Mariano Brull facts for kids

Mariano Brull Caballero (born February 24, 1891 – died June 8, 1956) was a famous Cuban poet. He is often linked to the French Symbolist movement in poetry. Two poets who really inspired him were Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. Among Cuban poets of his time, he stood out because he wrote poetry just for the beauty of it. He didn't focus on social problems or Cuban culture.

Mariano Brull loved the sounds of words. He even created a special type of poetry called "jitanjáfora." In these poems, the words don't have much meaning, but their sounds are super important! He was also a diplomat (someone who represents their country in other nations) and lived in many different countries in Europe and the Americas.

Mariano Brull (1891-1956) after graduating from the University of Havana in 1913.

Mariano Brull's Life Story

Mariano Brull was born in Camagüey, a city in eastern Cuba. His father, Miguel Brull, was a Spanish army officer. His mother, Celia Caballero, came from a family that had lived in Cuba for many generations.

His Early Years and Love for Poetry

As a child, Mariano lived in Ceuta and Málaga in Spain. When he was a teenager, studying in Camagüey, he found his true passion: poetry! He and some friends even started a small magazine where they wrote poems and essays. Young Brull read all the poetry he could find. He was especially amazed by the French Symbolist poets.

In 1908, he moved to Havana. He went to university there and earned a law degree at age 22. He worked in a law office but also wrote poems for a magazine called El Fígaro. From 1914 to 1915, he was part of a small group led by the writer Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Henríquez believed Brull had a bright future as a poet. He became Brull's mentor, helping him meet editors and suggesting new poets to read.

In 1916, Brull published his first poetry book, La casa del silencio. Soon after, he married Adela Baralt. He then changed careers and joined the Cuban diplomatic service. Brull really wanted to leave Cuba. After years of fighting for independence, the country was focused on its own problems. Art and new ideas were not very popular there. He wanted to experience the exciting new art movements in Europe, like Cubism and futurism.

Life as a Diplomat and Poet

Brull was eager to go to Europe. But his first two diplomatic assignments were in the United States and Peru. In the mid-1920s, he was stationed in Madrid, Spain. There, he was lucky to join literary gatherings in cafés. He met many of Spain's best poets of the 20th century, like Federico García Lorca and Rafael Alberti. While in Madrid, some of Brull's early poems were translated into French and published in Paris.

In 1923, Brull joined about 60 young professionals in Havana. They formed a group called El Grupo Minorista (the Minority Group). They wanted to speak out against the lack of progress in politics and culture. They demanded an end to old ways and wanted to embrace the new artistic trends from Europe. In politics, they spoke out against unfair governments and asked for a Cuban government that listened more to its people.

In 1928, he published his second poetry book, Poemas en menguante. It was also published in Paris, where he was living at the time, but it was written in Spanish. All his books were small editions, mostly for friends and family, and he paid for them himself.

The Brulls lived in Paris from 1927 to 1934. They only left twice for a year each, once for Berne and once for Havana. When they returned to Havana, there were many protests and riots. Students were clashing with the police of President Gerardo Machado, who was becoming a very strict ruler.

Brull spent the Great Depression back in Paris. He traveled often, visiting Havana for work, southern Spain (where he grew up), and Mexico City. In Mexico City, he visited friends like Gabriela Mistral, a Chilean poet, and Alfonso Reyes, a Mexican writer.

In 1934, his third poetry book, Canto redondo, was published in Paris. He was stationed in Rome, Italy, between 1934 and 1937. This was a time when fascism was very strong there.

After moving to Brussels (for the second time) in the late 1930s, Brull helped many German Jews. They were seeking visas to leave Germany and lined up at embassies in many countries. During these years, he was also Cuba's delegate to a meeting of the League of Nations. He also helped Cubans who were fleeing the Spanish Civil War return home. Brull believed a big war in Europe was coming, even though most of his friends disagreed. He pushed the Cuban government to send him back to Havana. He left in June 1939. A year later, the ship carrying all of the Brull family's belongings to Cuba was sunk by German forces.

In 1939, a bilingual book (French and Spanish) called Poëmes was published in Paris. It had a special introduction written by Paul Valéry, one of France's greatest writers at the time. Brull worked for many years translating Valéry's most famous and challenging poems into Spanish.

In Cuba, Brull helped organize a conference for the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in 1941. This group included important thinkers who believed that sharing ideas could help solve the problems of the 1930s and the violence of Second World War. Brull admired people who could both think deeply and take action. He didn't like the idea of just sitting and thinking, like Rodin's famous statue, "The Thinker." Brull's hero was José Martí, a Cuban journalist and poet who organized Cuba's fight for independence and died fighting Spanish soldiers.

His fifth poetry book, Solo de rosa, was published. His poems also appeared in top literary magazines like Social and Orígenes. He had long talks with the exiled Spanish poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez, who wrote a similar style of poetry.

During the Second World War, Brull was stationed in Washington, D.C.. In 1945, he was sent to Ottawa to set up Cuba's first diplomatic office in Canada.

Back in Brussels in 1950, he published Temps en peine. Tiempo en pena, a bilingual edition. Sadly, his wife died there after many years of fighting cancer.

His last job was as the Cuban ambassador to Uruguay. However, he refused an order from the Cuban leader, Fulgencio Batista. He suddenly resigned, ending his 47-year career in the Cuban diplomatic service. That same year (1954), his final book of poems, Rien que... (Nada más que...), was published in Paris.

His Final Years

Back in Havana, he started to modernize the cattle ranch he had inherited from his mother. But a growing brain tumor slowly made him weaker. It eventually led to a coma. He passed away at the age of 65 in 1956.

