Feliz Cumpleaños José Lezama Lima

December 19th 2010 is the centennial of Cuban born writer  
José Lezama Lima:

December 19th 1910 to August 9th 1976

is raising a drink to this person whose writing has the ability to split your head open and draw out from within it the language of infinite origin:

I encountered the word potens, which according to Plutarch represented in priestly Tuscan the "if possible," the infinite possibility we later observe in the virgo potens of Catholicism -- or, how to engender a god by supernatural means -- and I came to the conclusion that it was that infinite possibility that the image must embody. And since the greatest of infinite possibilities is resurrection, poetry -- the image -- had to express its most encompassing dimension, which is precisely, resurrection. It was then that I gained the perspective that I set against the Heidggerian theory of man-for-death proposing a concept of poetry that establishes the prodigious causality of being-for resurrection...So, if you asked me to give a definition of poetry...I would have to do it in these terms: it is the image attained by the man of resurrection.

Translation by James Irby 

    In Mexico he felt strange and aloof. The gods of light drifted off when they saw that that was a subterranean world, a world of chthonian deities. The Mexican had gone back to the ancient concept of the Greek World: hell was at the center of the earth, and the voices of the dead rose up through fissures in the earth. On his first morning in Mexico, looking into the bathroom mirror he could barely decipher the face on the glass. The mist, locked in a foggy blue from the beginnings of the earth, impeded his image's advance. He thought himself the victim of a spell. With a towel he wiped the fog off the mirror, but still he could not arrest the image in its reproductive play. He moved the towel from right to left and as soon as he reached the edges the mirror would cloud over again. With that first terror of his first Mexican morning, the land apparently wanted to open up its mystery and its spell to him.

From Paradiso; Translation by Gregory Rabassa