Visitors and passersby stop at the sign that marks number 162 on Trocadero street, in the municipality of Centro Habana, where he lived since 1929 and died on August 9, 1976, one of the very first Cuban authors in the national and foreign context . Then, the news shook the cultural sphere but barely made it into the media. 45 years later, José Lezama Lima is considered one of the most influential and universal authors of the Cuban twentieth century and from the forced silence of the dead lives his literary splendor more than ever.

Without forgetting that Lezama was a lawyer ‒in the beginnings of a law firm, after the offices of the Superior Council of Social Defense, in the Castillo del Príncipe‒, he was a man of various tasks within the intellectual field. And that various for him meant innovative .

His poetic production, prose (novel and short story), essay writing and his no less solid facet as editor reveal him as a tireless propagator of culture and an author with marked ascendancy in the literary context.

About the poet Lezama, Cintio Vitier will point out that «the first thing that stands out in these books ‒ refers to the Death of Narcissus (1937), Enemy rumor (1941), Sneaky Adventures (1945), The fixity (1949) and Giver (1960) - is the absolute poetic impartiality of Lezama. It will be useless to look for affiliations, determining influences, relationships ».

Take an example in "The Woman and the House": You  boiled the milk / and followed the fragrant customs of coffee. / You went through the house with a measure without waste. / Each minute a sacrament, / as an offering to the weight of the night. / All your hours are justified / when you go from the dining room to the living room, / where the portraits are / what your comments like. / You fix the law of every day / and the Sunday bird opens itself / with the colors of fire / and the foams of the pot. / When a glass is broken, / it is your laugh that tinkles. / The center of the house / flies as the point on the line. / In your nightmares / it rains endlessly / on the collection of bushes / dwarfs and the underground flamboyant. / If you were bewildered, / the broken firmament / in spears of marble, / it would fall upon us.

In this regard, Max Henríquez Ureña abounds : "It is not that he dispenses with metaphor, but that he doses it and only sets it where it can have full effect." So there is no room for what was imputed to him as an impenetrable poet , albeit difficult, of patient reading, like someone who performs an exercise whose solution should cause amazement and satisfaction, because Lezama's work, in any of its aspects, is complex , scholarly, meaningful.

As for Lezamian novels , Paradiso is his masterpiece, the most controversial, subject to endless appraisals, with continuous reissues and always news as lexical corrections, critical notes and details are discovered in each new edition that bring us closer to what that Lezama wanted to say and in truth said . Paradiso is a novel read in Spain and Latin America, with translations into the most important languages.

Nor should the compiler and selector of a text such as Anthology of Cuban Poetry be forgotten , from its origins to José Martí , which is accompanied by a substantial preliminary study.

For the end we have left his work as founder and editor of magazines that, in the case of Origen (1944-1956), "represents the greatest effort of culture made during the Republic prior to the triumph of the 1959 Revolution", in the opinion of Cintio Vitier .

But the 40 issues of Origen were preceded by other publications. Verbum (1937), at Law School, was the first; Espuela de Plata (1939-1941), the second, where he is already accompanied by Guy Pérez Cisneros , Mariano Rodríguez , Gastón Baquero , Ángel Gaztelu , Virgilio Piñera , Eugenio Florit and some painters, and No one seemed (1942-1944), together with Gaztelu .

In Origins, we had not pointed it out, he has José Rodríguez Feo by his side, and among the collaborators Lino Novás , Alejo Carpentier , Eliseo Diego , Octavio Smith , Cintio Vitier , Fina García Marruz , Eugenio Florit, Roberto Fernández Retamar , Fayad Jamís and Pablo Armando Fernández , also painters and musicians.

At the triumph of the Revolution, he held the direction of the Department of Literature and Publications of the National Council of Culture, was one of the vice presidents of Uneac in 1962 and worked for the Institute of Literature and Linguistics and for Casa de las Américas.

Lezama's calm appearance hid behind him a dynamic character, dissatisfied, in search of essences. He was born in 1910 in a military camp, Columbia, in Marianao, where his engineer father was an artillery colonel.

His life, basically insular, did not prevent him from seeing very far. He was sure of its significance, not caring that it was branded as dark. From the Cuban Encyclopedia on the Net (our EcuRed) we allow ourselves to take these opinions:

"Thank you, José Lezama Lima, for your beautiful poem Muerte de Narciso ." ( Alfonso Reyes ).

"With you, my friend Lezama, so awake, so eager, so full, one can always continue talking about poetry, without exhaustion or fatigue, even if we sometimes do not understand its abundant notion or its bubbling expression." ( Juan Ramón Jiménez ).

«His book ( Analecta del Reloj ) will always remain as the triumph of purified freedom over the flabby environment that does not know how to exalt it but respects and fears it. A wise way to stay alone because at a distance, bright nuclei, the best accompany us ». ( Emilio Ballagas ).

"There is no doubt that the generation born from Origen has found a way of seeing and feeling what is Cuban that redeems us from the abominable folkloric and costumbrista realism seen until now as the only solution to fix what is ours." (Alejo Carpentier).

«Voluptuousness of the extensive, but not gigantism of the excessive. Lezama knows the delicious temptation of the extensive and also knows its dangerous hand that pushes it ». (Virgilio Piñera).

« Paradiso is, in principle, the ritual journey that Dante Alighieri completes in The Divine Comedy , having to descend into hell and then reappear, leaving his light on in the dark. That makes Paradiso a work authentically within the Orphic tradition, except as noted. The horror that manifests itself in her for the woman's sex could be in Leonardo de Vinci's notebooks. For Lezama the infernos were the sexual relationship, whoever it was with. ( María Zambrano ).

If you want to see how modest his existence was, go to the house where he lived, among paintings of friends and books, on Trocadero street, this writer who set paths and is one of the Cuban authors who disappears the fastest from bookstores both here and there. .