Silvestre de Balboa

Silvestre de Balboa Troya Quesada (June 30, 1563 – c. 1644)[1] was a Canary writer considered author of the first literary text in Cuba.

Very little information is known of him, among which is his baptism certificate dated in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, June 30, 1563.[2] Hidalgo, of the gentry, notes that he arrived in Cuba between 1590 and 1600.

It is known that in 1604 that he was in the city of Manzanillo, but later settled in the village of Santa María del Puerto del Príncipe, current Camagüey province, where he was confirmed as clerk of the council.

Work

Silvestre de Balboa's work Espejo de paciencia remained hidden and survived the fire that devastated the town in 1616. It was found in 1836 by Jose Antonio Echeverria, who discovered the manuscripts in poor condition in the archives of the Patriotic Society of Havana, interspersed with other documents. The poem was published without any change in its original though only in fragments for two years after its discovery in 1838 in the newspaper El Plantel. And soon after it was published in full for the first time in the second edition of the Bibliografía cubana de los siglos XVII and XVIII.

Espejo de paciencia

Espejo de paciencia is considered the first literary work in Cuba:[3] based on historical fact about the capture of the bishop of the island of Cuba, Don Juan de las Cabezas Altamirano, at the hands of the French privateer Gilberto Giron in 1604 in the Manzanillo port, and his subsequent rescue by the villagers led by Gregorio Ramos, and how the pirate was killed at the hands of the slave Salvador Golomon.

Balboa had a pretty firm literary training and his work shows the influence of Canary poets Bartolomé Cairasco de Figueroa and Antonio de Viana.

Death

A document from 1644 has been found in which it is stated that Catalina de la Coba and Consuegra, “principeña, widow”, granted a will. Therefore it follows that her husband Silvestre de Balboa must have died that year (1644) or a year earlier (1643).[4]

gollark: ?tag blub
gollark: ?tag create blub Graham considers a hypothetical Blub programmer. When the programmer looks down the "power continuum", he considers the lower languages to be less powerful because they miss some feature that a Blub programmer is used to. But when he looks up, he fails to realise that he is looking up: he merely sees "weird languages" with unnecessary features and assumes they are equivalent in power, but with "other hairy stuff thrown in as well". When Graham considers the point of view of a programmer using a language higher than Blub, he describes that programmer as looking down on Blub and noting its "missing" features from the point of view of the higher language.
gollark: ?tag blub Graham considers a hypothetical Blub programmer. When the programmer looks down the "power continuum", he considers the lower languages to be less powerful because they miss some feature that a Blub programmer is used to. But when he looks up, he fails to realise that he is looking up: he merely sees "weird languages" with unnecessary features and assumes they are equivalent in power, but with "other hairy stuff thrown in as well". When Graham considers the point of view of a programmer using a language higher than Blub, he describes that programmer as looking down on Blub and noting its "missing" features from the point of view of the higher language.
gollark: > As long as our hypothetical Blub programmer is looking down the power continuum, he knows he's looking down. Languages less powerful than Blub are obviously less powerful, because they're missing some feature he's used to. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, he doesn't realize he's looking up. What he sees are merely weird languages. He probably considers them about equivalent in power to Blub, but with all this other hairy stuff thrown in as well. Blub is good enough for him, because he thinks in Blub.
gollark: Imagine YOU are a BLUB programmer.

References
  1. Lezama Lima, José; Esteban, Ángel; Salvador Jofré, Álvaro (2002): Antología de la poesía cubana. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2002. 302 pages.
  2. José Almeida Alfonso, La inmigración canaria en Cuba (Canary immigration to Cuba) Archived November 4, 2011, at the Wayback Machine
  3. Roberto Fernández Retamar , Introducción a la literatura cubana (Introduction to Cuban Literature)
  4. Balboa, Silvestre de (1988): Espejo de paciencia (Lázaro Santana's prologue, page 10). Santa Cruz de Tenerife (Canarias): Viceconsejería de Cultura y Deportes del Gobierno de Canarias, 1988. ISBN 84-505-7755-1.
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