Celestino antes del alba (1967; Celestino Before Sunrise) by Reinaldo Arenas, one of the most important writers to have appeared in Cuba since the Revolution, is a poetic recreation of childhood; but, far more important, it is an outstanding verbal exercise. Arenas uses the poetic technique of semi-independent phrases, which, as they accumulate, take the shape of a fragmentary text modified and remade in successive variations. The technique resembles the contrapuntal phrasing of surrealism, though it reminds one even more of the versicles of traditional poetry. Understandably, then, we find Arenas frequently quoting this poetry. Hallucinations, his second novel, unfolds within a framework of the fantastic and the baroque but according to a very concrete and objective system of correlations. The fictional aspect of the work focuses on everyday facts and experiences—hunger, physical punishment, helplessness—all endowed with a dreamlike aura and a genuine, spontaneous intensity, which nevertheless does not contaminate the physical dimension communicating through all the senses a multifarious accumulation of reality. Thus the capriciousness of an erratic existence and the reverberations of a hostile and magic world inform Arenas’s narrational space and characterize his personal world from the very first page. The book, of course, is an unrestrained verbal re-creation of the life of Friar Servando Teresa de Mier, an extraordinary character whom Lezama Lima, writing in La experiencia americana, sees as an archetypal image supporting an extremely convincing reality populated with other, less extraordinary characters from nineteenth-century Latin America. And in depicting that existence which exceeds reality and acquires form in a modifying imagination (by means of a combination Lezama himself Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 100, Vol. 53, No. 1, 2020, 50–55

中文翻译：

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神父Servando的耀眼世界

Celestino antes del alba (1967; Celestino Before Sunrise) 作者 Reinaldo Arenas 是自革命以来出现在古巴的最重要作家之一，是对童年的诗意再现；但是，更重要的是，这是一项出色的口头练习。阿里纳斯使用半独立短语的诗意技巧，随着它们的积累，这些短语形成了一个片段文本，在连续变化中修改和重新制作。这种技术类似于超现实主义的对位措辞，尽管它更让人联想到传统诗歌的韵文。可以理解的是，我们发现阿里纳斯经常引用这首诗。幻觉，他的第二部小说，在奇幻和巴洛克的框架内展开，但根据一个非常具体和客观的相关系统。这部作品的虚构部分侧重于日常的事实和经历——饥饿、体罚、无助——所有这些都被赋予了梦幻般的光环和真实、自发的强度，但并没有污染通过所有感官交流的物质维度，各种各样的积累。现实。因此，不稳定存在的反复无常以及充满敌意和魔法世界的回响，从第一页开始就构成了阿里纳斯的叙事空间并描绘了他的个人世界。当然，这本书是对 Servando Teresa de Mier 修士的生活的无拘无束的口头再造，Lezama Lima 在 La experiencia americana 中将其视为支持一个极其令人信服的现实的原型形象，其中充满了其他人，来自 19 世纪拉丁美洲的不那么非凡的人物。并且在描绘超越现实并在修改的想象中获得形式的存在时（通过组合 Lezama 本人评论：美洲文学与艺术，第 100 期，第 53 卷，第 1 期，2020 年，50-55