Cardenal meets Merton

In the fall of 1957, Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal (1925-2020) traveled to rural Kentucky where he met Thomas Merton (1915-68) for the first time. Cardenal arrived as a novice monk at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani where Merton had been a Trappist monk for fifteen years already, and a priest for the previous eight years.

Cardenal said of Merton,

From the beginning there was a great understanding between us, being that we were both poets.

And for Merton, says American poet Robert Hass (2017),

Cardenal’s arrival was a gift . . . they found occasions to talk, at a moment when Merton badly needed someone to talk to. He had come to, if not a crisis, a moment of intense restlessness in his life at Gethsemani.

Cardenal leaves Gethsemani

Cardenal left Gethsemani two years later. He went on to study theology in Mexico, and returned to Nicaragua where he was ordained a priest, and where he joined the Sandinista revolution. He later became the Minister of Culture—a position for which Pope John Paul II rebuked and later defrocked him in 1984. (Pope Francis reinstated Cardenal’s priesthood thirty years later in 2014).

Solentiname

As documented in his book, The Gospel in Solentiname (Maryknoll: Orbis), Cardenal also founded a spiritual community and arts center among the peasants and indigenous peoples in Nicaragua’s Solentiname Islands, where he lived from 1965-77. He wrote to Merton from Managua in 1965 about the establishment of the Solentiname community.

In a previous letter to Merton he credited him with helping him find his vocation:

I owe you for my ability to begin to understand and love the Indians, and most of all for being able to see in them the religious and spiritual values that I did not see before. And that almost no one here in Latin America ever sees.

Merton wrote back,

We begin already to heal those to whom we listen. The confusion, hatred, violence, misinformation, blindness of whole populations come from having no one hear them.

Letters

From the time of Cardenal’s departure from Gethsemani in 1959 to Merton’s death in Thailand in 1968, the two poets and priests corresponded. Their letters are published in a new book, From the monastery to the world: The letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal, translated and edited by Jessie Sandoval (Berkeley: Counterpoint).

This is the first English translation of Cardenal’s letters to Merton, published previously in Spanish (2003). Merton’s letters to Cardenal were published previously in different collections (Merton 1993; 1994).

Alfonso Cortés

What interests me most about their letters is their mutual interest in the work of Nicaraguan poet, Alfonso Cortés (1893-1969). In one letter, Merton refers to Cortés as “one of the most arresting poets of the twentieth century, and in my opinion certainly one of the very greatest. He really has something to say.”

He is much more than a surrealist. . . . He plunges to the heart of transobjective subjectivity which is the purely real, and he expresses it in images as original and as eloquent as those of Blake.

Cardenal responded,

Your assessment of him is very interesting. In Nicaragua, we are also convinced of his greatness and importance, as you say.

Cortés was admired for his mysterious metaphysical poetry. Unfortunately, he also suffered from a severe mental illness. His poetry assuaged his isolation and lack of human contact (Green and Cushman 2017).

Merton knew of Cortés’s work through Cardenal. With Cardenal’s help, Merton translated many of Cortés’s poems into English. In one letter, for example, Cardenal affirms and corrects some of Merton’s translations for publication (e. g., Merton 1963).

Then, he says,

I await those new copies of the Alfonso translations. I will take a copy for him at the asylum.

“Great Prayer”

My own connection to Cortés is a poem I received as a gift from one of my patients in palliative care many years ago. It was a copy of Cortés’s poem “La gran plegaria” (“Great Prayer”), handwritten for me from memory by my patient who was originally from Nicaragua.

La gran plegaria

El tiempo es hambre y el espacio es frío
orad, orad, que sólo la plegaria
puede saciar las ansias del vacío.

El sueño es una roca solitaria
en donde el águila del alma anida:
soñad, soñad, entre la vida diaria.

Merton’s translation is as follows,

Great Prayer

Time is hunger, space is cold

Pray, pray for prayer alone can quiet

The anxieties of void.

Dream is a solitary rock

Where the soul’s hawk nests:

Dream, dream during

Ordinary life.

(trans. Merton 1963)

I’ve always wondered about my patient’s connection to Cortés and the meaning of his poetry to her at the end of her life. Its spiritual significance is clear. But how did she come to memorize “La gran plegaria”? What was her motivation to internalize it, and carry it with her as a companion through life? What did she wish to express to me through it at the end of her life? What role did poetry play in her cultural upbringing and identity?

A partial explanation appears in Cardenal’s assertion to Merton that he knew all of Cortés’s poems by memory. Similarly, his Nicaraguan-American translator and editor for this volume, Jessie Sandoval, explains her own roots and connections to poetry, and to Cardenal, having grown up in Nicaragua,

Like most Nicaraguans from my generation, I was raised to venerate poetry, especially that of our Nicaraguan poets. . . You speak with any Nicaraguan, and they will probably inform you that we are all poets and that Nicaragua is the land of poets—poetry is our most prized export (Sandoval 2017, p. 251).

Last letter

In Merton’s last letter to Cardenal, dated July 21, 1968, he talks about his pending trip to Japan and then to Thailand to attend a meeting of Asian Catholic Abbots. He also informs Cardenal of his hope to visit him in Solentiname for a few weeks in the coming year, and of the possibility of even forming a small hermit colony either in northern California or somewhere in Nicaragua.

He wrote,

I have a very definite feeling that a new horizon is opening up and I do not quite know what it is.

We know, of course, that Merton died on that trip to Asia—near Bangkok, Dec. 10, 1968. It was 27 years, almost to the day, after his entrance into the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1941.

Cardenal lived the rest of his life in his native Nicaragua. In 2007, he was described as “the most important poet right now in Latin America” (La Prensa August 26, 2007).

I wonder what Cardenal and Merton would say to each other about the world today—about spirituality, faith, community, politics, violence, and about the meaning and significance of poetry? What does it all matter? What difference does any of it make?  

Merton’s final words to Cardenal are ominous:

I want to get out of this country. The atmosphere is stifling and very sick. . . . This will become a police state in all reality.

This dystopia is what journalist Chris Hedges confronts today in his writing, activism, and teaching—teaching students who are more often incarcerated than Ivy League. Still, in an act of hope in the final lines of Wages of Rebellion, he writes,

People of all creeds and people of no creeds must make an absurd leap of faith to believe, despite all the empirical evidence around us, that the good draws to it the good. . . and in these acts we make possible a better world, even if we cannot see one emerging around us (Hedges 2015).

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Cardenal, E. (2007). The gospel in Solentiname. Translated by Donald D. Walsh. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.

Greene, R., and Cushman, S. (eds) (2017) The Princeton handbook of world poetries. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press

Hass, R. (2017) Introduction. From the monastery to the world: The letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal. Translated and edited by Jessie Sandoval. Berkeley: Counterpoint.

Hedges, C. (2015) Wages of rebellion: The moral imperative of revolt. New York: Nation Books.

Merton, T. (1963) Emblems of a season of fury. New York: New Directions.

Merton, T. (1993) Witness to freedom: Letters of Thomas Merton in times of crisis. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Merton, T. (1994) The courage for truth: Letters to writers. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux.

Sandoval, J. (2017) Translator’s afterword. From the monastery to the world: The letters of Thomas Merton and Ernesto Cardenal. Translated and edited by Jessie Sandoval. Berkeley: Counterpoint.