Mariano Brull's Poetic Style

How His Poetry Began

Brull's first book, La casa del silencio, is a good example of Hispanic modernismo. It also shows influences from the Symbolist movement and a bit of tropical romanticism. Even in this early work, you can see themes that would stay with him: the idea of beauty and exploring one's inner feelings to escape the harsh realities of the world and time.

You can see the influence of Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez and Mexican poet Enrique González Martínez. But these early poems were like a student's work. Nine years passed between his first and second poetry collections. During these years, he grew as a poet, especially after moving to Europe.

In his second book, Poemas en menguante, Brull fully embraced Symbolism (which is often called pure poetry). However, the poems show he was still learning to use this new style completely. He was part of big discussions among poets of his time. They debated if Symbolism, which focused on art as pure abstraction, meant that art was losing its human touch. Brull made it clear that poetry was about making thoughts and forms perfect, but it was never just about being abstract. Still, many people linked Symbolism with art becoming less human. Strong criticism of Symbolism was often heard, even in Cuba.

The Importance of Sound

A key part of Brull's poetry is how he used words as sounds. This interest in sound can be seen in the efforts of Mallarmé and Valéry to create pure poetry. It also comes from the traditional, popular Spanish poems that played with sounds. Other Spanish poets, like García Lorca, also loved this. Similar experiments with word sounds were happening in Italian, German, and English literature in the 1920s and before.

Brull's creative use of sounds, through tongue-twisters and different phonetic experiments, could create a world of "magical enchantment." These sounds and word changes sometimes became so meaningless that they formed a type of poetry known as "jitanjáfora." This name comes from a word Brull used in his poem "Filiflama…," which is made up entirely of invented words.

Filiflama alabe cundre

ala olalúnea alífera

alveola jitanjáfora

liris salumba salífera.

Olivia oleo olorife

alalai cánfora sandra

milingítara girófora

zumbra ulalindre calandra.

But this extreme focus on sound was just one part of Brull's poetry. The "jitanjáfora" was like a "verbal joke." Brull created it on the side, but it was an extreme result of how his main work developed.

Themes of Childhood

Brull showed an interest in childhood in many of his poems. He did this either through the topic itself or by using language and rhythms that sound like children's verses, or both. The verses he learned in southern Spain as a boy had a lasting impact on him. These verses were part of the traditional, popular poetry that his generation of poets really enjoyed.

Special Features of His Work

Even though he used alliteration (repeating sounds) and metaphors (comparing things) a lot, some things made his work unique:

• He used words together in unusual ways.
• He would use the same word twice in one line but with completely different meanings.
• He loved punning (playing with words that sound alike but have different meanings).
• He combined words that meant the opposite or clashed in their meanings (like "the melody of the perfume"). These were usually placed inside dashes.
• He used illogical sound games and onomatopoeia (words that imitate sounds, like "buzz"). Here you can see the influence of futurism and Dadaism.

Brull preferred free verse (poetry without a regular rhyme or rhythm), followed by blank verse (poetry with a regular rhythm but no rhyme). However, he sometimes wrote sonnets and other traditional poetic forms. His poems were usually short, and he didn't write a huge number of them. These were unusual traits compared to most Hispanic poets.

The Symbol of the Rose

The rose is the main motif (a repeated idea or symbol) in Brull's poetry. It was his favorite symbol for "perfection and lasting beauty in a world that is always changing."

Mallarmé once described a flower as being without its stem and leaves. He meant that art should focus on the most important part, the essence. No other Cuban poet went as far as Brull in this idea of poetry. But because he was from Latin America, he couldn't completely forget the stems and leaves. Brull's special contribution to Cuban poetry is this balance between what is real and what is ideal.

He found the best balance between the real and the abstract in Solo de rosas. This collection of poems praises the rose in its pure form, fragile and wonderful, untouched by time.

Epitafio de la Rosa (Epitaph For a Rose)

Rompo una rosa y no te encuentro.

Al viento, así, columnas deshojadas,

palacio de la rosa en ruinas.

Ahora—rosa imposible—empiezas:

por agujas de aire entretejida

al mar de la delicia intacta,

donde todas las rosas

--antes que rosa—

belleza son sin cárcel de belleza.

(I take apart a rose and I don't find you.

To the wind, like this, columns of floating petals,

the palace of the rose in ruins.

Now—impossible rose—you begin:

woven by needles of air

to the sea of untouched delight,

where all the roses

--before they were a rose—

are beauty without beauty's prison.)

Thoughts on Change and Time

In his last works, Tiempo en pena and Nada más que…, Brull's poetry becomes more sad, serious, and thoughtful. It's like a journey towards a dark place, possibly made stronger by personal sadness (his wife's death) and the world around him seeming to fall apart (the Spanish Civil War followed by the Second World War).

Over the years, beneath the clear style of his poems, you can see Brull's growing worry about a world he saw getting worse. The roots of this sadness are clear in his first poems. In them, absence and silence are present, but any discomfort is eased by the idea of perfect beauty. By the 1950s, absence was no longer a friendly idea; it turned into nothingness. Brull was filled with a sad view of life where everything, even beauty, was seen as something that could be destroyed or, as he often said, ruined. Once time has done its work, only nothingness remains. "Never had Cuban poetry reached so far into despair with such quietness and solitude."

Famous Quote

"La prosa es escrita con el tesoro del conocimiento mientras que la poesía es escrita con el tesoro de la ignorancia."

“Prose is written with the treasure of knowledge, while poetry is written with the treasure of ignorance.”

Books of Poetry

• La casa del silencio (1916)
• Poemas en menguante (1928)
• Canto redondo (1934)
• Poëmes (1939) (A book with poems in both Spanish and French)
• Solo de rosa (1941)
• Temps en peine/Tiempo en pena (1950)
• Rien que ... (Nada más que ...) (1954)

See also

In Spanish: Mariano Brull para niños