50 Years Ago in These Pages

A review of Ernesto Cardenal’s Homage to the American Indians, trans. Monique Altschul & Carlos Altschul (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973)

“Nicaraguan Trappist monk Ernesto Cardenal (1925–2020) combines a Walt Whitman–Allen Ginsberg-like vision of a variety of pre-Columbian civilizations with an optimistic revolutionary message. Although eight of the seventeen poems are devoted to the Mayans, the geographical area extends from the Incas to the Iroquois and the Pawnees. . . .

Cardenal is a neo-Christian utopian socialist who compares and contrasts pre-Columbian phenomena with aspects of contemporary society. . . . Bitter in his condemnation of Spanish, French, and particularly U.S. imperialism, Cardenal does not despair. In keeping with the Indian circular notion of time, mankind will return to the virtuous life of the pre-Columbian Indian communities.”

—Seymour Menton, Books Abroad 48, no. 4 (Autumn 1974): 749