Born in the provincial city of Granada in 1925, the poet and priest, Ernesto Cardenal, was an important intellectual who led revolutionary acts in Nicaragua as a follower of Liberation Theology, a Christian movement that subscribes to Marxist principles of social justice. He gave recitals that fused his poetic expression with political and religious discourse in Europe and Latin America. His work as a writer-activist has been recognized internationally: he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times and won the Reina Sofia Ibero-American Poetry Prize in 2012.
Cardenal spent his childhood in León, a university town in Nicaragua, and began exploring his interest in poetry at that time. Between the years 1943 and 1947, he moved to Mexico City to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and it was during this period that he published his first book of poems, La ciudad deshabitada (1946). In the following years, Cardenal studied at Columbia University in New York and wrote some of his major works, including the long poem “Raleigh,” which deals with the history of the American continent before European colonization.
His poetics have been recognized for its fusion of diverse topics such as politics, religion, nature, and science. His religious faith is incorporated into his poetry through elements of nature and the cosmos, creating a relationship of interdependence between the human and the mystical. Overall, Cardenal uses poetry to connect his diverse interests and commitments, having had a great impact on Latin American poetry.
Cardenal divided his life as a writer with that of a priest and politician when he was ordained a priest in 1965 and was chosen as Nicaragua’s Minister of Culture in 1979. But even when he could not devote himself to writing, he made a point of promoting literature in the Solentiname archipelago, located on Lake Nicaragua, where he founded a community of farmers and fishermen and wrote The Gospel in Solentiname (1975-1977).
In the last years of his life, Cardenal published two more new collections of poetry: Así en la Tierra como en el Cielo (2018) and Hijos de las estrellas (2019). A year after his last publication, on March 1, 2020, the writer fell victim to heart and kidney failure at the age of 95 in Managua. Even after his death, the community he created in Solentiname continues to produce paintings of elements of nature that surround its daily life and that appeared in the poetry of its founder.
Photo credits:
Author: Jorge Mejía Peralta
Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0). Adapted picture.
