Jaime Sabines

Jaime Sabines Gutiérrez (Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, March 25, 1926-Mexico City, March 19, 1999) was a Mexican poet and politician, recognized as one of the great Mexican poets XX century.

Biography

His father, Julio Sabines, of Lebanese origin, emigrated with his family to Cuba and in 1914 settled in Mexico, where he participated in the Revolution. In Chiapas he met Luz Gutiérrez Moguel, granddaughter of Joaquín Miguel Gutiérrez, a military officer and governor of the state in whose honor the state capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez, bears his last name. They had three children: Juan, Jorge and Jaime.

Julio Sabines, fostered in his son a taste for literature. Sabines himself speaks of him as one of the reasons why he dedicated himself to writing poetry. In the poem Something about the death of Major Sabines -which the poet recognized as his best creation- Sabines tells us about the death of his father, but more than that, also about the importance that this had in his life.

In 1945 he traveled to Mexico City to begin his studies as a doctor at the National School of Medicine. While studying, he realized that a medical career was not for him; soon after he began his career as a writer. He returned to Chiapas for a short time and worked in the fabric store El Modelo , owned by his brother Juan de él, where he wrote his famous collection of poems Tarumba .

In 1953, he married Josefa "Chepita" Rodríguez Zebadúa, with whom he had four children: Julio, Julieta, Judith and Jazmín. In this same year, working during the day as a cloth vendor, he wrote poetry. A simple man, he lived like ordinary people, inserted in the urban daily life:

I felt humiliated and offended by life; how was it possible that I was in that activity, the most antipoetic in the world? After two or three years I began to be humble, to say, 'Let the poet go to the fuck'.

Her father died on October 30, 1961, and just five years later, in 1966, her mother died. Mourning at the death of her mother, again, appears in her writing in her poem Doña Luz .

Over time, he gained recognition among his contemporaries and his readers. He was a fellow of the Mexican Center of Writers, from 1964 to 1965 and obtained the Chiapas Prize, awarded by the Ateneo de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas, in 1959. In 1972, he received the Xavier Villaurrutia; Elías Sourasky in 1982; the National Prize for Linguistic Arts and Sciences and Literature in 1983; the Mexico City medal in 1991, the Belisario Domínguez medal in 1994, and in 1996, he was awarded the Mazatlán Literature Prize. He was a recognized poet and loved by his readers and honored by critics and scholars of letters. From June 28 to August 1, 1986, various events were held in his honor. In 1991, the Jaime Sabines Poetry Meeting was held, and when the poet turned 70, the Federal District government organized a tribute. He died on March 19, 1999 in Mexico City, after several years of illness, at the age of 72.

The Poet

Her first steps into poetry were Introspection, To my mother, Siento que te perdo y Primaveral, the previous ones were published in the newspaper El Estudiante, a publication of the student societies of the Normal Superior School and the Tuxtla Gutiérrez High School.

In 1949 he returned to Mexico City to study for a degree in "Spanish Language and Literature" at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He was a student of María Magdalena Hernández Pereira, Agustín Yáñez, José Gaos and Eduardo Nicol. Among his classmates, the names of Emilio Carballido, Sergio Magaña, Sergio Galindo, Rosario Castellanos and Ramón Xirau stand out. Jaime Sabines' generation -poets, novelists, playwrights- met in a literary workshop with Efrén Hernández, whose Sabines commented:

Living with them and the study of the career made me poet in the technical sense [...]. I realized I had to evolve, learn new things so I wouldn't stay behind.

His literary influences include Ramón López Velarde, Rafael Alberti, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, and to a greater extent Pablo Neruda.

"Did you realize the influences that seized your writing or did not perceive them?

Of course I realized that those poems were not mine! It's works by García Lorca or it's works by Neruda, he told me myself. But little by little I started writing different things... I was noticeing that it was already a voice of its own that was opening way between so many influences.

(Ana Cruz, “Poetry is a destiny”)

In 1949 he published Horal, his first collection of poems. Carlos Pellicer offered him a preface to the edition, but Sabines rejected the offer because he wanted his work to be established on its own merits, and not on the prestige of others.

In 1951 his book entitled The signal was published. In 1952 he returned to Chiapas because his father suffered an accident, therefore he could not finish his degree. However, in 1952 his book Adam and Eve appeared, his first foray into prose poetry, of which he stated:

I wanted to make poetry the most independent of the words, that resisted any translation and it is through the prose, - whose rhythm is the one that approaches the most of the blood- where it gets better.

In 1954 one of his books was published, perhaps the least understood in his country and the most appreciated outside of it, Tarumba.

In 1959 he moved to Mexico again to help establish a family business, manufacturing animal feed, along with his brother Juan while continuing to write.

In 1965, the record company Voz Viva de México recorded an album with some of Sabines' poems in the author's own voice.

Sabines suffered an accident when he fell down a staircase in which he fractured his leg and hip, leaving him with lifelong consequences. After seven years of living in Tuxtla, she returns to Mexico City where she writes Diario Semanario . In 1966 her mother, Doña Luz Gutiérrez, died and in 1967 the first edition of Yuria was published.

In 1983 he published "Los amorosos: Cartas a Chepita" It is perhaps her best known poem. It is the one that has had the most success and is the one that most people know about. Most of her poems ended on a page, on a notebook sheet, because they are brief; in some like & # 34; The loving ones & # 34;, where she had many things to say; It came out the same way as all of her poems: all at once and with one or two small corrections.

Jaime Sabines was known as "The Sniper of Literature" for belonging to a group that transformed literature into reality. His writings were based on his presence in various everyday places such as the street, hospitals, patios, etc. His works were translated into several languages. Octavio Paz described Sabines as one of the best contemporary poets in our language, adding: "His humor is a shower of slaps, his laughter culminates in a howl, his anger It is accelerated and its tenderness is choleric. He goes from kindergarten to the operating room. For Sabines, every day is the first and the last day of the world".

The politician

He was a federal deputy for the I Federal Electoral District of Chiapas to the L Legislature from 1976 to 1979, for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, and a deputy for the same party in the Union Congress in 1988 for the Federal District. In the 1990s, he condemned the Zapatista uprising and the intellectual circle of the time condemned him until shortly before his death.

On the occasion of his death, the then President of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo, described him as one of the most important poets of the country in the century XX. In one of his poems, Sabines conveyed the impression that he had about his own political activity:

I'm in politics again.
I know I can't do anything, but they use me.
And they show me
«Poet of the butterfly-circense family,
crossed by a pin, vitrina 5."
(I'm coming, with you, to see me)

Published poetic work

• Horal (1950)
• The sign (1950)
• Adam and Eve (1952)
• Tarumba (1956)
• Weekly journal and poems in prose (1961)
• Single Poems (1951-1961)
• Yuria (1967)
• Tlatelolco (1968)
• Maltime (1972)
• Something about the death of Major Sabines (1973)
• Other loose poems (1973-1994)
• I hope to heal from you (1975)
• New count of poems (1977)
• Not that I die of love (1981)
• Lovely: Letters to Chepita (1983)
• The Moon (1988)
• After all
• I liked you crying.
• To love you
• Your name
• With the flower of Sunday

Awards received

• 1959 Premio Chiapas, El Ateneo de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas.
• 1964 Fellowship of the Mexican Writers Center
• 1973 Xavier Villaurrutia Award for Maltime.
• 1982 Elías Sourasky Prize in Letras.
• 1983 National Prize for Science and Arts in the area of Linguistics and Literature.
• 1986 Juchiman Silver Award
• 1991 Presea de la Ciudad de México
• 1994 Medalla Belisario Domínguez
• 1996 Mazatlan Prize for Literature Pieces of shadow