The Feast of the Vultures
He had lost the sense of safety and daring after sacrificing his wife. He had surprised her in an interview with the enemy and inflicted death upon her without hearing the first explanation.
He had been left alone and nearly inert. The migratory tribe had succumbed in the dispute with the regular armies. The survivor had no other goods besides his horse and a cart entrusted to the strength of his dogs where he would take shelter from the rain. He would have died of hunger had he not dared to eat the uncultivated roots and the food gypsies made the most of in their indigent diet.
At each instant he received a warning from fate. He eventually ceased recognizing the noise of his own steps and he spun on his feet to defend himself. An apparition would tend to interrupt his sleep, violently destroying the door of his home amid the dismayed pack of hounds.
The outlaw decided to abandon himself to the mercy of events. He fortuitously came across a pitiful beggar on the day he fell prisoner and was victimized. Old age had turned her into a crane with crutches.
The beggar wanted the end of the continuous war, where she had lost her sons, and she lent herself to the task of spy.
The victors arrived through different routes and dispersed the final gesture of defense. They injured it to satisfaction.
The beggar limited herself to sealing the hero’s face with a fistful of dirt.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.18.2013
El clima del nopal / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Climate of the Nopal
The hermit narrates the events and incorporates himself to the army of lacerated and hopeless characters. He confesses himself the author of at least one rapture and suggests, by means of a living elocution, the fright of running away at full speed, within reach of the stones and bullets.
He pretends to be dedicated to the memory of Mercedes, who would constantly censure his youth and the author, once she died, of his retreat from the century and of his repentance and humility.
He describes the farm where she passed from this life and was left on her back, without help or company. A gust from the north would break the big windows at each step, dispersed the perfume of the incense and extinguished, in front of the ivory crucifix, a candle with faded light.
He goes on to celebrate his irrevocable purpose of living as a penitent, from that moment forth, in the hole of the mountain, amidst a scanty and ashen weeds.
The hermit concludes his discourse and surprises me by mentioning his companions and the reproach of his lateness. He convenes them by means of a copper whistle.
I saw myself threatened, in a limited space, by a wheel of aimed rifles. I couldn’t raise my voice amid the uproar of the knaves.
The captain persuaded them to respect my life and he took me out safely along cliffside roads, without abandoning the monk’s habit, and appropriating all my money and the promise to sail the return to my homeland.
He was shooting his gun against some birds of prey gathered, above me, in a furious scramble.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The hermit narrates the events and incorporates himself to the army of lacerated and hopeless characters. He confesses himself the author of at least one rapture and suggests, by means of a living elocution, the fright of running away at full speed, within reach of the stones and bullets.
He pretends to be dedicated to the memory of Mercedes, who would constantly censure his youth and the author, once she died, of his retreat from the century and of his repentance and humility.
He describes the farm where she passed from this life and was left on her back, without help or company. A gust from the north would break the big windows at each step, dispersed the perfume of the incense and extinguished, in front of the ivory crucifix, a candle with faded light.
He goes on to celebrate his irrevocable purpose of living as a penitent, from that moment forth, in the hole of the mountain, amidst a scanty and ashen weeds.
The hermit concludes his discourse and surprises me by mentioning his companions and the reproach of his lateness. He convenes them by means of a copper whistle.
I saw myself threatened, in a limited space, by a wheel of aimed rifles. I couldn’t raise my voice amid the uproar of the knaves.
The captain persuaded them to respect my life and he took me out safely along cliffside roads, without abandoning the monk’s habit, and appropriating all my money and the promise to sail the return to my homeland.
He was shooting his gun against some birds of prey gathered, above me, in a furious scramble.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.16.2013
El viaje en trineo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Journey by Sled
The copper and silver lay buried in a sterile zone, where vegetables reached a scant arborescence. The tiny birch tree and the lichen could not manage to liven the vista.
A continental river remained paralyzed by the ice for more than half the year. A few unformed boats, of rudimentary art, were falling apart amidst the strict climate. The authors of their fabrication gathered the pieces by means of hemp ropes, without the aid of iron. Those ships traveled heavily balancing their three masts in the livid air.
Apathetic men, dressed in reindeer skins, they were waiting at the mouth of the river. Some birds of sordid beaks were tearing apart in their presence the corpse of a polar whale.
Those unkempt men were dying from filth and scurvy. They were not accustomed to using salt and they would eat fish without gutting them.
I had arrived to that place while carrying out an order from the British government. I had to spy the activities of the Muscovite agents, who were insistent in our destruction. I had laboriously adopted the customs and languages of those uncultured nations and nobody would have distinguished me from among the Mongolians with saffron-colored faces.
I immediately noticed the ineptitude of our enemies. They had not yet discovered the method for applying to the industry of armor the metals treasured in the ground.
A few riders from the Caucus had penetrated the territory of an innocent tribe caught off-guard, subject to the uncertain authority of the emperor of China and careless in paying him the tribute of forty jackets made of white fox fur. He was said to be a devotee of the infernal spirits that take refuge in a mountain made of sand.
I persuaded the tribe to resist the invaders by lavishing money and firewater. I gathered a crowd together armed with pikes and walking sticks and I led it towards an assault against a small redoubt of wood where the enemy was hiding. The czar neglected the inferred amends to his servers and he incorporated them to his guard of honor.
I procured to increase my knowledge in the natural sciences when I convinced myself of the incapacity of our rivals in the dominion of Asia. I headed towards a place made famous by the discovery of Antediluvian animals. On that occasion I started a friendship with a Russian naturalist, born on the Baltic coast and educated at Riga.
Along with his university preparation he displayed the credulity and superstition of a pope. He would become copiously drunk to celebrate Sunday and he’d roll on the ground letting out an exhausting hiccup. He would habitually ingest a black bread, sour, aromatized with anise and cumin and sprinkled with a caustic sauce.
He realized, notwithstanding, the reason for my visit through that desert and he could frustrate my forced labor.
He had awakened my jealousies by telling me about the discovery of a new breed of cedars from Siberia.
I managed to poison him during the course of his drunkenness, giving him as a meal the meat of a mammoth fossil.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The copper and silver lay buried in a sterile zone, where vegetables reached a scant arborescence. The tiny birch tree and the lichen could not manage to liven the vista.
A continental river remained paralyzed by the ice for more than half the year. A few unformed boats, of rudimentary art, were falling apart amidst the strict climate. The authors of their fabrication gathered the pieces by means of hemp ropes, without the aid of iron. Those ships traveled heavily balancing their three masts in the livid air.
Apathetic men, dressed in reindeer skins, they were waiting at the mouth of the river. Some birds of sordid beaks were tearing apart in their presence the corpse of a polar whale.
Those unkempt men were dying from filth and scurvy. They were not accustomed to using salt and they would eat fish without gutting them.
I had arrived to that place while carrying out an order from the British government. I had to spy the activities of the Muscovite agents, who were insistent in our destruction. I had laboriously adopted the customs and languages of those uncultured nations and nobody would have distinguished me from among the Mongolians with saffron-colored faces.
I immediately noticed the ineptitude of our enemies. They had not yet discovered the method for applying to the industry of armor the metals treasured in the ground.
A few riders from the Caucus had penetrated the territory of an innocent tribe caught off-guard, subject to the uncertain authority of the emperor of China and careless in paying him the tribute of forty jackets made of white fox fur. He was said to be a devotee of the infernal spirits that take refuge in a mountain made of sand.
I persuaded the tribe to resist the invaders by lavishing money and firewater. I gathered a crowd together armed with pikes and walking sticks and I led it towards an assault against a small redoubt of wood where the enemy was hiding. The czar neglected the inferred amends to his servers and he incorporated them to his guard of honor.
I procured to increase my knowledge in the natural sciences when I convinced myself of the incapacity of our rivals in the dominion of Asia. I headed towards a place made famous by the discovery of Antediluvian animals. On that occasion I started a friendship with a Russian naturalist, born on the Baltic coast and educated at Riga.
Along with his university preparation he displayed the credulity and superstition of a pope. He would become copiously drunk to celebrate Sunday and he’d roll on the ground letting out an exhausting hiccup. He would habitually ingest a black bread, sour, aromatized with anise and cumin and sprinkled with a caustic sauce.
He realized, notwithstanding, the reason for my visit through that desert and he could frustrate my forced labor.
He had awakened my jealousies by telling me about the discovery of a new breed of cedars from Siberia.
I managed to poison him during the course of his drunkenness, giving him as a meal the meat of a mammoth fossil.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.13.2013
Miércoles de ceniza / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Ash Wednesday
She stands out amidst the contest of the naïve faithful for the severe majesty her faded beauty enacts. The final gala of youth appears with the sorrowful splendor of the afternoon, and her hair grows dry and is turned white by the implacable autumn that tears out the tremulous leaves. The melancholic memories of her youthful years suggest the nostalgia of splendid celebrations in a stately, abandoned castle, and to darken her eyes with tears comes, in the antechamber to old age, a message from the radiant past in the memory of antiquated music.
Oblivion, relentless sentinel, guards her window, and before her no longer succumb the pleading demands, like murmuring and humble waves at the foot of an inaccessible rock. Her soul avoids mundane agitation, and moderated by disappointment, flies like the swallow in mourning to gather itself in the mystical atmosphere of the temple. There she remains captive to the music that surges and dilates like the slow smoke of the incense, and she abominates the century amidst a rumor of funereal Latin.
Her soul has been occupied by the thought of what is divine and immortal since the mirror for her faded beauty received the pessimistic censure of the skull, and since then she dresses with the somber colors that symbolize the desolation of our life and are proper for lamenting the unavoidable ruin of time. The insult of the years does not darken the mirror of her eyes that shine with living splendor, as though by virtue of a perennial rite. They lend her face a religious gravity and exhibit it exhausted and penitent as though her life extenuated the cult of a dour numen.
Repentant of profane colloquies and avid for sorrows, she keeps the confidence of her troubles for the inflexible cross. By wishing for her forehead, in pious imitation, the crown of bloody thorns she drives away the memory of celebrations. To expiate mundane illusions she satisfies the extreme of the amendment and elevates above the desert of her life, to light the rest of her journey, the candle of cadaveric light.
Translator’s Note: This poem was first published on 21 October 1917 in the Caracas magazine La Revista.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
She stands out amidst the contest of the naïve faithful for the severe majesty her faded beauty enacts. The final gala of youth appears with the sorrowful splendor of the afternoon, and her hair grows dry and is turned white by the implacable autumn that tears out the tremulous leaves. The melancholic memories of her youthful years suggest the nostalgia of splendid celebrations in a stately, abandoned castle, and to darken her eyes with tears comes, in the antechamber to old age, a message from the radiant past in the memory of antiquated music.
Oblivion, relentless sentinel, guards her window, and before her no longer succumb the pleading demands, like murmuring and humble waves at the foot of an inaccessible rock. Her soul avoids mundane agitation, and moderated by disappointment, flies like the swallow in mourning to gather itself in the mystical atmosphere of the temple. There she remains captive to the music that surges and dilates like the slow smoke of the incense, and she abominates the century amidst a rumor of funereal Latin.
Her soul has been occupied by the thought of what is divine and immortal since the mirror for her faded beauty received the pessimistic censure of the skull, and since then she dresses with the somber colors that symbolize the desolation of our life and are proper for lamenting the unavoidable ruin of time. The insult of the years does not darken the mirror of her eyes that shine with living splendor, as though by virtue of a perennial rite. They lend her face a religious gravity and exhibit it exhausted and penitent as though her life extenuated the cult of a dour numen.
Repentant of profane colloquies and avid for sorrows, she keeps the confidence of her troubles for the inflexible cross. By wishing for her forehead, in pious imitation, the crown of bloody thorns she drives away the memory of celebrations. To expiate mundane illusions she satisfies the extreme of the amendment and elevates above the desert of her life, to light the rest of her journey, the candle of cadaveric light.
Translator’s Note: This poem was first published on 21 October 1917 in the Caracas magazine La Revista.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.10.2013
Caracas a través de Los impresentables de Raymond Nedeljkovic / Caneo Arguinzones
Caracas Through Raymond Nedeljkovic’s Los impresentables
Raymond Nedeljkovic (Caracas, Venezuela, 1979). Undergraduate degree in Literature from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). At this institution he participated in the workshops given by professors Luis Felipe Castillo and Rodrigo Blanco Calderón. In 2010 he was a member of the fiction workshop at Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, under the direction of Carlos Noguera. He received honorable mention in Fiction in the Semana del Estudiante UCV 2002 contest, and third place in Poetry in the 2008 edition. He was the Coordinator of the newspaper about journalism Palabra y Media (2005) and of the web page of TeleSUR TV station (2006-2008). He currently works as an editor for the team of the Presidential Press of the Ministry of Communication and Information. With Los impresentables he won the VIII Contest for Work by Unpublished Authors, in the category of Fiction, as well as the Municipal Prize for Literature 2012.
How did you get started in literary matters?
My beginnings in literature go back to the student contests at UCV: while I was there I received and honorable mention in Fiction and a third place in Poetry, I think around 2007. But my big opportunity came later, with the Contest for Works by Unpublished Authors at Monte Ávila Editores in 2010, when I won the Fiction category. It was my first publication, and at the end of that same year I was a finalist for the contest at the Society for Authors and Composers of Venezuela (SACVEN), that publishes the winners and the ten first runners-up in an anthology.
What was the creative process like for composing your book?
It’s hard to assume the task of the writer, to maintain the constancy, the discipline and to maintain the habit of writing. I think one writers and the book continues on its own, it speaks for you, and beyond that is where the writer exists. The book makes its own way. The short stories in Los impresentables are written from around 2005 onwards: I had a series of stories compiled when I was finishing my undergraduate degree in Literature, I was blocked with the topic for my senior thesis, I didn’t know what to do. Then it occurred to me to write one in the area of creative writing and so I approached Luis Felipe Castillo, who was my professor at that time and later became my tutor. I began to work from there: I gathered these stories, made a selection and forced myself to have the discipline to rewrite several of them that were half-finished. From that point emerged what forms the base of this book.
Does Los impresentables follow a certain structure?
Caracas gave this book its form. It’s a book that traverses the city, that’s how I’d define it: what gives it unity throughout most of it is the urban stories, about the reality of the capital city, and to a certain degree one’s own experience as a citizen of Caracas. I think there’s quite a bit of violence in my stories, acts of violence occur in about half of them, maybe more, it’s a violent Caracas. Maybe because the book has a great deal of autobiographical elements, and at the time I wrote those stories it touched me quite intensely, in a personal way. But of course, it’s only one focus out of many that can be given to Caracas.
How does the violence of Caracas traverse the short stories of Los impresentables?
It’s the violence we see in Caracas on a daily basis, but also the political violence, like the one we lived during the events of the Caracazo, something we see reflected in the story “Disfraz de zombie” in which the protagonist narrates how he was a victim of the police repression that was unleashed during those days. [Translator’s note: The Caracazo was a spontaneous, popular uprising on February 27, 1989 in Caracas.] In stories such as “Coleccionista de ventanas” we see a Caracas where president Bill Clinton appears, along with a phrase he said when he arrived at the airport: “Todo está chévere en Venezuela” [“Everything’s cool in Venezuela”]; a quotation that I employ in order to reveal the Venezuela that was asleep during those days, when politics were presented as a mere spectacle. It’s a Caracas that isn’t necessarily the one we know today, since other stories take place in the Caracas of 1967 and, actually, they’re inspired by a story my mom always tells me about the jewelry shop Francia. It’s a Caracas in various time periods. “Apenas una niña” is a very harsh story about that daily violence the world’s capital cities suffer, in which I explore the theme from the vantage point of a child’s tenderness, but when the protagonist is already an adult: it’s the memory of what she was when she suffered that traumatic event, when she was barely a child.
Why write short stories?
The other day I read an interview with a literary critic and he was speaking about a writer, whom I prefer not to name, who’s published a couple books of short stories; the critic said that this writer had reached a mature level and was ready to write a novel. I don’t see it that way, I think that a short story is a perfect version of itself, it’s not something that needs to mature. In my case, short stories are perfect for what I want to tell, for several reasons: brevity, tension, the depth I’d like to give my characters... above all starting from William Carlos Williams, one of the poets I most admire, and in whose poetry I’ve always seen as being very narrative. He’s a big influence on this book, a language that always seeks simplicity, closeness, intimacy in some form, and that believes in the power of poetry as an exercise in contemplation. I tried to imbue my stories with these elements.
How has it been to publish your first book through Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana’s Contest for Work by Unpublished Authors?
When you see your own book in bookstores you feel a certain form of obligation. It’s a big deal to be published. The positive aspect of it? To meet a stranger who’s read your book and makes a good comment about it, people who identified with the things you wrote, knowing that what you wrote meant something to them. It seems incredible to me to turn any corner —I’m speaking about Caracas, which is the city where I live— and find a Librería del Sur with more and more books and a greater variety of authors, and finding a convocation for literary contests, organized by the State in its multiple cultural and editorial organisms. In all the events the State organizes, like the International Book Fair, for example, you can see the access that many voices didn’t have previously; voices that are now revealing themselves and didn’t before. It seems very valuable to me, everything that’s been promoted in regards to culture in the most recent years of the Bolivarian Revolution. From each space there’s a struggle, mainly to confront a model and some characters who were very comfortably installed in their reality, and who didn’t seem to want to give space to what burst onto the scene, which is the opening and the access to culture for more people. And I say to confront, but to confront with ideas, with arguments, to try to convince without exclusionary ideas, so as to not damage what’s advancing: a greater inclusion, a wider dissemination of culture and literature. But it’s complicated, because there are two forces struggling against each other and you’re there trying to mediate, to offer ideas, to defend the things you believe in.
{ Caneo Arguinzones, Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, May 2013 }
Photo: YVKE Mundial
Raymond Nedeljkovic (Caracas, Venezuela, 1979). Undergraduate degree in Literature from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). At this institution he participated in the workshops given by professors Luis Felipe Castillo and Rodrigo Blanco Calderón. In 2010 he was a member of the fiction workshop at Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, under the direction of Carlos Noguera. He received honorable mention in Fiction in the Semana del Estudiante UCV 2002 contest, and third place in Poetry in the 2008 edition. He was the Coordinator of the newspaper about journalism Palabra y Media (2005) and of the web page of TeleSUR TV station (2006-2008). He currently works as an editor for the team of the Presidential Press of the Ministry of Communication and Information. With Los impresentables he won the VIII Contest for Work by Unpublished Authors, in the category of Fiction, as well as the Municipal Prize for Literature 2012.
How did you get started in literary matters?
My beginnings in literature go back to the student contests at UCV: while I was there I received and honorable mention in Fiction and a third place in Poetry, I think around 2007. But my big opportunity came later, with the Contest for Works by Unpublished Authors at Monte Ávila Editores in 2010, when I won the Fiction category. It was my first publication, and at the end of that same year I was a finalist for the contest at the Society for Authors and Composers of Venezuela (SACVEN), that publishes the winners and the ten first runners-up in an anthology.
What was the creative process like for composing your book?
It’s hard to assume the task of the writer, to maintain the constancy, the discipline and to maintain the habit of writing. I think one writers and the book continues on its own, it speaks for you, and beyond that is where the writer exists. The book makes its own way. The short stories in Los impresentables are written from around 2005 onwards: I had a series of stories compiled when I was finishing my undergraduate degree in Literature, I was blocked with the topic for my senior thesis, I didn’t know what to do. Then it occurred to me to write one in the area of creative writing and so I approached Luis Felipe Castillo, who was my professor at that time and later became my tutor. I began to work from there: I gathered these stories, made a selection and forced myself to have the discipline to rewrite several of them that were half-finished. From that point emerged what forms the base of this book.
Does Los impresentables follow a certain structure?
Caracas gave this book its form. It’s a book that traverses the city, that’s how I’d define it: what gives it unity throughout most of it is the urban stories, about the reality of the capital city, and to a certain degree one’s own experience as a citizen of Caracas. I think there’s quite a bit of violence in my stories, acts of violence occur in about half of them, maybe more, it’s a violent Caracas. Maybe because the book has a great deal of autobiographical elements, and at the time I wrote those stories it touched me quite intensely, in a personal way. But of course, it’s only one focus out of many that can be given to Caracas.
How does the violence of Caracas traverse the short stories of Los impresentables?
It’s the violence we see in Caracas on a daily basis, but also the political violence, like the one we lived during the events of the Caracazo, something we see reflected in the story “Disfraz de zombie” in which the protagonist narrates how he was a victim of the police repression that was unleashed during those days. [Translator’s note: The Caracazo was a spontaneous, popular uprising on February 27, 1989 in Caracas.] In stories such as “Coleccionista de ventanas” we see a Caracas where president Bill Clinton appears, along with a phrase he said when he arrived at the airport: “Todo está chévere en Venezuela” [“Everything’s cool in Venezuela”]; a quotation that I employ in order to reveal the Venezuela that was asleep during those days, when politics were presented as a mere spectacle. It’s a Caracas that isn’t necessarily the one we know today, since other stories take place in the Caracas of 1967 and, actually, they’re inspired by a story my mom always tells me about the jewelry shop Francia. It’s a Caracas in various time periods. “Apenas una niña” is a very harsh story about that daily violence the world’s capital cities suffer, in which I explore the theme from the vantage point of a child’s tenderness, but when the protagonist is already an adult: it’s the memory of what she was when she suffered that traumatic event, when she was barely a child.
Why write short stories?
The other day I read an interview with a literary critic and he was speaking about a writer, whom I prefer not to name, who’s published a couple books of short stories; the critic said that this writer had reached a mature level and was ready to write a novel. I don’t see it that way, I think that a short story is a perfect version of itself, it’s not something that needs to mature. In my case, short stories are perfect for what I want to tell, for several reasons: brevity, tension, the depth I’d like to give my characters... above all starting from William Carlos Williams, one of the poets I most admire, and in whose poetry I’ve always seen as being very narrative. He’s a big influence on this book, a language that always seeks simplicity, closeness, intimacy in some form, and that believes in the power of poetry as an exercise in contemplation. I tried to imbue my stories with these elements.
How has it been to publish your first book through Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana’s Contest for Work by Unpublished Authors?
When you see your own book in bookstores you feel a certain form of obligation. It’s a big deal to be published. The positive aspect of it? To meet a stranger who’s read your book and makes a good comment about it, people who identified with the things you wrote, knowing that what you wrote meant something to them. It seems incredible to me to turn any corner —I’m speaking about Caracas, which is the city where I live— and find a Librería del Sur with more and more books and a greater variety of authors, and finding a convocation for literary contests, organized by the State in its multiple cultural and editorial organisms. In all the events the State organizes, like the International Book Fair, for example, you can see the access that many voices didn’t have previously; voices that are now revealing themselves and didn’t before. It seems very valuable to me, everything that’s been promoted in regards to culture in the most recent years of the Bolivarian Revolution. From each space there’s a struggle, mainly to confront a model and some characters who were very comfortably installed in their reality, and who didn’t seem to want to give space to what burst onto the scene, which is the opening and the access to culture for more people. And I say to confront, but to confront with ideas, with arguments, to try to convince without exclusionary ideas, so as to not damage what’s advancing: a greater inclusion, a wider dissemination of culture and literature. But it’s complicated, because there are two forces struggling against each other and you’re there trying to mediate, to offer ideas, to defend the things you believe in.
{ Caneo Arguinzones, Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, May 2013 }
5.07.2013
El justiciero / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Righteous Man
I was a rigorous prelate. My authority weighed without contemplation over a fortified district. My palace governed the frontier river, of irregular course, altered by the precipice and the cavern. My standard, in the figure of a triangle, emitted with vigorous accent the concert of escarpments, redoubts and watchtowers.
I wanted to impose, in their precise signification, the goat’s thorns of my coat of arms.
I would be especially harsh with crimes of condescension and of frailty. I lived immersed in the ventilation of the problem of grace and free will, and was subtracted to the spell of sensible nature.
I ordered the inhumane punishment of stoning when I became aware of the case of nun who had fallen in love and I remained impassive to the pleas of her kneeling relatives.
The unfortunate woman walked to the place of punishment to the compass of a deaf music and carrying in her right hand the candle of penitence.
I grew ill from an incurable disease when I received, on the next day, the visit of the victim’s progenitor. The old man had learned, in the company of birds, an affectionate art. He lived, until that moment, on the edge of a grove within the vicinity of nightingales, and he had defended them from the innate malice of the sparrow hawk.
The birds had referred to him, in trills and chirps, the story of that ancient enmity, noted, from the dawn of history, in more than one venerable theogony.
The old man was strumming the bass-viol of a philharmonic angel, seen by me in a miniature allegory of paradise.
His reprimands, at the moment he walked away, demolished my severity.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I was a rigorous prelate. My authority weighed without contemplation over a fortified district. My palace governed the frontier river, of irregular course, altered by the precipice and the cavern. My standard, in the figure of a triangle, emitted with vigorous accent the concert of escarpments, redoubts and watchtowers.
I wanted to impose, in their precise signification, the goat’s thorns of my coat of arms.
I would be especially harsh with crimes of condescension and of frailty. I lived immersed in the ventilation of the problem of grace and free will, and was subtracted to the spell of sensible nature.
I ordered the inhumane punishment of stoning when I became aware of the case of nun who had fallen in love and I remained impassive to the pleas of her kneeling relatives.
The unfortunate woman walked to the place of punishment to the compass of a deaf music and carrying in her right hand the candle of penitence.
I grew ill from an incurable disease when I received, on the next day, the visit of the victim’s progenitor. The old man had learned, in the company of birds, an affectionate art. He lived, until that moment, on the edge of a grove within the vicinity of nightingales, and he had defended them from the innate malice of the sparrow hawk.
The birds had referred to him, in trills and chirps, the story of that ancient enmity, noted, from the dawn of history, in more than one venerable theogony.
The old man was strumming the bass-viol of a philharmonic angel, seen by me in a miniature allegory of paradise.
His reprimands, at the moment he walked away, demolished my severity.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.06.2013
La guerra / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
War
The man of rudimentary intelligence went out to hunt far from his inundated plain, at the start of the day in a primitive age.
He guided his steps to a canyon of volcanic origin, inhabited by tense dragons and deformed and lazy birds.
He chose, during the trajectory, the most solid stones, to arm his sling.
He emitted screams with the greatest strength, using his hands as a loudspeaker.
Another man appeared, dressed in a sheepskin coat and ready for the fight. He was vociferating from the top of a hill. His face was lost in the forest of hair and beard.
The combat lasted, without being decided, for an indefinite amount of time. Trickles of blood were painting the face and chest of the rivals.
A woman cautiously falsified the defender’s foot and precipitated him from the heights. She was avenging herself for an abject submission.
The victor takes her under his authority and imposes upon her shoulders the sum of the plunder. He guides her towards the plain through a brief slope.
He is unconcerned for the overwhelmed back and the bloody feet of the captive.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The man of rudimentary intelligence went out to hunt far from his inundated plain, at the start of the day in a primitive age.
He guided his steps to a canyon of volcanic origin, inhabited by tense dragons and deformed and lazy birds.
He chose, during the trajectory, the most solid stones, to arm his sling.
He emitted screams with the greatest strength, using his hands as a loudspeaker.
Another man appeared, dressed in a sheepskin coat and ready for the fight. He was vociferating from the top of a hill. His face was lost in the forest of hair and beard.
The combat lasted, without being decided, for an indefinite amount of time. Trickles of blood were painting the face and chest of the rivals.
A woman cautiously falsified the defender’s foot and precipitated him from the heights. She was avenging herself for an abject submission.
The victor takes her under his authority and imposes upon her shoulders the sum of the plunder. He guides her towards the plain through a brief slope.
He is unconcerned for the overwhelmed back and the bloody feet of the captive.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.05.2013
El knut / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Knout
Secular servitude inhibited, for generations, the thought of the peasants.
They would allow themselves to be thrashed without objection or protest. Their masters would cut their hair unevenly and multiply them by joining them together in pairs without consulting their will.
I attended one of those weddings. The peasants and their women had become intoxicated with a virulent alcohol and they danced holding hands to the sound of an elemental music. Many of them would fall face first onto the naked ground, stammering a song. The lord could not suppress his loud laughter.
They ate from wooden vessels a glutinous flour, of acidic flavor, and would remain choked up for the rest of the day.
They worked faithfully and with plenty of carelessness and clumsiness in exchange for a scant salary and they would rest on the lawn of the parks. The police would interrupt their nocturnal sleep with blows from swords.
The winter’s first snow was enough to exterminate the multitude of the dispossessed. They left piled together in carts to the outskirts of the city where they were incinerated without waiting, at any time, for them to die. The official at the civil registry didn’t bother to keep an account of the deaths. The peasants ignored if they had a name and answered to any nickname whatsoever.
The chance of a rainfall afforded me the knowledge of a maiden from that throng. I was captivated by her defenseless gesture and her lymphatic blandness. She would part her uncombed blonde hair in the middle of her forehead. She had taken refuge under a colonnade of my house.
Her brother, a character with an exhausted complexion and a wild and precocious beard, came to defend her from my treachery.
I decided to avenge myself for their resistance by increasing their misfortune. I went to the chief of the garrison, my companion in Bacchanalian life, and persuaded him to the conscription of the young man.
That officer, of aristocratic origin and select education, had gained renown for being severe in discipline and insensible to the suffering of others. He would entertain himself imposing dilacerating beatings. The soldiers would return ethical to their homes.
The young recruit came to be counted among the enemies of a tyrannical superior. The oficial had died after ingesting, with his soup, fragments of glass.
I forced the suspicions directed against the destitute man and improved the defense of his companions.
He was declared the author of the homicide and sentenced to fustigation. He passed to a suburb, where the soldiers cleared a path and discharged against him quite a few energetic lashes. The recruit was dragged, this way and that, tied to a rifle armed with its bayonet, by which he could wound himself with any evasive movement.
The screams of the victim chilled the executioners with fear. The lashing uncovered in no time the skeleton.
The task lasted close to an hour, when the regiment’s doctor interposed himself to discern the pulse and certify death.
The recruit’s sister, forced to appear, fainted during the course of the punishment.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Secular servitude inhibited, for generations, the thought of the peasants.
They would allow themselves to be thrashed without objection or protest. Their masters would cut their hair unevenly and multiply them by joining them together in pairs without consulting their will.
I attended one of those weddings. The peasants and their women had become intoxicated with a virulent alcohol and they danced holding hands to the sound of an elemental music. Many of them would fall face first onto the naked ground, stammering a song. The lord could not suppress his loud laughter.
They ate from wooden vessels a glutinous flour, of acidic flavor, and would remain choked up for the rest of the day.
They worked faithfully and with plenty of carelessness and clumsiness in exchange for a scant salary and they would rest on the lawn of the parks. The police would interrupt their nocturnal sleep with blows from swords.
The winter’s first snow was enough to exterminate the multitude of the dispossessed. They left piled together in carts to the outskirts of the city where they were incinerated without waiting, at any time, for them to die. The official at the civil registry didn’t bother to keep an account of the deaths. The peasants ignored if they had a name and answered to any nickname whatsoever.
The chance of a rainfall afforded me the knowledge of a maiden from that throng. I was captivated by her defenseless gesture and her lymphatic blandness. She would part her uncombed blonde hair in the middle of her forehead. She had taken refuge under a colonnade of my house.
Her brother, a character with an exhausted complexion and a wild and precocious beard, came to defend her from my treachery.
I decided to avenge myself for their resistance by increasing their misfortune. I went to the chief of the garrison, my companion in Bacchanalian life, and persuaded him to the conscription of the young man.
That officer, of aristocratic origin and select education, had gained renown for being severe in discipline and insensible to the suffering of others. He would entertain himself imposing dilacerating beatings. The soldiers would return ethical to their homes.
The young recruit came to be counted among the enemies of a tyrannical superior. The oficial had died after ingesting, with his soup, fragments of glass.
I forced the suspicions directed against the destitute man and improved the defense of his companions.
He was declared the author of the homicide and sentenced to fustigation. He passed to a suburb, where the soldiers cleared a path and discharged against him quite a few energetic lashes. The recruit was dragged, this way and that, tied to a rifle armed with its bayonet, by which he could wound himself with any evasive movement.
The screams of the victim chilled the executioners with fear. The lashing uncovered in no time the skeleton.
The task lasted close to an hour, when the regiment’s doctor interposed himself to discern the pulse and certify death.
The recruit’s sister, forced to appear, fainted during the course of the punishment.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.03.2013
La conseja de los alabarderos / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Council of Claqueurs
The king’s minister had accused the selfish purposes of the cardinal who was muddied by pleasures. At every moment they would confront each other, animated by a venomous hatred. They had been born in the heart of the same dynastic family. Their servants had squabbled at the foot of a prison tower.
The cardinal, accustomed to seduction, had insinuated an unworthy discourse in the mind of the minister’s daughter, under the secret of confession. He did not prosper in his evil, but instead emerged disillusioned and offended.
He chose a second route for the disgrace of his antagonist and directed the passions of the frivolous king in prejudice of the inflexible woman.
The minister is disposed to the defense of honor and suffers in his person and property. He does not survive, in the cell’s darkness, the amputation of the ears and the tonsure, legal affronts of the falsifiers.
