That image above is from a picture post card of the Cuban poet Ortelio Hernandez from his tenure at CMJK-AM, a radio station in Habana, Cuba. His nickname was "The peasant pleaser", and he was a member of an art movement called the "Repentistas." Repente doesn't translate into English directly. It means both "Suddenly" but specifically sudden movement or impulse. The movement was active in Cuba but also so in Brazil and other parts of South America.
Their music was mostly built around improvisation and rhyme which were expressed both in poetry and song. That scant information has led some ethno-musicologists to make comparisons to modern rap music. Many go as far as to claim that it is the beginning of hip hop. Very little is written about him or the movement. It's most popular figure was probably Nicolas Guillens, who was from Camageuey, like Ortelio. The best reference I've ever found bizarrely came from the HTML source code of a page of spam. It was probably spidered and harvested form a pdf somwhere, undoubtedly used just to troll for key words. The term "Pero hay una avalancha de decimistas que enriquecen este género dentro de la décima.">"decimista" below is a 10-line poetic structure also called the "Peruvian tenth."I've added other links as footnotes where I thought it was needed.
TRANSLATED:
The repentistas poets, Manuel Soriano, Azael Diaz, and Juan Antonio Diaz, along with tresero Leandro Rojas and Luis Emilio Rios, guitarist, composer and sonero, surprised the fighter Ariel Sigler Amaya at home doing live a peasant shindig "Singing in the Freedom" on the channel 41, AmericaTV, transmits Key Guajira Sunday poets were in the room watching TV to enjoy the transmission of pre-recorded on the estate Rancho Bejucal and devoted entirely to the figure of Ariel program Sigler Amaya, country music and their representatives in exile is committed to freedom of Cuba and prove it in every presentation and every detail of these moments you to mark the commitment of artists to freedom, Down with the murderers enjoy forts, Rich tunes, guajiros points, wildcat sounds and other genres of Cuban country music every Sunday intertwine to offer an attractive party of men and women from the countryside, where flowers lute and improvisations with disputes arising from the bottom repentistas same heart of the Isla.
Por Ernesto R. del ValleSiendo boy still, running around those streets full of dust or mud, in my childhood neighborhood, Villa Mariana, a working class neighborhood, north of the city of Camaguey, It was used to listen every morning very early the tinkling of those bells and bells worn by horses walking leisurely and sometimes boring, pulling wooden carts and four wheels filled with sacks of charcoal for sale, in that overwhelming and magical reality The muchachada heard between 12 and three o'clock, a replica of those jingles, much stronger and faster. The animals were returning from the sale of the day, sweating under the sun dog days of August, however they did with the speed of peaceful rest before him and regustazo of that deck of grass that adorned with green, the dust blackness coal residues. Alongside this page manners who daily lived to get to and from our school, we kept, at least I heard on the radio at noon at the Three Villalobos with stellar voices of Rolando Leyva, Miquelon; Ernesto Galindo (after Eduardo Egea), Rodolfo and Jesus Alvariño, Machito ..
There was a program that either I missed it, the peasant singing program in tenths, and other repentistas poets, two uniquely trapped forever in me, is Ortelio Hernandez "The peasant pleaser" and his counterpart which I only remember his surname "Machadito" [Carbonell] In my nine years, I produced a kind of morbid restlessness, hearing the voices of these poets singing their tenths remember nor knew what they were singing and asked someone "about tenths," he explained, from there I put more attention to the words that rhymed and could not answer the thousands of questions that come to mind. They were popular poets. Sometimes the guitar saw the ready mounted on a bicycle to go to the radio station, which I think was the Camagüeyano.
With this note I want to input two Cuban decimistas that despite reside in Miami, have left the Arique your legs and still entrenched in the sudden octosyllable. Neither has published books, neither have their written tenths, we have had to ask for the cooperation in this blog, memory write some of his texts, which agreed to cordial.El way repentismo in Oral tenth is a phenomenon that still studying art critics. The "already and now" of the poet in a dispute, beset by musical notes of a three accompanying guitar forward in time what the poet should say eight syllable timed way. I say you have to be born for that. Although there are schools to teach repentismo, I wonder, but how, in what way does "doing" a poet with these very special conditions. I know from reading, there are men and women without great knowledge of history, or science, philosophy or anything, and yet say one tenth with a depth such that one is really stunned. Feijoo, in his travels through these fields of Cuba, has left hundreds of examples of natural repentistas. But there is a flood of decimistas that enrich this genre in the tenth. Many well-known, others completely unknown but tenth in them emerges as spring water.
(original text in Spanish after the break)
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