Barnet, Miguel: Brief an Henze, Hans Werner. La Habana, 1970
author: Barnet, Miguel
language: es
availability: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[Picture of Ernesto Che Guevara in the center of the page with a silkscreened motif consisting of red areas and blue and white vertical stripes.]

Para Hans Werner Henze

Che[^1]

[^1: This poem by Barnet about Ernesto Che Guevara was first published in 1967 in Poesía cubana 59-66. An edition of Barnet’s poems entitled Carta De Noche, was kept in Henze’s library, now at the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold. The edition contains a handwritten dedication by the author himself dated 21 February 1983 and the poem Che is found on p. 90. The English translation offered here is by Margaret Randall, and is published in Only the Road, Solo el Camino: Eight Decades of Cuban Poetry, p. 206.]

Che, tú lo sabes todo,
los recovecos de la Sierra,
el asma sobre la yerba fría,
la tribuna
el oleaje en la noche
y hasta de qué se hacen los frutos
y las yuntas

no es que yo quiera darte
pluma por pistola
pero el poeta eres tú.

La Habana 1970
Miguel Barnet