Chronicle of an unknown poet

“I had a terrible childhood,” my uncle Ruben Núñez wrote to me in a letter a few years before his death. He was born on May 7, 1952, the grandchild of Italian and Spanish immigrants who had arrived in Uruguay on a boat hoping to make a living with their hands, perhaps working the fields or cleaning houses. It should come as no surprise then that he was born in a rather poor neighborhood in Montevideo. One of his first recollections is from when he was about three years old. His parents were building his eventual childhood home in a neighborhood called Conciliación. They asked him to help carry bricks, one at a time. To that child, each brick felt like the weight of the world. As the years passed by, that neighborhood came to feel like the weight of the world too, and he looked forward to escaping from there. His feelings toward his neighborhood, and toward life, were tainted to some extent by the grayish shadow of a family with a violent father.

Even so, not everything weighed heavily on him. His parents understood that reading played an important role in the raising of a child, so some books of poetry could be found in his house—just a handful, because for the poor, even paper is too costly. Little Ruben found poetry at an early age in a collection of children’s poems titled Palabras sencillas [Simple Words] written by Uruguayan Elisa de los Campos Gestido. Later, in copies distributed by the Austral publishing house, he would discover Nicaragua’s Rubén Darío and Mexico’s Amado Nervo. His enjoyment of poetry grew in school. There he gladly memorized the poems found in the reading textbook Un buen amigo [A Good Friend]. In due time discovered Spain’s Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, who became his favorite poet.

During his early years there were moments of true happiness, and these were not linked to poetry only. The happiest year of his childhood was after his first communion and confirmation, when his mother took him to the Seminary of the Salesian Priests to start him in the path toward Catholic priesthood. In his days as an altar boy, the priests would wake him up somewhere between three and five in the morning so he could help set up mass. In the globe’s Southern winter, he would kneel on the freezing marble and his teeth would shiver to the point it was hard to speak. Nonetheless, in the cavernous seclusion of the main nave, he was overcome by an undefiled joy, a feeling of purity and holiness that he never again regained during his lifetime. He gives us a glimpse of that in his poetry.

During his teenage years, Ruben gave up on Catholicism. He never explained why, but the fact is that by the late 60s, he was disenchanted with the faith of his fathers. Around that time, he started heading out onto the streets with Zulma, his younger sister, whenever he had a chance. Their goal was to visit Protestant churches and inquire about their beliefs. They talked with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Scientists, and any preacher out there who would take the time to engage with two inquisitive teenagers.

One day, a classmate from his high school’s student council invited him to do something that fit the anti-Yankee spirit of their day. He invited Ruben to join him in teasing some Gringos that were doing Gringo things in the Global South. This is how Ruben and several high schoolers headed down to the building where the Mormons met. There they found two Gringos who, without missing a beat, taught the jokers a first lesson on Latter-day Saint theology. The meeting concluded with an invitation to return for a second lesson. The unpublished poet came back, once a week, for three months. “I went that church to make fun of them… But in the end, the joke was on me—they ended up baptizing me,” he said to me with a playful smile twenty-five years later. His newfound religion profoundly affected his worldview; consequently, traces of Mormonism can be found throughout his poetry.

In the early 70s he started publishing his poems, especially as he joined the now discontinued United Poets of Uruguay [Unión de Poetas Uruguayos] (UPU), an organization that sought to get the word out about the poets of the new generation. UPU’s magazine was called Torre de los Panoramas [Tower of Vistas], after modernist poet Julio Herrera y Reissig’s Montevideo house. The magazine was a place where up and coming poets could share their works. In it, he published several poems under the penname Ruben Ransud. His pseudonym’s acronymous surname was derived from his legal name Ruben Alberto Núnez and his religious affiliation Santo de los Últimos Días [Latter-day Saint]. Several of the poems he published in that magazine can be found in the collection Y ahora, alma mía, ¿qué te queda? [And now, my soul, what is left in you?]. At the time he started going by the moniker The Romantic Poet of the New Wave, and he described himself in terms such as this:

I am a man who is in love with love… with love at its very core. I enjoy walking on the shore by the sea, my feet feeling the cool sand, under the brightness of a bright night… looking up again at the starlight heavens in new full moon night

Everything about his future in the world of poetry was promising. He was even interviewed on television back when only four channels broadcasted on Montevideo’s airwaves. Even so, his budding career as a poet was cut short at the end of the 70s. Just like his ancestors, he decided to get on boat, except this was a boat with metal wings. While they had headed toward the Southern Cross, he now headed northward. In his luggage, he packed the hope of being able to break away from everything he disliked about his land. He filled his pant pockets with ideas of economic possibilities for himself that would allow him, from a distance, to provide for his pregnant wife. He placed all his notebooks of poetry—all his poems, whether typewritten on a Remington or written by hand— in his backpack.

