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Robert Lesman
In the poem “Homenaje a Keats” (published in 1970 in the collection Visitacio-nes), Cuban poet Fina García Marruz creates a voice that situates itself at three distinct rhetorical distances from the imagined figure of the English Romantic poet in order to set in motion a complex play of tribute and appropriation. From the respectful distance of the homage, her poetic voice elevates Keats. From a second, more dialogic distance, the English poet is addressed in the second person, establishing a tone of intimacy that brings the poetic predecessor down to a level of equality with that of the speaker. From this distance, intertextual references to Keats’s work express an emotional closeness that humanizes him and begins to assert a form of discursive power over him. Finally, a third position is established, in which the distinction between the poetic voice and its object is erased through ventriloquism and translation. At this level, García Marruz appropriates Keats’s words for the advancement of her own intellectual agenda. By subsuming Keats’s words within her own, she imposes a re-reading of Keats’s poetry structured by her own religious thought.
