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Reviewed by:
  • José Martí and U.S. Writers
  • Oscar Montero
Anne Fountain . José Martí and U.S. Writers. Foreword by Roberto Fernández Retamar. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. 154 pp.

No one would argue against the fact that the complex relationship between José Martí and the culture and politics of the United States is a central chapter in any study of the Cuban poet and revolutionary. The foundational work of Manuel Pedro González immediately comes to mind, José Martí: Epic Chronicler of the United States in the Eighties, published in 1953, along with more recent works, notably José Ballón's Autonomía cultural americana: Emerson y Martí, published in 1986. Moreover, dozens of articles have dealt with Martí's years in the United States. Anne Fountain's José Martí and U.S. Writers focuses on Martí's essays and numerous references to U.S. writers. Fountain's is a brief book covering a vast territory. It suggests key points in the study of Martí, specifically the role of U.S. literature in the development of his own aesthetics. Although these and other points are not fully developed, Fountain's book offers a concise chart and a starting point for subsequent studies.

The centerpiece of José Martí and U.S. Writers is the chapter on Martí's essay and many references to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Fountain offers a lucid, compact summary of Martí's indebtedness to the "Sage of Concord," in whom Martí found "a kindred soul" (55). Fountain suggests that Martí's writings on Emerson involved a great deal of translation, not as the mere rendering of one language into another but as a process of assimilation and incorporation. As many critics have pointed out, Martí's charged interpretation of Emerson's analogic thinking, that is, the vibrancy of all links between human beings and the cosmos, from the blade of grass to the farthest star, was enormously influential in Latin America.

Along with a chapter on Emerson, Fountain also dedicates separate chapters to Martí and Whitman and Martí and Longfellow. The remaining chapters treat Martí's writings on writers of the Romantic movement and writers of Realism. The chapter on Walt Whitman glosses important topics in the study of Martí's groundbreaking reading of the poet of Leaves of Grass. Martí's admiration for Whitman's iconoclastic voice is unequivocal, yet his discomfort with Whitman's unruly muse and what Fountain rightly calls his "distance" from the homoerotic elements in Whitman's poetry are evident (53). I missed a reference to Sylvia Molloy's widely circulated article on this topic. Fountain notes the same sense of "distance" in Martí's writings about Edgar Allan Poe. Why this "distance," and what is its significance in the development of Martí's own aesthetics? Fountain approaches this important topic but does not fully develop it. On the other hand, she argues that both Whitman and Martí "preferred natural verse forms and a lack of artifice" (57), a recurring topic in Martí, notably in Versos sencillos, yet this does not account for the dazzling, overwrought artifice of Versos libres, one of the peaks in Martí's canon. The chapter [End Page 161] on Longfellow is significant in that it brings to light the importance for Martí of one of the giants of U.S. literature, long eclipsed by changes in literary taste, yet currently undergoing a reevaluation.

Martí's many references to other U.S. writers are glossed in Fountain's book, most importantly Martí's writings on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain. Martí's comments on Hawthorne seem to be secondhand and are rife with generalities and clichés. These passing comments, more the work of the dutiful reporter than the literary critic, pale along-side the brilliance of Martí's treatment of Emerson and Whitman and of other, nonliterary aspects of the culture of the United States.

In a discussion of Martí's writings on Twain, Fountain suggests that Martí's literary criticism offers "a window on his precepts of literary criticism and a guide to his aesthetic preferences" (121). This is a vast territory in which the literature and culture of the United...

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