In 1966, after the publication of his first novel, Paradiso (translated, 1974), José Lezama Lima emerged as a writer of astounding imagination capable of creating the most intricate and allusive metaphors. He was proclaimed by Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Octavio Paz, Severo Sarduy, and other Hispano-American writers as one of the most brilliant and complex authors of the latter half of the twentieth century. Cortázar, the first serious reader outside of Cuba of Lezama's work and editor of the Mexican edition of Paradiso, was the most enthusiastic spokesman for the aesthetic values of the novel. According to Cortázar, Lezama's novel and poetic works, all of clearly hermetic character, are made more accessible to readers who take into account the poetic principles discussed by Lezama in his essays written throughout a lifetime dedicated to culture. In its totality, Lezama's oeuvre is a conjunction...