\nAccording to Rafael Est\u00e9nger: “What gives the biography novel amenity is not the invention of events, but precisely ‘the expectation of the future, that every day we are on the verge of an abyss that is tomorrow’. […] but the excess of definitions, as in some biographies of Stefan Zweig, transforms narrative interest into the theorizing fervor of the essay.”5 For Emerson, rehearsing and recounting in the biography is both a comfort and a success. “Between the field of literature and history they operate as communicative vessels and in the case of the biographical genre it is unpredictable as it is subject to the fiction of the novelist. Biography is an intellect of the past, so it’s history.”6<\/p>\n
![\"Ralph](\"https:\/\/www.palabranueva.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Ralph-Waldo-Emerson-300x200-1.jpg\")
After the criteria of Gast\u00f3n Baquero and Jos\u00e9 Rodr\u00edguez Feo \u2013 not forgetting jos\u00e9 Mart\u00ed’s important essay \u2013 of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s work and figure, we get the first Cuban edition of Representative Men, a book, in truth, more mentioned than read in our context. We thank the team of the Editorial Capiro (Santa Clara, 2018) for the right idea of bringing the reader closer to a work still tempting by the current so-called “the sage of Concord”. \u03a9<\/p>\n
Notes
\n1 F\u00e9lix Lizaso: “New concept of biography”, in Notebooks of the Universidad del Aire, No. 26, 15 July 1933, Havana, Editorial Minerva, p. 153.
\n2 Referring to the American philosophical, political, and literary movement that prospered between 1836 and 1860, Jos\u00e9 Rodr\u00edguez Feo recalls: “In short, transcendentalism underpinned that almost religious faith in democracy which the founders of the nation had forged over the principles of the philosophes of the French Revolution. But if they based their rationalist philosophy on newton and Locke’s ideas, the transcendentalists of New England incorporated to theirs the German idealism of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel”, in American Themes, Havana, Editorial Cuban Letters, 1985, pp. 29-30.
\n3 Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men, Santa Clara, Editorial Capiro, 2018, p. 23.
\n4 Ibid., p. 145.
\n5 Rafael Est\u00e9nger: “The Art of Biography”, in Notebooks of the Universidad del Aire del Circuito CMQ, No. 10, November 1949, Havana, Lex Publishing Workshops, p. 54.
\n6 Rafael Acosta de Arriba: “The biography, search for the absentee” in Los silencios quebrados de San Lorenzo, 3rd. corrected and augmented edition, Havana, Ediciones Abril, 2018, p. 71.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"