Pedro Mir

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

New York Times, July 14, 2000

Pedro Mir, Whose Poems Spoke to Latin Workers, Dies at 87

By ERIC PACE

Pedro Mir, the poet laureate of the Dominican Republic, who gave voice to
the emotions of multitudes of working-class Latin Americans, died on
Tuesday in Santo Domingo, his country's capital. He was 87.

Mr. Mir, who was often called Don Pedro, wrote in Spanish. He was "without
a doubt, the vital voice of Dominican poetry of the 20th century," Ylonka
Nacidit-Perdomo, director of the Center for Literary Research of the
country's National Library, said after his death.

In 1991 Mr. Mir was awarded an honorary degree by Hunter College in New
York with a citation saying: "Critics have called you 'a great political
poet' who writes of 'the Latin American proletariat' and 'interprets
faithfully the feelings of the people.' Enormous audiences come to hear you
read your poetry."

In February of last year, Venezuela's new president, Hugo Chávez Frias,
declared in an address to his nation: "Let's give our children and our
grandchildren a homeland we do not have today. I will never forget the
verse by the Dominican poet Pedro Mir: 'If someone wants to know which is
my homeland, he will not have to look for it. He will have to fight for
it.' I urge all Venezuelans to fight so that we can have a homeland, a
truly democratic Venezuela."

Mr. Mir's book "Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems" (published by
Azul in the United States in 1993), a collection of his poetry in bilingual
format, with English translations by Jonathan Cohen and Donald D. Walsh,
was applauded by Roberto Marquez in The Village Voice Literary Supplement.

"His poetry achieves a rare, exceptionally felicitous marriage of poetry
and politics, of individual sensibility and the chronicling of quotidian
collective drama, the still unfulfilled promise of Latin America, its
landscape, peoples, and societies," Mr. Marquez wrote. He added that Mr.
Mir's work "pays tribute to the resilience, unyielding endurance, yearning
for release, and periodically stunning audacity of the region's ordinary,
slighted citizens."

Among the poems in "Countersong" (first published in Guatemala in 1952) is
the resonantly optimistic "Concerto of Hope for the Left Hand," which
foresees a time when:

the atmosphere
trembles with the unbridled percussion of
the underdeveloped
kettledrum, the universal orchestra
thunders,
the great concerto of humanity shakes
its insides, the timpani lets out a shriek
the laws of history vibrate beneath the feet
of the double basses while the cellos
of the human heart resound and erupt
deafeningly throughout all the confines
in a rousing solo of hope.

In a quieter vein, Mr. Mir once wrote of his homeland:

There is a country in the world
positioned in the path of the sun
native to the night
placed in an unlikely archipelago of sugar and of rum.

For more than two decades he was a professor of aesthetics at the National
Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, where he also taught creative
writing. He also worked as a journalist in his homeland and Cuba.

His best-known poetry books include "Hay un País en el Mundo" ("There Is a
Country in the World"), "Amén de Mariposas" ("Amen of Butterflies") and
"Viaje a la Muchedumbre" ("Journey to the Masses"). He also wrote fiction,
including the novel "Cuando Amaban las Tierras Comuneras." His nonfiction
books include "Fundamentals of Art Theory and Criticism" and "Overture to
Aesthetics."

He was given the title of National Poet in 1982 and was awarded the
Dominican National Prize for Literature, for his life's work, in 1993.

Mr. Mir was born in San Pedro de Macoris, 40 miles from Santo Domingo, to a
Puerto Rican mother and a Cuban-born father. By the time he was in his
mid-30's, he was well enough known as a writer for his views to stir the
wrath of Rafael Trujillo, his country's dictator.

He fled to Cuba in 1947 and spent 15 years in exile there and in Mexico and
the Soviet Union. (It was in Cuba that he published "Hay un País en el
Mundo" in 1949.) He went back to the Dominican Republic after Trujillo was
assassinated in 1961. There he became active in the Popular Socialist
Party, which no longer exists.

His survivors include his wife, Carmen Masejo; two sons, Luis Pedro and
Hugo Fernández; and two daughters, Geraldine and Celeste.

Louis Proyect

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