Encyclopedic Culture of Cuban Poet Regino Boti
- Submitted by: admin
- Caribbean
- Destinations
- Guantánamo
- history
- Literature
- national
- personalities
- Society
- Business and Economy
- 08 / 11 / 2008
He was a front-line poet, lawyer, journalist, historian and a cultivator of painting as a hobby, but he put so much effort in his work that his watercolor paintings constitute a legacy for the fine arts, in which even foreign specialists feel interested in, Montero stressed.
The expert pointed out the environmental preoccupations of the author of Arabescos Mentales and El Mar y la Montaña, who wrote categorically in the prologue to the first of these two books of poems that "There has been only one original singer, which is Nature".
Our interviewee explained that with this declaration the poet refutes the deceptive yearning for originality of some of his colleagues, "but in his book Rumbo a Jauco he goes even further by stating that the American society is cognizable only through its links to nature".
It is quite infrequent to see a poet making incursions into ecology, and Boti dealt with it in his writings and in the practice, since many of his excursions to the coast and Baracoa were inspired by his great passion for landscapes and his interest in bio-speleaology.
Regino Boti Barreiro (Guantánamo, February 18th, 1878 – August 5th, 1958), left thousands of articles and notebooks unpublished, several essays on Edgar Allan Poe, Julian del Casal and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, and hundreds of watercolor paintings.
He studied in the University of Harvard, was a member of the Cuban Academy of History, the Hispano-American Academy of Science and Arts in Cadiz, and the Cuban Academy of Language.
His decision to study Philosophy and Arts in the University of Havana when he was almost 60 put the distinguished professors Elías Entralgo, Rosario Novoa and Vicentina Antuña in a very embarrassing situation.
They made up the examining board to the final exam of the career and they found absolutely unusual that 64 year old student taking an exam, who had published five books, hundred of articles, could speak and write in French, English and Latin and had a good command of Greek.
(Cubarte)
Comments