The minister’s daughter faints in the hands of a few innoble religious ladies. She hears the reference to her misfortune in the risible serenade of those partial to the cleric. She is lost in conjectures and hallucinations and discovers a gathering of capering rats around the butterfly of light. They dance back to back and prance about, in the manner of witches.
The religious ladies persuade her to immobility and to the abandonment of her resistance. They announce to her the decease of her progenitor and show her the needle used to sew her shroud and destined to join together the curtains of her prisoner’s bed.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The king’s minister had accused the selfish purposes of the cardinal who was muddied by pleasures. At every moment they would confront each other, animated by a venomous hatred. They had been born in the heart of the same dynastic family. Their servants had squabbled at the foot of a prison tower.
The cardinal, accustomed to seduction, had insinuated an unworthy discourse in the mind of the minister’s daughter, under the secret of confession. He did not prosper in his evil, but instead emerged disillusioned and offended.
He chose a second route for the disgrace of his antagonist and directed the passions of the frivolous king in prejudice of the inflexible woman.
The minister is disposed to the defense of honor and suffers in his person and property. He does not survive, in the cell’s darkness, the amputation of the ears and the tonsure, legal affronts of the falsifiers.
The minister’s daughter faints in the hands of a few innoble religious ladies. She hears the reference to her misfortune in the risible serenade of those partial to the cleric. She is lost in conjectures and hallucinations and discovers a gathering of capering rats around the butterfly of light. They dance back to back and prance about, in the manner of witches.
The religious ladies persuade her to immobility and to the abandonment of her resistance. They announce to her the decease of her progenitor and show her the needle used to sew her shroud and destined to join together the curtains of her prisoner’s bed.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.01.2013
El musulmán / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Muslim
The mosque had tumbled to the ground during the extermination of the faithful.
The blond pirates had mutilated its towers and covered over the decorative letters where the name of the prophet could be read with stucco. They mocked the filigree conceived and realized by our ancestors in a series of enthusiastic centuries.
The muezzins, humiliating their foreheads in the dust, announced the cloud of bloodthirsty falcons.
They arrived after a voyage of six months, lucid and with their skin peeling from the scorching heat of the torrid seas. The wind was dividing into whistles as it ran between the tense sails. The cabin boys were blowing the sirens, hanging from the masts with agility.
We didn’t dare fight them on the coast, choosing rather a clearing with easy access for our cavalry. We were utterly slaughtered. Our heroes had mad faith in a spectacular battle, of steel crossed in singular combat. The flame of the iron wits vanquished the frank resolve and matted the floor with the victims and plunder of a
simoom.
My older brother was left among the prisoners and suffered a sad fate.
The victors chose him as a target for their pistols. His corpse, hung from its feet, rotted for several days amidst a swarm of crepuscular jackals. He had dared, despite his manacles, to challenge a principal chief.
I discreetly visited the mosque of our devotion, before departing from my captive soil, and I rescued my brother’s relics, paying the victor for them with the present of a few antique arms and a sumptuous quilt. The muslin, elastic and transparent, would pass through a needle without crumpling.
I chose for my exile the home of a neighboring town. A voluble plant, captive of our jungles, weaves itself around a dry tree and adorns it with its scarlet flowers. I brought it with me to keep in memory of my house.
I requested service in a flotilla of pearl fishermen and I traverse a crystalline gulf.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The mosque had tumbled to the ground during the extermination of the faithful.
The blond pirates had mutilated its towers and covered over the decorative letters where the name of the prophet could be read with stucco. They mocked the filigree conceived and realized by our ancestors in a series of enthusiastic centuries.
The muezzins, humiliating their foreheads in the dust, announced the cloud of bloodthirsty falcons.
They arrived after a voyage of six months, lucid and with their skin peeling from the scorching heat of the torrid seas. The wind was dividing into whistles as it ran between the tense sails. The cabin boys were blowing the sirens, hanging from the masts with agility.
We didn’t dare fight them on the coast, choosing rather a clearing with easy access for our cavalry. We were utterly slaughtered. Our heroes had mad faith in a spectacular battle, of steel crossed in singular combat. The flame of the iron wits vanquished the frank resolve and matted the floor with the victims and plunder of a
simoom.
My older brother was left among the prisoners and suffered a sad fate.
The victors chose him as a target for their pistols. His corpse, hung from its feet, rotted for several days amidst a swarm of crepuscular jackals. He had dared, despite his manacles, to challenge a principal chief.
I discreetly visited the mosque of our devotion, before departing from my captive soil, and I rescued my brother’s relics, paying the victor for them with the present of a few antique arms and a sumptuous quilt. The muslin, elastic and transparent, would pass through a needle without crumpling.
I chose for my exile the home of a neighboring town. A voluble plant, captive of our jungles, weaves itself around a dry tree and adorns it with its scarlet flowers. I brought it with me to keep in memory of my house.
I requested service in a flotilla of pearl fishermen and I traverse a crystalline gulf.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
4.30.2013
El entierro / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Burial
There was once a keen and conceited young man. He had come from a civil war, exceeding himself in a bloody day’s journey, shedding light upon the martial lineage in the presence of an ambitious caudillo.
He held in his hands the government of a village.
He went out one night beyond the village to enjoy a reserved and silent landscape. The moon was peeking over an edge of the sierra.
The young man distinguished, in the ambiguous hour, the passing of a cortège. A few jokers were leading the way, carrying a bed on their shoulders and announcing the news of a death. They were locals of mischievous lives and alcoholic faces.
The young man heard his own name upon asking about the deceased. He easily persuaded them to abandon the lugubrious farse and to disperse in demand of their homes.
They gathered, the next night, for the same diversion within view of the fading moon, and reiterated the warning of the young man’s death. He dispersed them sword in hand, with cuts and insults, and arrested the guiltiest of them.
A party was given, within a few days, at the home of a rural nobleman.
The hero was submissively lavishing attention on the beautiful girls and braiding garlands of fleeting flowers for them.
A massive and disheveled man penetrated the hall and went up to the young man. He came from the wilderness and cliffs and he was venting an indiscreet aggressiveness.
The unknown man seemed invulnerable to fire arms.
The struggle was decided with the dagger and concluded, after a few troublesome moments, with the death of both adversaries.
The locals, of mischievous lives and alcoholic faces, were absolved of their arrest and ordered to take away the young man’s corpse.
No one was able to identify the importunate one.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
There was once a keen and conceited young man. He had come from a civil war, exceeding himself in a bloody day’s journey, shedding light upon the martial lineage in the presence of an ambitious caudillo.
He held in his hands the government of a village.
He went out one night beyond the village to enjoy a reserved and silent landscape. The moon was peeking over an edge of the sierra.
The young man distinguished, in the ambiguous hour, the passing of a cortège. A few jokers were leading the way, carrying a bed on their shoulders and announcing the news of a death. They were locals of mischievous lives and alcoholic faces.
The young man heard his own name upon asking about the deceased. He easily persuaded them to abandon the lugubrious farse and to disperse in demand of their homes.
They gathered, the next night, for the same diversion within view of the fading moon, and reiterated the warning of the young man’s death. He dispersed them sword in hand, with cuts and insults, and arrested the guiltiest of them.
A party was given, within a few days, at the home of a rural nobleman.
The hero was submissively lavishing attention on the beautiful girls and braiding garlands of fleeting flowers for them.
A massive and disheveled man penetrated the hall and went up to the young man. He came from the wilderness and cliffs and he was venting an indiscreet aggressiveness.
The unknown man seemed invulnerable to fire arms.
The struggle was decided with the dagger and concluded, after a few troublesome moments, with the death of both adversaries.
The locals, of mischievous lives and alcoholic faces, were absolved of their arrest and ordered to take away the young man’s corpse.
No one was able to identify the importunate one.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
4.28.2013
Ricardo Azuaje: Escribir para mí es compulsivo / Eduardo Cobos
Ricardo Azuaje: Writing Is Compulsive For Me
I began writing at around age fifteen, but more seriously at nineteen. At first, like everyone, I wrote poetry. Then short stories very influenced by García Márquez and by Francisco Massiani. The latter was a voice that felt very close to me; he had a big impact on me when I read him between the ages of sixteen and seventeen: Piedra de mar, Las primeras hojas de la noche and El llanero solitario tiene la cabeza pelada como un cepillo de dientes. Also another Venezuelan writer, Norbith Graterol, with a short novel titled La invención del fuego, which I must have reread several times. There’s Renato Rodríguez with Al sur del equanil, first, and then El bonche. But the truth is I read everything: pulp fiction, many Latin Americans, Julio Cortázar above all. His novel Hopscotch was very important for me for many years, although it’s been a while since I’ve reread it. I also read the Venezuelans from the collection El Dorado from Monte Ávila Editores. I particularly recall Marzo anterior by José Balza; a book by Oswaldo Trejo, También los hombres son ciudades, and Iphigenia by Teresa de la Parra.
In 1978 I left Caracas to study literature at the Universidad de los Andes. I chose the major of Classical Literatures which only had five students enrolled, almost everyone chose Latin American Literature. I was very attracted to the possibility of living alone and changing cities. At the time I was more dedicated to politics than to anything else. However, Mérida was very important because that’s where I began to write seriously. I wrote a first novel in some high school notebooks, which I sent to José Balza. He simply said they were unpublishable, but that the possibility of a writer existed and he encouraged me to keep going. So, as time went on, I published short stories in a few university magazines. I was able to place on in the magazine Zona Franca, then another one appeared in Papel Literario, more or less in the early eighties. But the possibility of publishing a book was given much later.
First Books and Caracas As Sustenance
In the mid-80s my first book of short stories is published, A imagen y semejanza (Monte Ávila Editores, 1986); most of the stories in that collection I had written between Caracas and Mérida, with the exception of “Sanguinela gens,” written in La Gran Sabana. In fact, that was a thicker book. There have also been attempts at long novels, which haven’t been completely successful, because my fiction tends to be short stories that go on much longer or novels that resolve themselves quickly. And really, despite the fact I’ve made a few, I don’t intend to make short novels. Actually, the first one, Juana la roja y Octavio el sabrio (Fundarte, 1991), which is published independently, was going to be included in A imagen y semejanza.
The protagonist of Juana la roja..., Octavio, has a more or less programmed life, he knows he knows he’ll get his Law degree and that he lives with a certain amount of comfort, but he rebels. And this might be one of the most frequent characteristics in what I write: almost all the stories have something like that, at some point the characters become aware of what’s happening and they rebel; they also know that this behavior can lead to failure or calamity, but at the same time they know that, suddenly, they’ll return to their normality, which is to be aware of their surroundings. That rebellion is what makes people more human. Of course, it’s not original at all, we’ve seen it in the stories of Anton Chekov or Raymond Carver, those types of things, common people who suddenly act after a momentary trigger, it illuminates them for a moment and they see life as a series of flashes.
Another constant that’s found there is Caracas. My family came to Caracas in 1972 from the state of Guárico; but in some way or another my entire experience has revolved around this city. So much that when I first left for La Gran Sabana in 1983, I would come to Caracas every two months and spend a couple weeks here, which is to say the contact was permanent. That’s the relationship with Caracas, which has been an important sustenance of what I do; and yet, more than urban texts it has to do with how one lives life here, the unsatisfactory relationships in work and in love, structured life, because in the end you’ll die and nothing will happen. In any case, there’s always an initial idea in my stories, something I want to develop, and if need be I’ll do research. For example, in Juana la roja... I wrote almost from memory about the time period the novel is set in, which is 1982, and I wrote it in 85-86, and I more or less remembered the year of the events in Cantaura. Later I went to the newspaper archives, so the information came after the first draft.
