, La Sonora Matancera, decided to stay abroad while on tour in Mexico, and Fidel Castro, resentful, never let them reënter the country, not even for the funeral of Cruz’s father. Yet she would remain La Guarachera de Cuba, always identified with the island she left behind. By contrast, Dulce María Loynaz stayed in Cuba, in what scholars refer to as an “internal exile.” She stopped writing and publishing her poetry and rarely left her family mansion in Vedado, Havana. “Quiero vivir en Salsipuedes,” Cruz sings: “I want to live in Leave If You Can.”

What does it mean to stay without staying, or to leave without leaving? These are a migrant’s questions, or the questions of a would-be migrant. They take on a broadly existential tone in the work of Loynaz, whose prose poems are often described as apolitical. Poem XC, first published in Spain in her 1953 collection, “Poems Without a Name,” provides a sense of her mysterious mental weather:

The rains displace me without washing me away, the winds push me about without breaking my form, or my identity. I remain myself, but I constantly lose my center, or what I thought my center was, or what my center will never be.

We tend to assume that political poetry announces its commitment to the here and now. Loynaz leaves us at sea, favoring an elemental vocabulary of rains, winds, rivers, waves, wings, and stars. Her poems make no reference to scenes, figures, or events in Cuban history, remote or recent. Instead, they ride a recursive current. They inspire doubt in the power of forward movement to manifest a new reality.

In other moments from “Poems Without a Name,” she is “prisoner of a flow without meaning”; she writes, “we could walk until morning and never get anywhere.” Sometimes Loynaz seems to imagine that her own writing could restore vitality to all that’s been left behind by time’s passage: “my water is not for the new shoots. I am here to water the stump, for it is dry.” More often, though, as in Poem CXIV, she imagines that she herself is among the abandoned:

The entire world is empty before me, left by men who forgot to take me with them.

I am alone on this vast earth, my only company animals who were left behind as well, and trees, which were not thought necessary.

Tomorrow, when they no longer hear the meadowlark’s song, when they no longer smell the rose’s perfume, they will remember there was a bird and a flower and maybe then they will think it was good to have had them.

But when they no longer have my timid poems, nobody will know that I once walked among them.

Here, her abstract anxiety takes on a sharper edge, one she would come to experience still more keenly after the Revolution: “does my sweetness lie so deep within me you need to cut me to find it?”

Though Loynaz predicted that “men,” specifically, would be the agents of her abandonment, she began her life blessed by her country’s patriarchs. She was born in 1902, the year that Cuba seized sovereignty from Spain. Her father, Enrique Loynaz del Castillo, was a celebrated figure in the Cuban War of Independence; he fought alongside his friend José Martí. The Loynaz family was not only patriotic but wealthy: chandeliers, white peacocks, private tutors, world travel. In the nineteen-thirties and forties, the family’s palatial home was a hub for the great writers of the Spanish-speaking world, including Juan Ramón Jiménez, Federico García Lorca, and Gabriela Mistral. Enrique Loynaz encouraged his firstborn’s talent for poetry, sending her work to Havana’s most important newspaper, La Nación, which published two verses, “Vesperal” and “Winter,” when she was just seventeen. Though she struggled to find success with her first book in Cuba, she found an audience in Spain in the nineteen-fifties, where her next five books were published to great acclaim across the Spanish-speaking world. Juan Ramón Jiménez praised the “mystic irony” of “Ophelia Loynaz the Subtle.” The Uruguayan modernist Juana de Ibarbourou christened her “the first woman of América.” The Mexican megastar Maria Félix considered playing the lead in a film adaptation of “Jardín,” the poet’s only novel.

