PRESENTATION COPY, WITH A MANUSCRIPT TRANSLATION
BRULL, Mariano, and Mathilde POMÈS, translator.
Solo de Rosa. Poemas.
Con dos rosas de Mariano y Portocarrero. [Havana,] ‘La Veronica’, 1941.
4to, ff. [3], 17, [3], with two line-drawings of roses printed in black and pink by the Cuban artists Mariano Rodriguez and René Portocarrero; title-page printed in red and black; limitation leaf inscribed by the author; printed on thick textured paper (Buckeye Custom Cover); a fine copy, untrimmed, in the original printed paper wrappers; loosely inserted letter from Pomès (cropped at head), dated 6 April ?1946.
First edition, no. 186 of 300 copies, printed in Cuba and inscribed by the author to his French translator, Mathilde Pomès, with Pomès’s manuscript translation of one of Brull’s poems from Solo de Rosa loosely inserted.
The Cuban Symbolist poet Mariano Brull (1891–1956) lived in Paris from 1927 to 1934, where he developed a close friendship with Paul Valéry through his French translator, the Hispanist Mathilde Pomès (1886–1977), whose lively salon in Paris formed a bridge between Spanish-speaking expatriates and French creatives. Brull would, as a result of this connection, translate into Spanish several poems by Valéry, including ‘La jeune Parque’. Her autograph letter is addressed to ‘Mon cher Maître’, a title she writes that she had used for her ‘dearest teachers’, [Joseph?] Bédier and Paul Hazard, and she hopes that the recipient will be remembered by posterity as the ‘archivist of literature’, mentioning also an ‘homage to our dear, great Valéry’ (trans.). On the verso is a French translation of one of the poems in Brull’s Solo de Rosa, ‘Rosa, inmortal presencia’ (‘Rose, immortelle présence’); its inclusion with her copy of the book suggests that it may have been a draft or was never sent. Brull’s inscription is dated ‘Ottowa, 1946’; after he was stationed in Washington, D.C. during the Second World War, he was sent to Ottawa in 1945 to establish the first Cuban diplomatic mission in Canada.
Solo de Rosa was printed in Cuba by the Spanish poet and publisher Manuel Altolaguirre, who had arrived in the country in 1939 and stayed until 1943. Buying the small press that he christened La Veronica was one of the first things he did in Cuba, publishing from there the work of both Spanish exiles and of his new literary milieu.
We find a single copy in the UK, at the Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Council (Canning House).