[Translator’s Note: In October of 1982, the Venezuelan military attacked a guerrilla encampment near Cantaura in the state of Anzoátegui, killing 23 people.]
Likewise, with La expulsión del paraíso (Memorias de Altagracia, 1998) there’s some of that. In relation to the fiction of Oswaldo Trejo, to whom I allude in that novel, I tried to read a few essays, but they didn’t help me too much and what I did was take the idea from what I wanted to put into my piece of writing; above all, whatever had to do with my character. The narrator is more cultured, though I try not to make the references too exaggerated; because I think that, in general, no one from our university-educated middle class is extremely cultured, they manage information from newspapers and magazines, television, they have some literary reference that comes from high school, things like that, with exceptions in a few circles of society in Caracas, but they don’t have books as an immediate reference. La expulsión del paraíso is my most literary text and it’s one of the most extravagant ones, because the character’s life is completely changed; the characters in my stories don’t end up doing well; all of them undergo many trials.
Regarding Viste de verde nuestra sombra (Fundarte, 1993), I wrote it more or less during the same time as Juana la roja... and it’s inspired by an issue of the Spanish magazine El Viejo Topo, which included a dossier on the “metropolitan indians,” a radical Italian group that would occupy abandoned buildings. I suppose it was also influenced by the fact that at the time I was living in La Gran Sabana and I was dazzled by what I was learning about the Pemon people. Although I don’t think any of that is reflected in the story. I might have been more influenced by an illustration in the dossier that showed a police officer in riot gear with an arrow piercing his shield, with that we’re already in the story. On the other hand, Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado (1) was written in Caracas during a time when the country seemed to have no future (that no man’s time between the fall of Carlos Andrés Pérez and the second presidency of Rafael Caldera), and I think some of that is reflected in the story and above all in the character. This text appeared in Tenerife, Canary Islands, thanks to the mediation of Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez and Ernesto Suárez, accompanying other short stories, although it also functions as a short novel.
The Art of Rewriting and the Legion Nearby
On another note, writing is actually something compulsive for me, since I can go for months and years without writing; then an idea begins to move around me and I start writing until I achieve something that might be a starting point. I don’t make outlines. And in fact I start stories whose ending I don’t yet know, I really try to be consistent with the anecdote, once it takes off I don’t try to force it. That’s a piece of advice from Cortázar: to be consistent, that the story be credible even if it’s fantastic. That’s why I try to maintain a rhythm. In any case, if I don’t finish a story in one night or in one week, it’s likely that I’ll never finish it and if I do finish it after a long time has passed it will definitely be a bad one. Actually, a few years ago I sent a story to a magazine, I wasn’t convinced it could be published, because I never managed to finish it and I sincerely think I should have never sent it.
That’s where one is left more exposed to criticism. Though I’ve really had a lot of luck with critics considering that if you add up the copies of all the books I’ve published they don’t reach three thousand. And despite this there has been a certain response, I say it because I know of writers who can publish eight or nine books, with readers even, and they don’t have the same resonance. In that regard, the truth is I can’t complain. And I’ve learned a few things from that. Above all because, in some cases, I’ve made myself revise more profusely, to be more responsible with readers, since one can sometimes become a bit arrogant when one has published. Regarding critiques that have pointed out errors in the writing, I’ve given myself the task of rewriting some texts, polishing them a bit more; this is the case with Juana la roja..., which had errors relating to grammar, although I have to say the editors created true disasters. Now that it’s been republished I have revised it and I hope it turned out much better. (2)
People always ask me if I feel I’m part of a generation of writers or novelists; what I think is that there was a group, we didn’t always share the same opinions about literature or about the matter that everyone in this country talks about, which is politics, but that group that wasn’t quite cohesive was interesting. In the 90s we were all working in cultural institutions: the Dirección de Literatura, Monte Ávila Editores, Fundalibro or the Consejo Nacional de la Cultura. And I think chance made it possible for us to know each other because we were all close to the world of books. Even those who weren’t had attended conferences through Fundarte or events that were organized in the book festivals; it was simply impossible not to meet each other. There were ideas about fiction of interest in the group like, for example, those of Slavko Zupcic y Armando Luigi Castañeda. I don’t know if they continue to write bu they, who were the youngest of that cohort, had a writing that was forward-looking. Writers, in many instances, are immersed in the country and express what’s happening, but only on extraordinary occasions do they give clues about what will happen. We’ll have to see if that group or generation, or whatever we might call it, from the 90s, which was very heterogeneous, with very different tendencies, will continue to say things to the country, and if it truly did so at one point.
Notwithstanding, it seems to me that this group belonged to a certain literary tradition. Because I think that in Venezuela we have a strong literary tradition, but one that’s not necessarily tied to the academy. There critics who affirm, many times correctly, that Venezuelan writers don’t know their literary tradition. There is one; but for a writer it can be another one that’s not the national one. A writer, like any Latin American, is formed by reading a Japanese writer or the North Americans, to give an example. There’s a web of dissimilar influences and readings. Many of us who began in the 80s and 90s were influenced by Renato Rodríguez, and we continued to discover him in conversations. Even Rómulo Gallegos has been a reference point for everyone; in this sense I can say there were people who wrote against him. Guillermo Meneses, who was less frequented but had a certain importance, has also been present; there is Julio Garmendia and Salvador Garmendia, the early novels of Carlos Noguera, that are extraordinary, those of José Balza that despite generating so much rejection opened up spaces and influenced other writers; such as Humberto Mata, among others from the house.
That whole tradition of writers I’ve mentioned, regrettably, with specific exceptions, has not been projected outside the country. And maybe that’s one of our writers’ biggest frustrations. Though I think that transcending borders is more of a commercial problem than a literary one. The country’s market can’t sustain a writer because you have to publish abroad and have wider distribution. The truth is I’m convinced the best writers have had to work in other fields since their work has distanced them from the market. There you have William Faulkner, among many others, who didn’t make a living from literature until his final years. Or like the character in La expulsión del paraíso, who when he starts to make a living from what he writes has already betrayed his writing. That’s been the temptation for many writers.
Notes
1. Novel published alongside the short stories “De las mutaciones,” “Carro rojo,” “Puertorrico,” and “Buscando su muerte natural” in the book with the same title: Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado (Canary Islands, Spain: El Lobey Ediciones, 2003; republished by Monte Ávila Editores, 2010).
2. Juana la roja y Octavio el sabrio, Viste de verde nuestra sombra and “Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado” were published in a single volume titled Tres novelas cortas (Universidad de Oriente, 2007).
{ Eduardo Cobos, Letralia, 22 April 2013 }
I began writing at around age fifteen, but more seriously at nineteen. At first, like everyone, I wrote poetry. Then short stories very influenced by García Márquez and by Francisco Massiani. The latter was a voice that felt very close to me; he had a big impact on me when I read him between the ages of sixteen and seventeen: Piedra de mar, Las primeras hojas de la noche and El llanero solitario tiene la cabeza pelada como un cepillo de dientes. Also another Venezuelan writer, Norbith Graterol, with a short novel titled La invención del fuego, which I must have reread several times. There’s Renato Rodríguez with Al sur del equanil, first, and then El bonche. But the truth is I read everything: pulp fiction, many Latin Americans, Julio Cortázar above all. His novel Hopscotch was very important for me for many years, although it’s been a while since I’ve reread it. I also read the Venezuelans from the collection El Dorado from Monte Ávila Editores. I particularly recall Marzo anterior by José Balza; a book by Oswaldo Trejo, También los hombres son ciudades, and Iphigenia by Teresa de la Parra.
In 1978 I left Caracas to study literature at the Universidad de los Andes. I chose the major of Classical Literatures which only had five students enrolled, almost everyone chose Latin American Literature. I was very attracted to the possibility of living alone and changing cities. At the time I was more dedicated to politics than to anything else. However, Mérida was very important because that’s where I began to write seriously. I wrote a first novel in some high school notebooks, which I sent to José Balza. He simply said they were unpublishable, but that the possibility of a writer existed and he encouraged me to keep going. So, as time went on, I published short stories in a few university magazines. I was able to place on in the magazine Zona Franca, then another one appeared in Papel Literario, more or less in the early eighties. But the possibility of publishing a book was given much later.
First Books and Caracas As Sustenance
In the mid-80s my first book of short stories is published, A imagen y semejanza (Monte Ávila Editores, 1986); most of the stories in that collection I had written between Caracas and Mérida, with the exception of “Sanguinela gens,” written in La Gran Sabana. In fact, that was a thicker book. There have also been attempts at long novels, which haven’t been completely successful, because my fiction tends to be short stories that go on much longer or novels that resolve themselves quickly. And really, despite the fact I’ve made a few, I don’t intend to make short novels. Actually, the first one, Juana la roja y Octavio el sabrio (Fundarte, 1991), which is published independently, was going to be included in A imagen y semejanza.
The protagonist of Juana la roja..., Octavio, has a more or less programmed life, he knows he knows he’ll get his Law degree and that he lives with a certain amount of comfort, but he rebels. And this might be one of the most frequent characteristics in what I write: almost all the stories have something like that, at some point the characters become aware of what’s happening and they rebel; they also know that this behavior can lead to failure or calamity, but at the same time they know that, suddenly, they’ll return to their normality, which is to be aware of their surroundings. That rebellion is what makes people more human. Of course, it’s not original at all, we’ve seen it in the stories of Anton Chekov or Raymond Carver, those types of things, common people who suddenly act after a momentary trigger, it illuminates them for a moment and they see life as a series of flashes.
Another constant that’s found there is Caracas. My family came to Caracas in 1972 from the state of Guárico; but in some way or another my entire experience has revolved around this city. So much that when I first left for La Gran Sabana in 1983, I would come to Caracas every two months and spend a couple weeks here, which is to say the contact was permanent. That’s the relationship with Caracas, which has been an important sustenance of what I do; and yet, more than urban texts it has to do with how one lives life here, the unsatisfactory relationships in work and in love, structured life, because in the end you’ll die and nothing will happen. In any case, there’s always an initial idea in my stories, something I want to develop, and if need be I’ll do research. For example, in Juana la roja... I wrote almost from memory about the time period the novel is set in, which is 1982, and I wrote it in 85-86, and I more or less remembered the year of the events in Cantaura. Later I went to the newspaper archives, so the information came after the first draft.
[Translator’s Note: In October of 1982, the Venezuelan military attacked a guerrilla encampment near Cantaura in the state of Anzoátegui, killing 23 people.]
Likewise, with La expulsión del paraíso (Memorias de Altagracia, 1998) there’s some of that. In relation to the fiction of Oswaldo Trejo, to whom I allude in that novel, I tried to read a few essays, but they didn’t help me too much and what I did was take the idea from what I wanted to put into my piece of writing; above all, whatever had to do with my character. The narrator is more cultured, though I try not to make the references too exaggerated; because I think that, in general, no one from our university-educated middle class is extremely cultured, they manage information from newspapers and magazines, television, they have some literary reference that comes from high school, things like that, with exceptions in a few circles of society in Caracas, but they don’t have books as an immediate reference. La expulsión del paraíso is my most literary text and it’s one of the most extravagant ones, because the character’s life is completely changed; the characters in my stories don’t end up doing well; all of them undergo many trials.