His initial destination was historic Greenwich, Connecticut. Those were stormy years in which many things fell apart. He spent some time, not a lot, in Mexico and Honduras. It was in this Central American nation that his notebooks were destroyed in a fire. This was a hard blow to the poet—in that bonfire his years of greatest creative drive went up in smoke, his poems where he celebrated love with true excitement and life with eager curiosity burnt to a crisp.

The cold winters of the American Northeast froze solid his poetic wit and his faith. He left the Church and began to experience an emptiness inside. Even though he did wish to return to his country, he longed for the human connections he lost when he moved away. He longed for the friendships he lost when he gave up on the Church. He longed for a life alongside his son, for the relationships he did not have with his cousins. He was able to maintain a close relationship with his sister across great physical distances, but even so, there was in his life as a foreigner a hole he could never quite fill up.

All of this is reflected in the new poems he timidly began to write again. He never sought to publish these. There is in them a muffled moan. This is evident, for example, in the poems he wrote at the passing of his cousin Fabio, whose life was cut short when he was still a child. That death hit Ruben hard, who kept among his most priced possessions a red toy car that had belonged to his now deceased cousin.

By the mid-80s, he knew English perfectly, even though he never quite lost his accent. In Spanish, his River Plate draw became softened into something that sounded like it was from Chile and the Caribbean all at once. Around this time, he migrated toward warmer climates and made a home for himself in Florida. There, in the suffocating heat of the Atlantic tropics, he began the work of trying to put the pieces of his life back together. And he returned to the Church with enthusiasm and determination. His return to what he considered his true spiritual homeland is also reflected in his poetry.

I witnessed many of these ups and downs myself, as child and a teenager, but it would take me many years to really understand them. In the mid-90s, I was serving as a missionary for my uncle’s Church. (My uncle had brought my mother into the Church three decades prior.) I remember the phone ringing one morning. It was my mission president, a seventy-something with unquestionable musical talent. He was calling to let me know that my uncle had passed. It was September 12, 1996. I was aware that my uncle’s health was frail, but I never thought I would receive such a phone call. I wept with the pain we all feel when we weep for our dead. At that time, I was comforted by the thought that during the last two years of his life, my uncle had attended the Orlando Temple almost on a daily basis. I found comfort in the knowledge that some of his pain had been diminished that way.

My commitment as a missionary kept me from attending the funeral. On the other hand, my mother, who was the poet’s sister, traveled from South America to Florida in order to tend to the many things that become suspended in midair when someone passes. Hers was the difficult task of going through her brother’s belongings. Among the things she found were many poems, handwritten on scraps of paper, the back of old receipts, and paper napkins, all tucked away in drawers filled to the brim or folded between the pages of old planners. Knowing that these were in a way the wake left behind by a life, she gathered them all in one  place and later typed them on WordPerfect. In a very real way, Ruben Ransud’s poetry collection Y ahora, alma mía, ¿qué te queda? exists because of that work, which she carried out with teary eyes and a heavy heart.

There is no doubt an element of chance in that book of poems even existing. I cannot help but think of the vastness of the Spanish-speaking continent and suspect that surely there are other such individuals out there who also tucked away poems in drawers and daily planners. Surely there are out there other poems dealing with youth and maturity, poems of gleeful cheerfulness and funerary sadness, poems of love and ascent. It is likely that most of those works will in the end disappear into the relentless abyss of time. Or, to put it succinctly, it is rather fortunate that that the poetry of Ruben Ransud has been rescued.

Note: The preceding text is a translation of the introduction to the poetry collection Y ahora, alma mía, ¿qué te queda?, which posthumously gathers the poetry of LDS poet Ruben Ransud.