What Anita Brookner has said of Germaine Greer might be applied to the contemporary Latin American poet, Ernesto Cardenal. He is like Delacroix's portrait of liberty, marching forward with his banner, rallying the troops in his commune of Nuestra Señora de Solentiname, doomed to the eminence of a figurehead as the current Nicaraguan Minister of Culture and chained to the concept of permanent struggle. He has now given up writing, however, in order to dedicate himself to ministerial duties since, at least for this Catholic priest and Marxist poet who was radicalised by his visit to Cuba in 1970, the Revolution is the same thing as the Kingdom of God. Cardenal embraces the plight of the poor in Central America as well as the sufferings of the Nicaraguan people under the Somoza dynasty. He attacks issues of judicial corruption in politics, torture by the secret police, deployment of the military in furtherance of domestic political matters, American influence in Latin American affairs, and the threat of nuclear holocaust. His poetry embodies some of the most contentious issues of our times, and Robert Pring-Mill claims stentoriously that Cardenal's ideas are "clearly around to stay and must be reckoned with" [in his introduction to Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems, by Ernesto Cardenal, 1990].

The foundations of Cardenal's radicalism are biblical and meditative. In a revealing interview at his commune of Solentiname, just before being outlawed by Somoza, he explained:

En realidad, yo me he politizado con la vida contemplativa. La meditatión, la profundización, la mística es la que me ha dado a mí la radicalización política. Yo he llegado a la revolutión por el Evangelic No fue por la lectura de Marx sino por Cristo. Se puede decir que el Evangelio me hizo marxista.

("Conversación")

The gospel, of course, finds the good news in the bad news. Broken of self and self-sufficiency by the rigors of Trappist training and seminary preparation, Cardenal saw the face of Christ in the primitive community of peasants and fisherman at Solentiname. Among the poor and humble of Central America he finds the hope of resurrection, and it is instructive to examine his Salmos in order to comprehend the literary effects of revolutionary Christianity. Composed during his training for the priesthood in Colombia and illuminated by contemplation, the collection is patently Christian. Moreover, if his own statement about the foundation of his Marxism in Christian meditation counts, as it should, then the collection is central to an understanding of his work.

The immediate issues are whether the poems are indeed psalms and, if so, what sort and what literary qualities do they display. Critical analysis will show, I think, that Cardenal's Salmos are felicitous imitations that stretch mind, imagination, and sensibility. They also contain a basic element of revolutionary dogma, namely, that society is riven by unappeasable strife that will be overcome by the liberation of the poor and oppressed. In these poems, divine intervention is the sole agent of renewal; within a decade, God's agent becomes a Marxian proletariat. Religion legitimates, as it were, the new social order.

Unlike translators, imitators do not aspire to faithfulness. Cardenal had already encountered Pound's translations from the classics while at Columbia University in New York, and this experience led him to produce versions of Catullus and Martial (Epigramas). One does not have to read far to see that there is nearly always a gap, and sometimes a chasm, between Cardenal and his model. The result is a commentary on Cardenal as much as on the original, and the omissions are as telling as the imaginative departures. This dialogue between old and new also pervades the Salmos, although the origins are not strictly literary but liturgical. The chief characteristics of Trappist life are liturgical prayer, contemplation and absolute silence. As a Trappist monk and then as a Catholic seminarian, Cardenal recited the psalms daily in the Divine Office. Their intrinsic spiritual depth and beauty form the backbone of public and private prayer. Cardenal, however, strives to produce a version of the Vulgate Bible psalms that the ancient author would have given us had he been born in Central America. The result is a contemporary work capable of standing on its own feet, and some Salmos have been used in rather unorthodox liturgies in Latin America. In treating the Bible as a source of supply, Cardenal looks both backward and forward. On the one hand he seeks to enhance his dignity by close links with the past; on the other he likes to experiment with old material and create new effects with it. The title of the English translation of Salmos, Psalms of Struggle and Liberation, bluntly underlines Cardenal's emphasis, but, in fact, his stance is closer to Mertonian non-violence.

Cardenal selects twenty-five of the one hundred and fifty psalms that are his source of supply, while he preserves the ordering of his source. He chooses what suits him: certain topics receive unusual emphasis while others, equally important, are peremptorily neglected. The principle of selection is to take what corresponds with his own outlook. There are several kinds of biblical psalms: penitential and imprecatory, praise and thanksgiving, supplication, royal and messianic, wisdom and songs of ascents. However, Cardenal changes the proportion of these ingredients in his Salmos, so that there is a fundamental shift of emphasis towards supplication and imprecation. Certainly, the psalms of praise offer Cardenal opportunities for imaginative poetic treatment, in modern scientific terms, of God's wonders in creation. Yet he reduces the whole range of relations between God and man which is the subject matter of the Psalms, giving attention to those psalms which provide expression for his own ideas. His fresh adaptations show clear traces of their ancestry, but the overall focus is different. In short, Cardenal's central themes are the power of wicked dictators, the sufferings of oppressed innocents, and the desire to see God's vengeance upon the wicked. Ferocious hatred, indignant self-pity, and passionate desire for God's retributive justice give a fiery Old Testament tone, although the image of God is painted with shades of a peasant caudillo.

