Author

Cardenal, Ernesto

Ernesto Cardenal (1925–2020) was a Nicaraguan poet, revolutionary, Catholic priest, and politician. Persecuted for his participation in the 1954 attempted overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship, he entered the Trappist Monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky in 1957, where he was overseen by Thomas Merton, then master of novices. At the monastery, the monks’ choir sang the Vulgate version of the Psalms seven times per day. It was during that time that Cardenal was inspired to draft his own “translations,” which Merton later told him were “the versions we should really be singing in the choir.”

Publications in The Rang Yan Review

Poetry

Three Psalms earlier voice

Ernesto Cardenal

Emerging from the revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggles of Nicaragua and Latin America, Ernesto Cardenal’s radical reworking of the biblical Psalms confronts the alliance of military power, capitalist exploitation, and authoritarian rule that sustains the Somoza dictatorship and the broader machinery of Cold War militarism. By recasting sacred language as an instrument of political indictment, Cardenal exposes the ideological function of propaganda, the complicity of political elites in the preparation for war, and the obscene disjunction between official invocations of peace and the material production of violence, including the existential threat of nuclear annihilation. His poetics of resistance reclaims spiritual solidarity as a force against the dehumanisation of the oppressed, transforming the ancient Psalm into a revolutionary counter-discourse that refuses the sanctification of state power and insists upon the ethical indivisibility of faith, class consciousness, and liberation.

  • poetry
  • translation
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