Regarding Viste de verde nuestra sombra (Fundarte, 1993), I wrote it more or less during the same time as Juana la roja... and it’s inspired by an issue of the Spanish magazine El Viejo Topo, which included a dossier on the “metropolitan indians,” a radical Italian group that would occupy abandoned buildings. I suppose it was also influenced by the fact that at the time I was living in La Gran Sabana and I was dazzled by what I was learning about the Pemon people. Although I don’t think any of that is reflected in the story. I might have been more influenced by an illustration in the dossier that showed a police officer in riot gear with an arrow piercing his shield, with that we’re already in the story. On the other hand, Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado (1) was written in Caracas during a time when the country seemed to have no future (that no man’s time between the fall of Carlos Andrés Pérez and the second presidency of Rafael Caldera), and I think some of that is reflected in the story and above all in the character. This text appeared in Tenerife, Canary Islands, thanks to the mediation of Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez and Ernesto Suárez, accompanying other short stories, although it also functions as a short novel.
The Art of Rewriting and the Legion Nearby
On another note, writing is actually something compulsive for me, since I can go for months and years without writing; then an idea begins to move around me and I start writing until I achieve something that might be a starting point. I don’t make outlines. And in fact I start stories whose ending I don’t yet know, I really try to be consistent with the anecdote, once it takes off I don’t try to force it. That’s a piece of advice from Cortázar: to be consistent, that the story be credible even if it’s fantastic. That’s why I try to maintain a rhythm. In any case, if I don’t finish a story in one night or in one week, it’s likely that I’ll never finish it and if I do finish it after a long time has passed it will definitely be a bad one. Actually, a few years ago I sent a story to a magazine, I wasn’t convinced it could be published, because I never managed to finish it and I sincerely think I should have never sent it.
That’s where one is left more exposed to criticism. Though I’ve really had a lot of luck with critics considering that if you add up the copies of all the books I’ve published they don’t reach three thousand. And despite this there has been a certain response, I say it because I know of writers who can publish eight or nine books, with readers even, and they don’t have the same resonance. In that regard, the truth is I can’t complain. And I’ve learned a few things from that. Above all because, in some cases, I’ve made myself revise more profusely, to be more responsible with readers, since one can sometimes become a bit arrogant when one has published. Regarding critiques that have pointed out errors in the writing, I’ve given myself the task of rewriting some texts, polishing them a bit more; this is the case with Juana la roja..., which had errors relating to grammar, although I have to say the editors created true disasters. Now that it’s been republished I have revised it and I hope it turned out much better. (2)
People always ask me if I feel I’m part of a generation of writers or novelists; what I think is that there was a group, we didn’t always share the same opinions about literature or about the matter that everyone in this country talks about, which is politics, but that group that wasn’t quite cohesive was interesting. In the 90s we were all working in cultural institutions: the Dirección de Literatura, Monte Ávila Editores, Fundalibro or the Consejo Nacional de la Cultura. And I think chance made it possible for us to know each other because we were all close to the world of books. Even those who weren’t had attended conferences through Fundarte or events that were organized in the book festivals; it was simply impossible not to meet each other. There were ideas about fiction of interest in the group like, for example, those of Slavko Zupcic y Armando Luigi Castañeda. I don’t know if they continue to write bu they, who were the youngest of that cohort, had a writing that was forward-looking. Writers, in many instances, are immersed in the country and express what’s happening, but only on extraordinary occasions do they give clues about what will happen. We’ll have to see if that group or generation, or whatever we might call it, from the 90s, which was very heterogeneous, with very different tendencies, will continue to say things to the country, and if it truly did so at one point.
Notwithstanding, it seems to me that this group belonged to a certain literary tradition. Because I think that in Venezuela we have a strong literary tradition, but one that’s not necessarily tied to the academy. There critics who affirm, many times correctly, that Venezuelan writers don’t know their literary tradition. There is one; but for a writer it can be another one that’s not the national one. A writer, like any Latin American, is formed by reading a Japanese writer or the North Americans, to give an example. There’s a web of dissimilar influences and readings. Many of us who began in the 80s and 90s were influenced by Renato Rodríguez, and we continued to discover him in conversations. Even Rómulo Gallegos has been a reference point for everyone; in this sense I can say there were people who wrote against him. Guillermo Meneses, who was less frequented but had a certain importance, has also been present; there is Julio Garmendia and Salvador Garmendia, the early novels of Carlos Noguera, that are extraordinary, those of José Balza that despite generating so much rejection opened up spaces and influenced other writers; such as Humberto Mata, among others from the house.
That whole tradition of writers I’ve mentioned, regrettably, with specific exceptions, has not been projected outside the country. And maybe that’s one of our writers’ biggest frustrations. Though I think that transcending borders is more of a commercial problem than a literary one. The country’s market can’t sustain a writer because you have to publish abroad and have wider distribution. The truth is I’m convinced the best writers have had to work in other fields since their work has distanced them from the market. There you have William Faulkner, among many others, who didn’t make a living from literature until his final years. Or like the character in La expulsión del paraíso, who when he starts to make a living from what he writes has already betrayed his writing. That’s been the temptation for many writers.
Notes
1. Novel published alongside the short stories “De las mutaciones,” “Carro rojo,” “Puertorrico,” and “Buscando su muerte natural” in the book with the same title: Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado (Canary Islands, Spain: El Lobey Ediciones, 2003; republished by Monte Ávila Editores, 2010).
2. Juana la roja y Octavio el sabrio, Viste de verde nuestra sombra and “Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado” were published in a single volume titled Tres novelas cortas (Universidad de Oriente, 2007).
{ Eduardo Cobos, Letralia, 22 April 2013 }
4.23.2013
La poesía de Vicente Gerbasi / Carlos J. Soucre
The Poetry of Vicente Gerbasi
The poets of the Viernes Group burst onto the scene with a solution of continuity in the face of Venezuelan poetry that while already exhausted intended to continue. The poets of that group that left the biggest impression, in my view, were Vicente Gerbasi,Luis Fernando Álvarez, Pablo Rojas Guardia and Otto de Sola; and from outside Viernes, the also excellent Juan Sánchez Peláez, as I see it, the only truly surrealist poet that Venezuela has produced. In the Viernes Group, only a few passing traces of the movement created in France by André Breton were noted, while Sánchez Peláez had ties to the Chilean surrealist group Mandrágora. He displays a poetic writing where one notices a flow of oneiric character, although not strictly emanating from automatic writing. He reveals a beautifully arbitrary writing, surprising and magical images, distant and dissimilar realities that approximate each other by means of associations, like Pierre Reverdy wanted, and which reason or logic would refuse to relate together. It is well known that logic is for rational thought. After Viernes, other very valuable poetry groups emerged with Tabla Redonda, the Sardio Group and later on El Techo de la Ballena, who continued to offer us a poetry with which Venezuela could, and can, exhibit itself with dignity before the intellectual world of this America. We don’t present these notes as a critic, since we are by no means one, but rather as a mere being who is sensible or... sensitive. (“The critic is a subject that enters into a matter that does not concern him,” Mallarmé said.) The poets of the Viernes Group were opposed by poets and men of letters from the so-called Generation of 42, slaves to precepts, versifiers, minstrel singers, ludics, makers of sonnets, compositions that had already been exhausted as well in the Spanish language by the great poets of Modernismo. Jokes were also made at the expense of Viernes; we recall that a good poet from the Generation of 18, a very dignified person, said with the grace that distinguished him, and noting the dreamful nature of his friend Vicente Gerbasi, that the latter should be named “Registrar of a cloud,” and someone else, also a poet, wrote a few jovial verses with the following title: “Responsary to the Viernes Group.” This made me think of the following impertinence: This one’s going to face the same thing as Mozart, who also composed a Responsary that later turned out to be for himself.
Well, then. Gerbasi’s poetics is signed by a lyricism toward the landscape and everything from there that surrounds him, surprising, luxurious images, a language not so much constructed as made by the effects of resonances, with an occasionally metaphysical treatment. For example: surrounding death, that mystery that obsesses him along with life in his masterful poem “My Father, the Immigrant” and from the famous verse: “We come from the night and toward the night we go,” enigmas that have been addressed, as we know, by more than one philosopher. Poetry for him was never an entertainment, a spectacle. Or any of those declamatory and pompous things that versifiers offer. He perceived through the senses those correspondences that Baudelaire spoke of, and which could later be glimpsed in Arthur Rimbaud’s sonnet “Vowels,” and this is how in the poetry of Gerbasi we read verses where he shows us the color of sounds or makes us smell the perfume of the stars. But I don’t claim this was an influence on Gerbasi, but rather that it was already in his sensibility, that’s what he extracted from his senses. Gerbasi is the poet that situates himself in front of things or the landscape as a mystic; the tree, the water, the sun, the animal, the stone, the star, good and evil, being and not being, speak constantly to him of the mystery. He makes from the real a quintessence in which a double dimension of things is accomplished, the real sense and another one that is developed within the spirit. Both states are integrated in a synthesis in which one doesn’t know what is real and what is marvelous. Or everything is marvelous. Those who study that double resonance then notice a being who, without being delirious or in a oneiric trance, is easily transported from one world to another, from a normal state to a privileged one and makes of both worlds, as I said, a symbiosis. Finally, Gerbasi’s poetry is a magical object, it’s not there to be explained because poetry is served exclusively to the senses and to one’s sensibility, and it is only through that faculty that it can be assimilated. There the word doesn’t work like it does in the dictionary or in the essayist’s mind, I mean that the poet doesn’t adhere to or doesn’t remain within the realm of what the word means there, he transcends to the inexplicable. This is all I can say regarding the poetry of Vicente Gerbasi.
{ Carlos J. Soucre, Tal Cual, 20 April 2013 }
[Canoabo, Carabobo state, birthplace of Gerbasi]
The poets of the Viernes Group burst onto the scene with a solution of continuity in the face of Venezuelan poetry that while already exhausted intended to continue. The poets of that group that left the biggest impression, in my view, were Vicente Gerbasi,Luis Fernando Álvarez, Pablo Rojas Guardia and Otto de Sola; and from outside Viernes, the also excellent Juan Sánchez Peláez, as I see it, the only truly surrealist poet that Venezuela has produced. In the Viernes Group, only a few passing traces of the movement created in France by André Breton were noted, while Sánchez Peláez had ties to the Chilean surrealist group Mandrágora. He displays a poetic writing where one notices a flow of oneiric character, although not strictly emanating from automatic writing. He reveals a beautifully arbitrary writing, surprising and magical images, distant and dissimilar realities that approximate each other by means of associations, like Pierre Reverdy wanted, and which reason or logic would refuse to relate together. It is well known that logic is for rational thought. After Viernes, other very valuable poetry groups emerged with Tabla Redonda, the Sardio Group and later on El Techo de la Ballena, who continued to offer us a poetry with which Venezuela could, and can, exhibit itself with dignity before the intellectual world of this America. We don’t present these notes as a critic, since we are by no means one, but rather as a mere being who is sensible or... sensitive. (“The critic is a subject that enters into a matter that does not concern him,” Mallarmé said.) The poets of the Viernes Group were opposed by poets and men of letters from the so-called Generation of 42, slaves to precepts, versifiers, minstrel singers, ludics, makers of sonnets, compositions that had already been exhausted as well in the Spanish language by the great poets of Modernismo. Jokes were also made at the expense of Viernes; we recall that a good poet from the Generation of 18, a very dignified person, said with the grace that distinguished him, and noting the dreamful nature of his friend Vicente Gerbasi, that the latter should be named “Registrar of a cloud,” and someone else, also a poet, wrote a few jovial verses with the following title: “Responsary to the Viernes Group.” This made me think of the following impertinence: This one’s going to face the same thing as Mozart, who also composed a Responsary that later turned out to be for himself.
