In many of Cardenal’s epigrams, love and history are compared with each other in terms of their temporality. Politics and history are contingent and immanent realities which exist inside the flow of time, while love through poetry exists outside the flow of time, in a transcendent and intemporal mode. This contrast of temporalities emerges somewhat in the Claudia poems, as Claudia’s immanent temporal reality progressively disintegrates leaving nothing but the transcendental, intemporal reality of her love affair with the poet and it’s conversion into literary art: “el gesto más leve/de Claudia, el menor descuido/Tal vez un día lo examinen eruditos, y este baile de Claudia se recuerda por siglos.” “No quedará nada para la posteridad, sino los versos de Ernesto Cardenal para Claudia.” This concept of the poetic art having a privileged relationship with temporality and intemporality is a common theme throughout Cardenal’s work. The Nicaraguan poet uses language and poetry as a means to collapse time, to bring the present into the past and the past into the present. The use of the epigram form itself is a means of doing this. Not only does Cardenal use a classical poetic form developed and refined during the Roman Empire, he interweaves the language and themes of Martial and Catullus with references to the social and political reality of 1950’s Nicaragua in order to expose the parallels between Somoza and the corrupt and bloody Imperators.
Recibe estas rosas costarricences Myriam is the first of a pair of Epigrams in which the contrast of temporalities is used. The epigram which follows “Yo no canto a la defensa de Stalingrado” compares twentieth century battles, ancient battles and the regime of Somoza and places the pure desire of the lover in sharp relief next to them. In “Recibe” Myriam the beloved is given a bouquet of “Costa Rican” roses and a book of love poems. The roses represent contingent, immanent temporality, the poems transcendental intemporality. The poet gives her roses not only as a reminder of her beauty but also as a sign of tempus fugit.
Mis versos te recordarán que los rostros
de las rosas se parecen al tuyo; las rosas
te recordarán que hay que cortar el amor,
y que tu rostro pasará como Grecia y Roma
In these four lines Cardenal sets up a chain effect. The poems exist to link the face of the beloved with the roses, while the roses exist to express the idea of death, contingency and temporality. This contingency not only applies to the life of the beloved, but also to the nation, expressed in both the references to Greece and Rome, but also the national designation applied to the roses themselves. Costa Rica, (and implicitly Nicaragua) is linked to the ancient empires of Greece and Rome, to the beloved through the contingent nature of the roses. It’s interesting to note that Cardenal seems to taking notes directly from the Renaissance poetic playbook, where the rose is frequently used to signify not only beauty, but also tempus fugit, the fleeting, temporal nature of all earthly things including youth and beauty. It is also interesting to note that this is the first of two epigrams which mentions Costa Rica, Nicaragua’s neighbor. In the second poem “En Costa Rica cantan los carreteros” the poet uses Costa Rica to refer indirectly to Nicaragua, by describing the former as a country where “el presidente camina a pie”, in other words the democratic Costa Rican president can walk calmly through the streets of peaceful San José, while the Nicaraguan tyrant Somoza must be driven around in an armoured car surrounded by guards. This may be the same type of play which Cardenal is making in “recibe”, couching in his love-verse to Myriam an attack against the regime which suggests that it, like Greece and Rome and Costa Rica, will pass away.
Another interesting element of this poem is how the roses also refer to love’s own temporal contingency. Love in this poem doesn’t belong to the intemporal realm but rather the temporal one.
“Cuando no haya más amor ni rosas de Costa Rica
Recordarás Myriam, este triste canción”
Because there will come a time (pardon the pun) when love ceases to exist, it is as temporal. It’s only claim to intemporality lies in its ability to inspire the poet to write verse. In this sense poetry itself is the one true intemporal force, all other things pass away. It is poetry, after all, which allows Cardenal to collapse time, to bring Greece and Rome into Nicaragua and vice-versa. Poetry is the thing which remains when all else is gone. Here we see a discrete example of Octavio Paz’ notion of poetry’s simultaneous position as both inside and outside of time. This intemporal nature of poetry also allows Cardenal to conceive of it as the perfect tool against the regime, a consciousness which seems to underlie the concept of poetry as outlined in the epigramas. We see it in the Claudia poems where Cardenal warns his beloved that she will be remembered for all eternity for having loved him and inspired him to write about her. As the focus of the poems becomes oriented more towards the regime of Somoza, Cardenal begins to apply the same concept towards attacking and undermining the regime’s activities. It’s interesting to read “Somoza desveliza una estatua de Somoza en el estadio Somoza” in this context, a poem in which the dictator attempts to access the intemporal realm by creating a monument to himself, one which the people will eventually destroy when he dies.
So how does the role of love fit into this? as we will see in later epigrams, love constantly pushes the poet to capture it in verse, which also provides the means for him to capture the condition of the nation.
