Ernesto Cardenal (kahr-day-NAHL) is considered by many to be one of the most significant poets of Central America. Cardenal is a Catholic priest, a Nicaraguan revolutionary, a sculptor, and his country’s former minister of culture. The author of numerous books and editor of poetry anthologies, Cardenal has seen only a handful of his works translated into English.
Following his high school studies at the Colegio Centroaméricana de los Jesuitas in Granada, Cardenal moved to Mexico, where he graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma in 1947. From 1948 to 1949 he studied North American literature at Columbia University. Before returning to Nicaragua in 1950, he traveled through France, Italy, and Spain. Upon his return, he began working in sculpture and shortly thereafter founded the literary press El Hilo Azul. His strong political stand against the dictatorship of Nicaragua’s Anastasio Samoza was the source of some of Cardenal’s early political poems, which were published anonymously in Chile and abroad. Other poets opposed to Samoza formed a group with Cardenal, and in 1954 he participated in an unsuccessful, armed assault against Samoza at the Presidential Palace.
In 1957 Cardenal decided to turn his life in a different direction, and he became a novice at the Trappist abbey Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton was novice master. Because of health issues, Cardenal left the monastery after only two years but continued his religious training at a Benedictine monastery in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and was eventually ordained as a Catholic priest in Managua, Nicaragua, in 1965.
Following his ordination, Cardenal began plans with Merton to create a small contemplative community in Nicaragua. The commune of Solentiname was established in 1966 on an island in Lake Nicaragua. Painting, sculpture, pottery, and poetry flourished there as part of an attempt to interpret the Gospels from a revolutionary perspective.
In 1977 several young men and women from Solentiname participated in an uprising against the military government. Cardenal had just left the country for diplomatic reasons and was sentenced to several years’ imprisonment in absentia. The commune of Solentiname was destroyed. In 1979, during the final days of the insurrection and with the establishment of a new government, Cardenal was named minister of culture, a position that he held until 1988. Under his direction, volunteer teachers throughout Nicaragua conducted literacy workshops. During that same period, several Catholic priests in Central America who also held government posts were censured by Pope John Paul II, and in 1985 Cardenal was denied the right to continue to perform priestly functions.
Cardenal has received numerous awards and honorary degrees for his work. Since the defeat of the Sandinista government in 1990, he has lived in Managua and is a director of Casa de los Tres Mundos, a literary and cultural organization that supports artists from Nicaragua and around the world. In 1995 he and several other leaders renounced their membership in the Sandanista National Liberation Front.
Cardenal’s literary output is characterized by works that combine the poetic with the political, the Christian with the Marxist. Cardenal, with José Coronel Urtecho, invented a new poetic school knowsn as exteriorismo, that is, poetry which is created from the exterior world, poetry which includes exact names, dates, and historical details. At times Cardenal appropriates entire selections of prose from historical and other documents and inserts them directly into his work, creating a montage style of poem which blends theology with history and politics. Through the juxtaposition of historical data and poetic commentary, he deals with the exploitation of those who have no voice of their own–the poor and the oppressed of society.
Many of Cardenal’s books have received critical acclaim, including several of those translated into English. These include Homage to the American Indians, The Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, The Doubtful Strait, and Cosmic Canticle.
In Homage to the American Indians, the poet highlights the spiritual strengths of Aztec, Maya, and other indigenous peoples and contrasts these with the spiritual weaknesses of people of the Americas today. In this work he uses native cultures to symbolize values, such as peace and social welfare, in comparison to contemporary social phenomena, such as consumerism and war. Psalms has its basis in the Old Testament book of Psalms, which Cardenal has re-cast in a modern version. The evils of the Old Testament have been replaced with capitalism, nuclear arms, and political propaganda. The cry of the oppressed Hebrews becomes the cry of today’s poor and downtrodden.
The Doubtful Straight is a narrative epic poem that focuses on the discovery and conquest of the Americas, particularly Central America. The poet uses words from Christopher Columbus’s logs and from other historic documents to re-create the struggles and violence against the inhabitants of the New World. Cardenal urges the reader to see the present in terms of the past.
There is agreement that Cosmic Canticle is Cardenal’s magnum opus. Written over a thirty-year time span, the six-hundred-page epic poem combines modern sciences, such as quantum physics and biological evolution, with mysticism and contemporary Nicaraguan history. Mythologies and wisdom from dozens of world religions, particularly those of primitive peoples, are blended with the theology of Teilhard de Chardin as well as with the theories of modern scientists such as Albert Einstein.
Ernesto Cardenal has created a unique poetic voice and has used it to defend and support those members of society who are often unable to speak for themselves. His works combine liberation theology and political ideology into poems and prayers that seek justice and compassion.