Well, then. Gerbasi’s poetics is signed by a lyricism toward the landscape and everything from there that surrounds him, surprising, luxurious images, a language not so much constructed as made by the effects of resonances, with an occasionally metaphysical treatment. For example: surrounding death, that mystery that obsesses him along with life in his masterful poem “My Father, the Immigrant” and from the famous verse: “We come from the night and toward the night we go,” enigmas that have been addressed, as we know, by more than one philosopher. Poetry for him was never an entertainment, a spectacle. Or any of those declamatory and pompous things that versifiers offer. He perceived through the senses those correspondences that Baudelaire spoke of, and which could later be glimpsed in Arthur Rimbaud’s sonnet “Vowels,” and this is how in the poetry of Gerbasi we read verses where he shows us the color of sounds or makes us smell the perfume of the stars. But I don’t claim this was an influence on Gerbasi, but rather that it was already in his sensibility, that’s what he extracted from his senses. Gerbasi is the poet that situates himself in front of things or the landscape as a mystic; the tree, the water, the sun, the animal, the stone, the star, good and evil, being and not being, speak constantly to him of the mystery. He makes from the real a quintessence in which a double dimension of things is accomplished, the real sense and another one that is developed within the spirit. Both states are integrated in a synthesis in which one doesn’t know what is real and what is marvelous. Or everything is marvelous. Those who study that double resonance then notice a being who, without being delirious or in a oneiric trance, is easily transported from one world to another, from a normal state to a privileged one and makes of both worlds, as I said, a symbiosis. Finally, Gerbasi’s poetry is a magical object, it’s not there to be explained because poetry is served exclusively to the senses and to one’s sensibility, and it is only through that faculty that it can be assimilated. There the word doesn’t work like it does in the dictionary or in the essayist’s mind, I mean that the poet doesn’t adhere to or doesn’t remain within the realm of what the word means there, he transcends to the inexplicable. This is all I can say regarding the poetry of Vicente Gerbasi.
{ Carlos J. Soucre, Tal Cual, 20 April 2013 }
4.20.2013
La campaña / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Campaign
I was invited to the exequies of a hunting dog. The nomadic family broke out in agonized laments and described themselves as threatened by penury after the death of that provident server. The women imposed on the men the mission of putting together a brigade and going out in demand of the accused wolves.
We went into the campaign at the break of the next day. We lacked gunpowder and carried measured canes. The sun appeared very quickly over the ground of snow and turned it into a glassy surface. The snow was thin and the horses would break through it easily to devour the hidden grass. Hunger was devastating the country.
We ran into the squadron of wild beasts when we rounded the curve of a steep mountain. Some of our riders were dangerously bitten in the tough fight and said they had been infected with rabies. Eight or ten wolves were knocked down and with their spines broken. I was satisfied by capturing a baby cub with red hair.
We returned to the village after attaining victory and proceeded to curing the wounded by means of cautery. All of them showed signs of melancholia, which is the beginning of the crisis of rabies.
The women didn’t expect to save the infected ones any other way than by sacrificing my captive as a symbol of their faith, maintained for innumerable generations, since the days of Attila. They adored a sword nailed into the ground, image of strength. They discreetly envied my fortune and once again demonstrated toward me the uncertainty of their dealings. They were capable of advising my loss in the case of ending up better off in a second excursion.
The wounded recuperated thanks to the sacrifice of my baby cub. They grew content when they saw the signs of my sadness and they let me see the necessity and opportunity to continue my journey. They had pretended, according to my conjecture, to have the symptoms of rabies.
I abandoned the company of those disloyal hunters and I stepped out with my horse into the uniform country, with the help of a compass.
A woman wounded me with a stone when I was separating my horse from looking at itself in the mirror of a puddle.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I was invited to the exequies of a hunting dog. The nomadic family broke out in agonized laments and described themselves as threatened by penury after the death of that provident server. The women imposed on the men the mission of putting together a brigade and going out in demand of the accused wolves.
We went into the campaign at the break of the next day. We lacked gunpowder and carried measured canes. The sun appeared very quickly over the ground of snow and turned it into a glassy surface. The snow was thin and the horses would break through it easily to devour the hidden grass. Hunger was devastating the country.
We ran into the squadron of wild beasts when we rounded the curve of a steep mountain. Some of our riders were dangerously bitten in the tough fight and said they had been infected with rabies. Eight or ten wolves were knocked down and with their spines broken. I was satisfied by capturing a baby cub with red hair.
We returned to the village after attaining victory and proceeded to curing the wounded by means of cautery. All of them showed signs of melancholia, which is the beginning of the crisis of rabies.
The women didn’t expect to save the infected ones any other way than by sacrificing my captive as a symbol of their faith, maintained for innumerable generations, since the days of Attila. They adored a sword nailed into the ground, image of strength. They discreetly envied my fortune and once again demonstrated toward me the uncertainty of their dealings. They were capable of advising my loss in the case of ending up better off in a second excursion.
The wounded recuperated thanks to the sacrifice of my baby cub. They grew content when they saw the signs of my sadness and they let me see the necessity and opportunity to continue my journey. They had pretended, according to my conjecture, to have the symptoms of rabies.
I abandoned the company of those disloyal hunters and I stepped out with my horse into the uniform country, with the help of a compass.
A woman wounded me with a stone when I was separating my horse from looking at itself in the mirror of a puddle.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
4.12.2013
El chavismo y la memoria subversiva de Jesús / Armando Rojas Guardia
Chavismo and the Subversive Memory of Jesus
In light of the efforts to transform Chavismo into a new type of religion, utilizing and instrumentalizing Christian elements and content, it is a moral imperative for me to distinguish this type of unusual religious expression from genuine Christianity, at least in the manner that many men and women in our country and our time understand it and attempt to live it.
1.
The first thing I need to say is that, as a radio listener and TV-watcher, as a reader of newspapers and an Internet user, for weeks I’ve been feeling a deep nostalgia for modernity and for the critical spirit of Enlightenment thought. The excess of religion, of ritual manifestations, of sacred ceremonies and devotedly homiletic speeches that has abounded in Venezuelan public life for months now turns out to be incompatible with one of the most indispensable conquests of the modern world: the secular State, the total laicism of public affairs. That laicism, which has been an essential characteristic of our life as a republic since 1830 and which therefore has decisively permeated our entire historical character as a nation, is being violently assaulted to a degree none of us could have expected by an avalanche of religious symbology mixed in an indisoluble manner with excrescences of magical thinking. I think that, with the exception of a few Islamic theocracies, this isn’t happening in any other country in the world. The symbolic sobriety and austerity that the modern secularization of public affairs imposes when it comes to approaching the religious fact, has come to be exactly that in Venezuela: a nostalgia.
But the fact is the ethical proposal of Jesus of Nazareth is itself incompatible with religion. An historically indisputable phrase by Christ is: “But go and learn what this means: I desire compassion, and not sacrifice” (Mt 9,13-12,7). There, in that phrase, a devastating critique of religion (sacrifice, worship) is suggested in order to privilege, as an anthropological alternative, solidarity, compassion and human fraternity. The religious project finds its reason for being in “the sacred” (a space, a time, a few utensils, a few rites, a few norms), and in “the sacred” as a counterpoint to “the profane,” to the lay and secular. On the other hand, Jesus’s project operates a radical displacement: the way to access God is not through the sacred, but rather through the profane aspect of our relation with fellow man, the ethical relation of service for others to the point of devotion and forgetting oneself. Christ not only showed us, but he incarnated a way —another one—, unprecedented, of living human religiosity. We know of his critical distancing from the two religious instances that mediated, for the men and women of his time and country, the relation to God: the Temple and the Law. Regarding the first, the gospels never mention that Jesus went to the Temple to pray or to participate in any liturgical ceremony. His conduct was never ritualistic: he didn’t find the Father in the sacred space of the Temple nor in the sacred time of religious worship. He went to the Temple because that’s where people gathered and it was to them he directed his message. Jesus Christ spoke with the Father and of the Father in profane, secular time and spaces of life itself, the daily life of the city and countryside. The only violent action Jesus realized was the one he performed in the Temple (Mk 11,15-19; Mt 21,12-17; Lc 19,45-48; Jn 2,13-22) and his contemporaries judged that action as an “attack” against the Temple itself and everything it represented in the Israelite life of his time. In the Gospel of John (4,20-24) we’re told, as a teaching emanated from Christ himself, that neither sacred space, nor the religious ceremonies that are celebrated within it, constitute the adequate place to find God. He is found when one invokes Him “in spirit and in truth” throughout the concrete secularity of existence. And, with regards to Jesus’s conflict with the Law, he gave no importance to the norms of ritual purity (Mk 7,1-17), to prohibitions about food (Mk 7,18-23), to what is stipulated about fasting (Mk 2,18-22), to the social rejection, also legislated, that fell upon public sinners, who were his friends and shared the table with him (Mk 2,15-17), and upon prostitutes (Mt 21,4-31s); he also dispensed with norms regarding the treatment of and cohabitation with women, a group of whom accompanied him permanently (Lc. 8,1-3), some of them having a bad reputation (Lc 8,2). Finally, Christ’s axiom regarding the Law is the following: man is not made for the law but rather the law is made for man (Mk 2,27).
So, this national waterfall of rituals and political speeches that intend to employ Christian symbolism understood in a “religious” manner, not only attempts against the sane laicism of our life as a republic, that we should do everything possible for it to be the most modern (or postmodern) possible, it’s one of the pivots of what Christianity projects for us as anthropology.
2.
I think nothing and no one is less Christian than the rule of a caudillo and a caudillo. Both probably function in Venezuela and in countries neighboring ours as a funest Hispano-Arab inheritance, although other latitudes have known and also know the political dominance of a supposedly providencial man who presents himself as the galvanizer of a collective mobilization. There are very serious exegetes and theologians who affirm that this was the core of one of the great temptations of Jesus; this seems to be the meaning of one of the tests —the third and decisive one— that he faced in the desert during the preamble of his public activity (Mk 1,12s; Mt 4,8-10; Lc 4,1-13): these texts regarding the temptations constitute a tale, not a historical one, but rather a redactional and symbolic one, that wants to illustrate for us what stalked as the possibility of Jesus’s own consciousness going astray throughout his life. I’m speaking of the temptation of power. But with this crucial characteristic: the temptation of power in order to accomplish good deeds. It’s well-known that Israel awaited a political messiah, a warrior who was going to completely do away with the opprobrium and secular oppression of the country and its culture. The four canonical gospels explicitly indicate to us that all of Jesus’s close disciples thought, and they continued to believe it until the very moment of the passion, that Christ incarnated that political messianism, based on power and on the human triumph. After the miracle of the multiplication of bread (Mt 14,13-23; Mk 6,30-46; Jn 6,1-15), the enthusiastic multitude thought that Jesus was the awaited political messiah (Jn 6,4) and, in consequence, they wanted to proclaim him king. Jesus then retires “once again to the mountain, alone” (Jn 6,15). The disciples who identified with the popular enthusiasm didn’t want to lose the occasion for Christ to be proclaimed a political king. This is why both Matthew and Mark point out that Jesus had to “force them” (anagkáso) to get on the boat to leave that place (Mt 14,22; Mk 6,45).
