Calle de la Marina

Santa Cruz de Tenerife · Category: Literature · Subcategory: Literary fragments · Year: 1925 · Authors: Francisco Izquierdo

Francisco Izquierdo (La Laguna, Tenerife, 1886-Havana, Cuba, 1971) can be considered the quintessential overseas voice of Canarian poetry. At twenty years old he published his first poem and in 1916 emigrated to Cuba, settling in Havana. There he worked as a journalist and editor of the prestigious Diario de la Marina . He briefly returned to Tenerife in 1936 and published some poems in La Tarde . Before a year passed he returned to Cuba, where he died in June 1971.

In 1925 he published in Havana his poetry collection Medallas , where the four blocks of sonnets included a nostalgic and intimate charge of his experience in Tenerife. In the first part of the book, called  "The sea, the port", he recreates in fourteen poems the vision and emotion of Santa Cruz de Tenerife of his adolescence, dedicating one of them to Calle de la Marina with these lines:

«Calle de la Marina. Venerable mansions

full of English spoken and On parle français .

Bustle. Little shops with their loud fabrics

and their scandalous signs in English.

They say everything changes, but being a Chicharrera emblem

and stubborn you continue in your three

with your thousand nooks, your slippery ramps,

highs, lows and curves, with neither head nor feet.

Alameda of the dock, provincial avenue

with its fountain and its white tombstone among the trees

-¿And what would that white tombstone say glanced at passing by?-

Oh the gold of the afternoon on your old balconies

and the Anaga mountains frolicking in the distance

with the crazy and blue hazes of the sea!»

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