José Juan de Aguilar Acuña Tablada (April 3, 1871 – August 2, 1945) was a Mexican

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

art critic An art critic is a person who is specialized in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating art. Their written critiques or reviews contribute to art criticism and they are published in newspapers, magazines, books, exhibition brochures, and catalogue ...

and, for a brief period,

diplomat A diplomat (from ; romanization, romanized ''diploma'') is a person appointed by a state (polity), state, International organization, intergovernmental, or Non-governmental organization, nongovernmental institution to conduct diplomacy with one ...

. A pioneer of oriental studies, and champion of Mexican art, he spent a good portion of his life living abroad. As a poet, his work spans from the fin-de-siècle style to

avant-garde In the arts and literature, the term ''avant-garde'' ( meaning or ) identifies an experimental genre or work of art, and the artist who created it, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable ...

experimentalism. He was an influential early writer of Spanish-language

haiku is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 Mora (linguistics), morae (called ''On (Japanese prosody), on'' in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a ''kire ...

Career

Tablada was born in

Mexico City Mexico City is the capital city, capital and List of cities in Mexico, largest city of Mexico, as well as the List of North American cities by population, most populous city in North America. It is one of the most important cultural and finan ...

and studied at

Chapultepec Castle Chapultepec Castle () is located on top of Chapultepec Hill in Mexico City's Chapultepec park. The name ''Chapultepec'' is the Nahuatl word which means "on the hill of the grasshopper". It is located at the entrance to Chapultepec park, at a he ...

. He at first worked for the national railways. In 1890, aged 19, he began contributing to magazines and newspapers as a journalist, essayist and poet. In 1894 his rhythmic and intricate poem "Onix" brought him renown. ''Florilegio'', his first collection of poetry, was published in 1899 and established him as one of Mexico's pioneer 'modernists', although at that period such writing approximated the style of the French

decadent movement The Decadent movement (from the French language, French ''décadence'', ) was a late 19th-century Art movement, artistic and literary movement, literary movement, centered in Western Europe, that followed an aesthetic ideology of excess and artif ...

From early on, he became interested in Japanese aesthetics and travelled to Japan for some months in 1900. This left its influence on his work and culminated in a book on the artist

Hiroshige or , born Andō Tokutarō (; 1797 – 12 October 1858), was a Japanese ''ukiyo-e'' artist, considered the last great master of that tradition. Hiroshige is best known for his horizontal-format landscape series '' The Fifty-three Stations ...

(1914) and a general work, ''En el país del sol'' (In the land of the sun, 1919). The latter was made up of a selection of his articles on Japanese subjects over the years, in particular those arising from his 1900 visit. In addition he had brought back a large collection of

ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art that flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock printing, woodblock prints and Nikuhitsu-ga, paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes ...

prints that are now in the

National Library of Mexico The National Library of Mexico () is located in University City of Mexico, Ciudad Universitaria, the main campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City. It was first established on November 30, 1867. As a national ...

. During the turmoil of the

Mexican Revolution The Mexican Revolution () was an extended sequence of armed regional conflicts in Mexico from 20 November 1910 to 1 December 1920. It has been called "the defining event of modern Mexican history". It saw the destruction of the Federal Army, its ...

, Tablada spent time in

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

and then in

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

until he was appointed a cultural secretary in the Foreign Service in 1918, serving in

Bogotá Bogotá (, also , , ), officially Bogotá, Distrito Capital, abbreviated Bogotá, D.C., and formerly known as Santa Fe de Bogotá (; ) during the Spanish Imperial period and between 1991 and 2000, is the capital city, capital and largest city ...

Caracas Caracas ( , ), officially Santiago de León de Caracas (CCS), is the capital and largest city of Venezuela, and the center of the Metropolitan Region of Caracas (or Greater Caracas). Caracas is located along the Guaire River in the northern p ...

, and

Quito Quito (; ), officially San Francisco de Quito, is the capital city, capital and second-largest city of Ecuador, with an estimated population of 2.8 million in its metropolitan area. It is also the capital of the province of Pichincha Province, P ...

. Unable to adapt to the altitude of the last, he resigned and thereafter spent much of his time in New York until 1935. There he ran a bookshop and founded the magazine ''Mexican Art and Life''. At this time he was championing Mexican art, being among the first to draw attention to the art of the Pre-Columbian period, but also supporting the modernist painters

José Clemente Orozco José Clemente Orozco (November 23, 1883 – September 7, 1949) was a Mexican caricaturist and painter, who specialized in political murals that established the Mexican Mural Renaissance together with murals by Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siquei ...

and

Diego Rivera Diego Rivera (; December 8, 1886 – November 24, 1957) was a Mexican painter. His large frescoes helped establish the Mexican muralism, mural movement in Mexican art, Mexican and international art. Between 1922 and 1953, Rivera painted mural ...

. After his return to Mexico, he published a partial autobiography, ''La feria de la vida'' (1937), and was elected a member of the Mexican Literary Academy in 1941. He was appointed Vice-Consul for New York City in 1945 but died soon after his arrival. On November 5, 1946 his remains we interred at the Rotunda of Illustrious Persons

Poetry

Tablada is recognized as among the originators of modern Mexican poetry and is credited with the introduction of

to his country. His collection ''Un dia'' (1919) contains 38 ‘synthetic poems’ and has been described as “the first book of original haiku written by a poet outside Japan”. It was followed by a collection of

calligrams A calligram is a set of words arranged in such a way that it forms a thematically related image. It can be a poem, a phrase, a portion of scripture, or a single word; the visual arrangement can rely on certain use of the typeface, calligraphy o ...

, ''Li-Po y otros poemas'' (1920), and in 1922 by ''El jarro de flores'', containing a further 68 haiku. His haiku are distinguished by their aesthetic quality, as for example in :::Slight willow, ::almost gold, almost amber, :::almost light…. and by their humour: ::Moonlit roofs beyond the window, ::Chinese shadows inky black ::and the Chinese music of cats. In 1921 his friend the composer

Edgard Varèse Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse (; also spelled Edgar; December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was a French and American composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; h ...

incorporated an earlier piece by Tablada, ''La Cruz del Sur'', in his '' Offrandes'' (1921), and two years later dedicated his ''Hyperprism'' to the poet.Olivia Mattis, “Varèse and Dada” in ''Music and Modern Art'', Routledge 2014
p.153
/ref> After Tablada's death, Luis Sandi set ten of his haiku for voice and piano (''Diez hai-kais para canto y piano'', 1947).

Bibliography

Poetry

* ''El florilegio'', 1899 * ''La epopeya nacional'', Porfirio Díaz, 1909 * ''Hiroshigué: el pinto de la nieve, de la lluvia, de la noche y de la luna'', 1914 * ''Al sol y bajo la luna'', 1918 *
Un día... Poemas Sintéticos
', 1919 *

', 1920 * '' Madrigales ideográficos'', 1920 * ''Retablo de memoria de Ramón López Velarde'', 1921 * ''El jarro de flores'', 1922 * ''Intersecciones'', 1924 * ''La feria: poemas mexicanos'', 1928 * ''Del humorismo a la carcajada'', 1944

Essays

* "La defensa social: historia de la campaña de la División del Norte", 1913. * "Historia del arte en México", 1927 * "Hongos mexicanos comestibles: micología económica", 1983

References

Most details are taken from the biography of the poet at th
Free University of Mexico, Faculty of Philosophy and Literature

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Tablada, Jose Juan 1871 births 1945 deaths 20th-century Mexican writers 20th-century Mexican male writers Mexican male poets Haiku poets Writers from Mexico City 20th-century Mexican poets Burials at the Panteón de Dolores