When the Revolution came, in 1959, Loynaz may have been briefly imprisoned. O’Connor cites a conversation with a close friend of Loynaz in support of this claim, which is difficult to confirm while the Cuban state maintains the privacy of its records regarding dissidents. At the very least, we know that Loynaz was accused of supporting Batista, the overthrown dictator, and the Spanish editions of her books were removed from Cuba’s National Library. Though her class background and failure to join the Communist Party were enough to mark her as a potential traitor, the radical interiority of her work also posed an implicit threat to the ideology of the Revolution in its early days. In Poem LXXXVI, Loynaz, addressing a lover, writes, “even though I’m yours, I keep everything from you”; the line figures the poet’s soul as riches withheld—the ultimate private property. But throughout her work Loynaz distinguishes spiritual privacy and material possessions: in Poem II, “my word . . . is not a coffer for the things we covet.” And in the poem that provides the title for O’Connor’s translations, she writes: “the world gave me many things, but the only thing I ever kept was absolute solitude.” If she is greedy, she is greedy only for her own mind.

It would be thirty years before the fall of the Soviet Union loosened the aesthetic criteria of the Cuban regime enough to allow for a renewed interest in Loynaz’s work. The majority of her books were only published at home after she received Spain’s 1992 Cervantes Prize, the highest literary honor in the Spanish language. By then she was ninety years old, and not in the best shape to enjoy her sudden renown, though she did receive a steady flow of literary pilgrims at her home, always at 5 p.m. But even after her death, in 1997, this reclamation has remained ambivalent. In 2003, the Cuban government raided the Dulce María Loynaz Library and confiscated more than a thousand books as part of a broader campaign to eliminate independent libraries operating beyond the purview of the state. Two years later, her former home was meticulously restored on the basis of old photographs and transformed into a museum, the Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Center. A visitor to Havana can still see the courtyard with its towering stone statue of a headless woman, and, in the garden, a silence that can’t be unheard.

Is it justifiable to read her work, the vast majority of which was written before the Revolution, in light of her post-revolutionary life? To do so is, on one level, plainly anachronistic, and yet there is an uncanny clarity to her vision of internal exile:

My new master even lets me deceive myself by letting me see, right there where they’ve always been, the sky, the sun, and the horizons that used to be mine, horizons I now flee without fleeing and bite without biting while I wait to know what exactly they’re going to do with me.

The Cuban critic Zaida Capote Cruz has written that Loynaz silenced herself “due to her own character traits.” But, by the nineteen-eighties, Loynaz herself was clear on the subject; in a letter to another Cuban critic, Aldo Martínez Malo, she refused to provide information for a proposed biography: “My own country silenced me for more than twenty years. How to pretend now that everything has changed when I am closer to death than to life?” It doesn’t seem right to regard her poems as outside history, since their itinerary has been so tightly intertwined with our shared hemispheric centuries of revolutions, coups, and embargoes national and international.

But what history does her work live inside? “Poetry is transit,” Loynaz wrote in a 1950 lecture on her own process. Her pattern of publication repeatedly pulled her writing outside its moment of composition, and placed it in new contexts: poems she wrote in the twenties were not published until 1938; the novel she finished in 1935 was not published at all until 1951, and did not appear in Cuba until 1994. In her lifetime, Loynaz sometimes lamented these generational disconnects: “You know, it’s sad to start over with people who didn’t exist when I existed.” Her grief can be contagious. I count myself among the lloronas of Poem CIX: “women wept for the dead women who had never known me as if they wept for themselves.” It feels reparative to hear her alongside Celia Cruz, humming as I read, tuning parallel channels until they harmonize.

Now more people can read her poems in the United States, at a moment when it seemed, briefly, as if relations between Loynaz’s country and this one would warm. U.S. policy toward Cuba has had its own role in stifling the rich and storied cultural exchange between the migrant peoples of the Americas. The disappearance of Loynaz is marked by the unique trajectory of Cuban history, but she is far from the only woman writer who, once widely celebrated, fell into almost total obscurity for a time. Such disappearances often begin willfully, then slowly come to seem like the natural lay of the land. Dulce María Loynaz reminds me to ask, relentlessly, “what flowers did I step on pretending I didn’t see them?”