The forms that Cardenal's versions assume offer some insight into his purpose. He takes as many precious stones as he can from the mosaic of biblical heritage and uses them to construct his own pattern. Some are intermittent paraphrases, others contain brief allusions and are so free that they are scarcely recognizable as adaptations of the Psalms. The degree of proximity, therefore, varies. Cardenal's psalms bear the original stamp of independent creations but they have transfusions of foreign blood in their veins. For example, the surprise ending to psalm five adds a new dimension to its source. The closure of the original, in a familiar English rendering from the Book of Common Prayer, is as follows:

This is a prayer for deliverance from personal enemies, but Cardenal combines biblical features with certain contemporary realities in such a way as to make them imaginative with a dual significance in biblical lament on the one hand and Nicaraguan reality on the other:

Time does not allow a thorough and detailed study of all the verses which Cardenal retains or abandons in his selections, but this sample exhibit shows the nature of his renderings, at least when he follows the original relatively closely. He pushes and pulls against his source. The spirit of unshakable faith remains together with the psalm's function of providing comfort, inspiration and strength. He frequently alters, however, the disposition of the individual elements. Elsewhere, in the first psalm for example, the contrasting fate of the righteous and the wicked is still the basis of Cardenal's version; but the depiction of the wicked occupies twice as much space as in the source. The extended simile for the righteous, "He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers" (vs. 3), is reduced simply to the closing line, "Será como un árbol plantado junto a una fuente." Yet the remainder of the poem is taken up with the depiction of the wicked in contemporary sociopolitical terms. Curiously, the disastrous end of the wicked described in the second half of the original is omitted completely. This changed selection and arrangement transforms the model into an exercise in denunciation. Cardenal bases himself on two of the original six verses (vs. 1, 3), so that the balance shifts.

Cardenal has intensely absorbed his biblical material, but the original stamp of his free imitations shows his independence. His frame of reference is restricted. The goal is an effective means of expression, fluent and moving, not an exact reproduction. The Psalms are turned into a collection of endorsements to back his own moral judgements, which spring from his own Nicaraguan experience. The imitation of a biblical model with less than absolute precision, therefore, is a means to an end. At the stylistic level, there is a clear recollection and recitation of biblical fragments:

"Líbrame Señor"
(Salmos 7)

'Cantaré Señor tus maravillas"
(Salmos 9)

"Y séante gratas las palabras de mis poemas Señor, mi libertador."
(Salmos 18)

However, the echoes are intricately blended in a new amalgam. The key lines that seize Cardenal's attention are clearly appropriated, but the bottles are new. Apart from the psalms of praise (18, 93, 103, 113, 148, 150), the predominant tone is one of denunciation and lamentation.

The Psalms, of course, contain a good portion of maledictions. They freely express hatred and invoke divine judgement, since wrong is offensive to both God and the victims of wickedness. The simple life of the righteous is contrasted with the luxury, extravagance, and cruelty of the sinful. Moreover, since the Psalms display characteristic stylistic features of ancient Hebrew lyric, notably, parallelism, patterning, and hyperbole, it is worth looking at the rhetoric and diction of Cardenal's reworkings. He typically expresses indignation by highlighting the antithesis between oppressor and oppressed in order to denounce the wicked:

Luxury is exaggerated and presented by means of polysyndeton and auxesis:

(Señor, líbrame de)
los que tienen repletas las refrigeradoras
y sus mesas llenas de sobras
y dan de caviar a los perros.
(Salmos 26)

Parallelism and anaphora are distinctive features of the Psalms and Cardenal exploits these rhetorical schemes to produce a rhetoric of blame.

The appearance of the villains in the Salmos becomes aggressively monotonous. "Gangsters, generales, Consejos de Guerra, dictadores, Ministros de Justicia, Cortes Supremas de Justicia, Fuerzas Armadas, Policía Secreta, Primer Ministro, asesinos llenos de condecoraciones," all populate the scene. Reflecting the temper of, the times, their weapons are "anuncios comerciales, slogans, la prensa, radio, memorandums, campañas publicitarias, periódicos, propaganda, testigos falsos." These are in essence the lying lips of the Hebrew Psalms. The oppressed suffer from "campos de concentración, bombas, armas atómicas, el detector de mentiras, alambradas electrizadas, tortura." How banal the forces of repression are. However, if it were not for these agents of destruction, so necessary to the revolutionary code, the world could be freed for the poor and oppressed, superior in their splendid covenant with God to all the creatures by whom they have been exploited.

Cardenal's Salmos are radical not because the speaker holds contemporary views but because he expects history to submit to him, not vice versa. Sanctity, love, and humility, appear to give way to spiritual pride, self-righteousness, and a persecuting zeal. There may not yet be freedom at the end of Cardenal's struggle in Nicaragua, but it is unfortunate that his new political eminence prevents him from writing poetry. Salmos are important as much because of his biblical expression of modern indignation as because of the creative expression of wonder and gratitude in his psalms of praise. But the psalms of praise will be a subject for another time.