CAMAGÜEY.- No one can doubt that the ideology of José Martí, our National Hero, has a universal scope that spreads through the most unimaginable places on the planet and it is a source of consultation for national and foreign researchers.
A recent study by José Oriol Marrero Martínez, a Camagüey's inhabitant, lover of History and Sciences, brings us closer to the patriot, politician and writer in a little-known and widely publicized aspect: his vision of Greece, that distant European region.
Martí spoke of more than 70 cities and places in Greece, towns, mountains, monuments, rivers, lakes and the island; he wrote about the Greek in more than 20 newspapers in seven countries, while quoting more than 250 real or mythological personalities.
Marrero Martínez, Consul of Cuba in Greece, summarizes this passionate topic in a monograph, entitled: Martí and the Greek, written in nights and weekends between 2017 and 2020, while continuing to work in a stage that, like him, he admits himself, it was very intense in every way.
“It is the modest result of an urgent need, turned into a purpose with a sense of urgency and patience, it was three years of investigative work, intense and exhausting days, but at the same time rewarding and surprising.
"The work is translated and has 500 pages in Greek and a little over 400 in Spanish, adding up to the 50 of the graphic chapter."
According to the researcher, the book Martí and the Greek will be published in the Topos publishing house next March, with two reasons: the 168th anniversary of the birthplace of the hero, on January 28, and the bicentennial of the Independence of Greece to be fulfilled on the day 25 of the third month of the year.
“In the first chapter the antecedents of the phenomenon of Martí's apprehension of the Greek appear, a proposal is built on the bibliometrics of the Greek in José Martí, and Martí's translations are studied that address Greek motifs from the Greek language.
“Don't forget that José Martí studied this language and also translated works from English and French. Additionally, in this chapter, a proposal for the theoretical systematization of the vision of the Greek in Martí's work is built, in addition to sketching necessary conclusions ”.
Whoever has the opportunity to read the work will perceive how and why in Martí there is a vision about the Greek in particular, not only of the so-called “Greco-Roman world”, a formulation that is arrived at after studying the colossal journalistic, poetic production, novel, literary in general and important translations into Spanish.
The text is accompanied by a photographic chapter with 50 images of places cited by the Hero and an annex of bibliographic and chronological ordering of Martí's work on the Greek between 1869 and 1895 by day, month and year.
“Martí is amazing! Three Greeks familiar with his work have read the draft of the book amazed at how he was able to do so much and say about Greece. It constitutes a practically unknown subject in this country ”.
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The second chapter of the book, of about 200 pages, is titled: Cities, regions and places of Greece in the work of Martí, with 75 epigraphs.
“It is relevant how Martí was inspired by the lights of Greece. He was not a Hellenist-propagandist, nor a dazzled and uncritical admirer of the Greek, nor a 'Grecizer' of other realities ”.
Promoted by the Cuban Embassy in that nation, the photographic exhibition José Martí with Greece in the heart has circulated in several places, with great acceptance in the people of Athens, of the Lefkada Islands, mentioned by Martí when talking about the Safo jump or Ikaria, where the renowned composer Mikis Thedorakis suffered exile, and in the two most important meters of Athens.
The exhibition becomes one of the results of the book and has images, design, composition and assembly by Oriol Marrero himself, conceived to socialize the subject in Greek society.
More than 30,000 people have seen it and it has been exhibited for a year in the two most important metro stations of Athens, Acropolis and Syntagma, in the heart of ancient Greece.
José Martí was in the Old Continent, particularly in Spain, France and England; in our region in Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela, Haiti, Costa Rica, Panama and the Dominican Republic, he passed through Jamaica and lived in the United States.
He left a prolific work, despite the short time he lived, 42 years, when he was mortally wounded by the independence of Cuba in Dos Ríos. Numerous national and foreign researchers in many fields of knowledge have been inspired by his personality, mainly in the philological field.
Marrero Martínez always tells his friends in Greece that it is perhaps the most Caribbean country in Europe. "It has a strong insular component, in addition to continental. Martí noticed this when he spoke more than once ‘the new and intense force that is being created in the islands. From the islands of Greece '”.
Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez