Versos sencillos by José Martí: read free online & download PDF or EPUB

Martí wrote most of these verses in 1890 while convalescing in Haines Falls, a small town in the Catskill Mountains of New York. There are forty-six poems, numbered in Roman numerals and untitled. The first is a self-portrait: “Yo soy un hombre sincero / De donde crece la palma. / Y antes de morirme quiero / Echar mis versos del alma” (“I am an honest man from where the palm tree grows, and before I die I want to pour out the verses of my soul”). Then the poet tells what he knows and what he prefers: mountain air, the mountain stream, the poor of the earth, a true friend over love.

There are poems of love and disillusion, like those about Eva, fair-haired and “traitorous”, or the story of the girl from Guatemala who “died of love”. There are scenes, like a Spanish dancer on stage. And there are poems of homeland and war: a mother crossing gunfire to find her son (XXVII), a boy shot “by the king’s rifles” (XXIX), a slave ship unloading its captives and a child who swears to wash the crime away with his blood (XXX).

The book closes with a dream of marble heroes who wake and grip their swords (XLV) and a poem addressed to verse itself, “my loving companion”, with whom the poet will be saved or damned (XLVI).

Martí published these verses in New York, where he lived in exile and organized the struggle for Cuban independence. He is considered the initiator of Spanish American modernismo, but here he chooses the opposite of ornament: popular forms, everyday words, clear rhyme. That simplicity holds love, mourning, friendship, nature and freedom: “¡La esclavitud de los hombres / Es la gran pena del mundo!” (“The slavery of men is the great sorrow of the world!”), says poem XXXIV.

Its lines live on in popular memory: the best-known lyrics of “Guantanamera”, adapted by Julián Orbón and carried around the world by Pete Seeger in the 1960s, come from its opening stanzas, and “Cultivo una rosa blanca” is learned by heart in schools across Latin America.

José Martí was born in Havana on 28 January 1853 and was killed in battle at Dos Ríos, in the former province of Oriente, on 19 May 1895, in the Cuban War of Independence he himself had organized. A poet, journalist and diplomat, he founded the Cuban Revolutionary Party and is known as the Apostle.

He lived in Spain, Mexico, Guatemala and Venezuela, and from 1880 in New York. He wrote Ismaelillo (1882), Versos libres, Versos sencillos, the novel Amistad funesta (1885) and the essay Nuestra América (1891).