An Ordered Eden: The Ideal Administration in Ernesto Cardenal's El estrecho dudoso

Abstract

This article analyses the Nicaraguan poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal's compelling but little studied book-length narrative poem, El estrecho dudoso (1966), which was published at a time when Cardenal's traditional position of Conservative opposition to the Liberal-affiliated dictatorship of the Somoza family no longer offered a viable political alternative in the present. The article analyses how the adaptation of the poetic techniques of Ezra Pound contributes to the poem's tone and structure. It argues that by setting the action in the sixteenth century, Cardenal dramatized a period when Conservative ideas of order, discipline and religious devotion retained their oppositional potential. The analysis discusses the poem's portrait of the emerging colonial society of Central America as a mirror of that of twentieth-century Nicaragua that draws attention to parallels between the tyrannical Governor, Pedrarias Dávila, and the Somozas. Finally, this article argues that the poem's failure to espouse the left-wing ideology that would be associated with Cardenal in the 1980s, when he served as Minister of Culture in the Sandinista government, is the source of its popular and critical neglect.

Notes

¹Nicaraguan Conservatism inherited the social project of nineteenth-century Conservatism throughout Spanish America: ‘to preserve the wealth and social influence of the Church, the special legal privileges of the clergy and the army, the separate “republic” of the Indians, the legal and social restrictions on the castas […]’ (Edwin Williamson, The Penguin History of Latin America [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992], 235). In the Nicaraguan case, however, a US military occupation from 1927 to 1933 and the rise to power of the Liberal Somoza family when US marines withdrew, entrenched Conservatives in a posture of opposition.

²‘I thought him perhaps a trifle consciously charismatic with his white beard and his flowing white hair and the blue beret on top, and he seemed a little conscious of his own romantic character as a priest, a Communist and a refugee from Somoza, who had destroyed his monastery on an island in the Great Lake’ (Graham Greene, Getting to Know the General. The Story of an Involvement [London: The Bodley Head, 1984], 137).

⁶Ernesto Cardenal, Oración por Marilyn Monroe y otros poemas, Serie Textual 2 (Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1972 [1^st ed. 1965]), 51.

³The Granada oligarchy ‘originated from the same families, particularly the Argüellos, Chamorros, Cuadras, Lacayos, Pasos, Urtechos, Vegas, Vivas, and Zavalas […] Granadan oligarchs tended to intermarry and live near each other in the city's center, or on its principal commercial street, the Calle Atravesada’ (Michel Gobat, Confronting the American Dream. Nicaragua Under U.S. Imperial Rule [Durham, NC/London: Duke U. P., 2005], 13). Cardenal's great-grandfather, Pedro Cardenal, was Foreign Minister in the Conservative government of the late 1850s; his first cousins, the Chamorros, provided Nicaragua with four Conservative presidents between 1853 and 1927.

⁴Gobat, Confronting the American Dream, 276–77.

⁵Hazel Smith, Nicaragua. Self-Determination and Survival (London/Boulder: Pluto Press, 1993), 117.

⁷Tamara R. Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Ernesto Cardenal, The Doubtful Strait/El estrecho dudoso, trans. John Lyons (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana U. P., 1995) vii–xxxi (p. xi). Subsequent references will be abbreviated to ‘Introduction’, Cardenal, The Doubtful Strait.

⁹Williams, ‘Introduction’, Cardenal, The Doubtful Strait, xiv.

⁸Williams, ‘Introduction’, Cardenal, The Doubtful Strait, xi.

¹⁰Steven White, Modern Nicaraguan Poetry. Dialogues with France and the United States (Lewisburg: Bucknell U. P., 1993), 172 (original emphasis).

¹¹Cardenal, The Doubtful Strait/El estrecho dudoso, 2. Subsequent references to this edition will be given in parentheses in the main text.

¹²Williams, ‘Introduction’, Cardenal, The Doubtful Strait, xxii.

¹³Ernesto Cardenal, Las ínsulas extrañas. Memorias 2 (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2002), 223.

¹⁴‘Somoza exploited the government for personal gain [….] Although accurate figures on his fortune are unavailable, by 1945 he was estimated to have between $10 and $60 million’ (John Booth, The End and the Beginning. The Nicaraguan Revolution [Boulder: Westview Press, 1982], 67–68).

¹⁵‘Glossary’, in The Doubtful Strait/El estrecho dudoso, 177.

¹⁶E. Bradford Burns, Latin America: A Concise Interpretative History, 6^th ed. (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1994), 200.

¹⁷Williams, ‘Introduction’, Cardenal, The Doubtful Strait, xxii.

¹⁸Robert Pring-Mill, ‘Cardenal's Treatment of Amerindian Cultures in Homenaje a los indios americanos’, Renaissance and Modern Studies, 35 (1992), 52–74 (p. 67).

¹⁹‘Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda relied heavily on Aristotelian theory for his arguments. Because of the intellectual superiority of the Europeans, Sepúlveda reasoned, the Indians should be subjected to them in a kind of natural servitude, which would permit the Indians to improve themselves by observing a better example of virtue, devotion and industry’ (Burns, Latin America: A Concise Interpretative History, 33).

²⁰Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, ed. José María Reyes Cano (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 1994), 112. Numerous other lines from this essay are repeated verbatim in Canto XVIII.

²¹‘[National] Guard officials, reportedly including the Somoza family, operated illegal gambling and prostitution rackets’ (Booth, The End and the Beginning, 57).

²²‘Within days after Rigoberto López Pérez shot Anastasio Somoza García, the National Guard arrested thousands of Nicaraguans. The crazed search for a conspiracy eventually led to the jailing for interrogation of some three thousand people [….] [who suffered] diabolical tortures […] electrical shocks with an airplane magneto, repeated near-drowning, lifting or dragging with a cord tied around the genitals, imprisonment in a coffin-sized cell, or time in the Somoza family's private zoo […] in barred cages open to the weather, next to lions and panthers’ (Booth, The End and the Beginning, 71–72).

²³Paul W. Borgeson, Jr, Hacia el hombre nuevo: poesía y pensamiento de Ernesto Cardenal (London: Tamesis Books, 1984), 56.

²⁴Gerald Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London/New York: Verso, 1989), 171–235.