That was the temptation I was referring to: the temptation of power. And it’s a temptation that, as I’ve said, can be clothed in a false consciousness: it is power, yes, but in order to transform it into a factor that multiplies good. And Jesus rejects that specific temptation from an impregnable conviction that he never ceased to explain to his closes followers, those he thought were particularly apt to understand it: the path to power and privilege leads one to keep a “reasonable” coexistence with the agents and factors that organize in this world the suffering and oppression of mankind. Society is not transformed from above (from power and fame) but rather from below (from the unarmed solidarity with those crucified throughout history) (Cf. Mt 16,22; Mk 8,33). From this conviction emerges an implacable denunciation of political power: “You know (...) that those who hold sway as rulers dominate nations as though they were their owners and the powerful impose their authority. This will not be the case amongst you, but rather if any of you want to grow you should become a servant to others” (Mk 10,42-43). And what also emerges is an enormous freedom facing him, facing power: when Jesus is told that Herod —who was the king of Galilee and thus the political chief of the region of Israel to which Jesus belonged— wanted to kill him (Lc 13,31) he tells them: “Go and tell that fox (...) that there is no room for a prophet to die outside Jerusalem” (Lc 13,32). In the Jewish culture of that time the “fox” was considered the animal that didn’t represent anything. Thus, it was as though he were saying: “Go and tell nobody...” And this was the king!
I’m not going to waste my possible reader’s time abounding the obvious: just as Jesus was a layman, not a priest or a professional theologian (as the so-called “lettered men” and scribes were) he didn’t want to be a caudillo. Despite his ascendance among the most impoverished masses of Israel he didn’t want to instrumentalize them with a political objective because for him God was not mediated by power, not any type of power, only by love (that prostituted but essential word). We all know what finally happened: he was assassinated as a “blasphemer” and “political criminal” by the civilian, military and religious authorities of his time. The masses he didn’t want to instrumentalize left him on his own. Completely alone, this man of unpronounceable innocence, tortured and executed as though he were a criminal and a dangerous revolutionary by institutional power, by the intellectual orthodoxy and their henchmen, had already warned his followers one day —those back then and those today—: “See how I’m sending you out as sheep among wolves: therefore be as cautious as snakes and as innocent as doves. But be careful with people, because they will take you to court, they will whip you in the synagogue and they will lead you in front of governors and kings for my cause; thus they will give testimony...” (Mt 10,16-18). Jesus did not live for the cross; when the dynamics of reality imposed it on him, he accepted it and assumed it, transforming it into an option of love, that is, an affirmation of life. This execution, this assassination carried out for religious and political reasons, that infamously crowned a life consumed by disinterested service to others, was left forever transformed into a forceful requisition, in the deepest and most intimate denunciation of any type of power, no matter how much it might try to be canonized.
From the Gospel we Christians inherit a radical suspicion regarding the pretensions of leadership, of important positions, of the supposedly majestic, dazzling aura that seems to surround political and social triumph. If anyone had any doubts whether president Chávez was a caudillo of the most rancid and sad Latin American lineage, observe what they want to do with his passage through history: Chávez ascending into the sky, Chávez enthroned in the altar of a chapel in the 23 de Enero zone of Caracas (called the “Chapel of San Hugo Chávez”), Chávez multiplied in stamps sold at the entrance of churches and plaster busts that, it’s been said, people seek out so they can pray to him in the intimacy of their home, Chávez the second Simón Bolívar, Chávez the new liberator, Chávez the Redeemer, Chávez the “Christ of the poor.” All this would be amusing if it weren’t tragic. Because it’s a matter of an inextricable mixture of magical credulousness and naiveté for many with a deification, a mythologizing, a sacralization orchestrated by those in power. Biblically speaking, it is simply said, an idolatry. From the Christian point of view, it doesn’t make sense. We Christians believe that there has only been, only is and only will be a single messiah. And a crucified messiah. And crucified means that the “utopian” (in the sense Ernst Bloch uses) radical brotherhood of human relations, which is the central tenet of Christianity, can only be realized from the “utopia” of the cross: the total failure implied by the last scream of Jesus’s agony, abandoned by one and all, and which expresses God’s solidarity with history’s humiliated and offended, not from the majesty of power that uses the poor as instruments in order to dominate them —turning them into objects of political marketing— but rather from a solidarity that is defenseless, forsaken and left out in the open air alongside them. The failure of the cross is a counterweight to the heroic-promethean image that we create of the messiah. It doesn’t display any epic traits. The death of Jesus was not that of Socrates, parsimoniously drinking hemlock, accompanied by disciples and friends. His was wrapped in signs of a profound fright: an authentic sense of being horrified by suffering, torture, solitude and death itself which inevitably also seemed to him like the cause and mission of his life.
That identification of Chávez and Christ, being an idolatry and not making sense, was propitiated in more than one aspect by Chávez himself. He never tired of proclaiming that he obeyed the “first and greatest socialist in history.” In vain people responded that this affirmation contained an unforgivable anachronism: Jesus was not a socialist just like he wasn’t an aviator: socialism implies a theory of political, social and economic organization dating from the 19th century, that is, a considerable temporal distance from Christ’s life. It was useless. Until the end of his existence Chávez continued to believe and proclaim this nonsense. As it’s also nonsense, but this time it’s an absurdity that is dangerous because of its political consequences, to affirm —as is being done now by the supposed emulator of the deceased president— that “socialism is the kingdom of God on earth.” Regarding this statement, the following precisions turns out to be necessary: that “utopian” dream (in the worst sense, the etymological one, of the word: “there is no such place”) is found in its own way in Plato’s Republic, in the visionaries of the Fifth Monarchy, in the Medieval apocalyptics, in the anabaptists, in the Puritan theocrats, in the religious sectors of the anarchist movement: all those who have not believed and don’t believe —I’m citing George Steiner almost from memory— in the constitutive fallibility of man, in the permanent imperfection of the mechanisms of power, in the presence of inhumanity and evil within man’s existential condition and his historical achievements. They have believed and believe that the “civitas Dei” should be built now on earth and that a certain fanatical rigor at the service of the revolutionary ideal is indispensable: from there to sustaining that the ends justify the means and that some dose of political terror becomes necessary to obtain the edenic objective of the suppression of all oppression, there’s no more than a step or two.
The Kingdom of God, considered biblically, is a reality whose plenitude is meta and transhistorical, when God, as Paul of Tarsus says,“is in all things.” It is the responsibility of us human beings to progressively and always partially or in an unfinished manner draw closer to that plenitude, organizing the dynamics of history in such a manner that it reach closer to it. Someone might not like the appellative Kingdom of God. Many years ago a friend told me that we Christians should speak, not of the Kingdom but of the Republic of God. To make things clear, I invite the reader to remember that the first poetry collection by Ramón Palomares is titled El reino [The Kingdom]. And the Kingdom of God is a mythopoetic designation to allude to a goal —the sovereignty of God as a fraternal house of human abandonment, a definitive house that is he himself made presence among us— and that indeed we should make an effort to begin constructing here and now, always and at every moment under the threat of those powers that, according to the Gospel of Lucas (22,25), “take away liberty and make themselves be called benefactors” and which are money and the political and religious powers. From the future that goal acts as a constant critical instance that interpolates and questions our always limited and partial achievements, impeding the history and society we build from not remaining open, convening us for the ontological appointment to which we have been called at birth: “It will dry the tears from your eyes. There will no longer be death nor shame nor weeping nor pain. All the ancient things have passed” (Ap 21,4).
To pretend that this ontological convocation will be realized by socialism constitutes, to say the least, a senseless act: “The Kingdom of God should be understood as the Kingdom of Man: this is the theology of totalitarian utopias.” (George Steiner)
Armando Rojas Guardia Venezuelan poet, critic and essayist who played a fundamental role in the foundation of the literary group Tráfico, and who has published numerous collections of poetry and essays, among them Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979), Yo que supe de la vieja herida (1985), Poemas de Quebrada de la Virgen (1985), Hacia la noche viva (1989), "La nada vigilante" (1994) and El esplendor y la espera (2000).
Translator’s note: Armando Rojas Guardia lived at the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s spiritual community Solentiname in Nicaragua during the 1970s.
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Prodavinci, 2 April 2013 }
In light of the efforts to transform Chavismo into a new type of religion, utilizing and instrumentalizing Christian elements and content, it is a moral imperative for me to distinguish this type of unusual religious expression from genuine Christianity, at least in the manner that many men and women in our country and our time understand it and attempt to live it.
1.
The first thing I need to say is that, as a radio listener and TV-watcher, as a reader of newspapers and an Internet user, for weeks I’ve been feeling a deep nostalgia for modernity and for the critical spirit of Enlightenment thought. The excess of religion, of ritual manifestations, of sacred ceremonies and devotedly homiletic speeches that has abounded in Venezuelan public life for months now turns out to be incompatible with one of the most indispensable conquests of the modern world: the secular State, the total laicism of public affairs. That laicism, which has been an essential characteristic of our life as a republic since 1830 and which therefore has decisively permeated our entire historical character as a nation, is being violently assaulted to a degree none of us could have expected by an avalanche of religious symbology mixed in an indisoluble manner with excrescences of magical thinking. I think that, with the exception of a few Islamic theocracies, this isn’t happening in any other country in the world. The symbolic sobriety and austerity that the modern secularization of public affairs imposes when it comes to approaching the religious fact, has come to be exactly that in Venezuela: a nostalgia.
But the fact is the ethical proposal of Jesus of Nazareth is itself incompatible with religion. An historically indisputable phrase by Christ is: “But go and learn what this means: I desire compassion, and not sacrifice” (Mt 9,13-12,7). There, in that phrase, a devastating critique of religion (sacrifice, worship) is suggested in order to privilege, as an anthropological alternative, solidarity, compassion and human fraternity. The religious project finds its reason for being in “the sacred” (a space, a time, a few utensils, a few rites, a few norms), and in “the sacred” as a counterpoint to “the profane,” to the lay and secular. On the other hand, Jesus’s project operates a radical displacement: the way to access God is not through the sacred, but rather through the profane aspect of our relation with fellow man, the ethical relation of service for others to the point of devotion and forgetting oneself. Christ not only showed us, but he incarnated a way —another one—, unprecedented, of living human religiosity. We know of his critical distancing from the two religious instances that mediated, for the men and women of his time and country, the relation to God: the Temple and the Law. Regarding the first, the gospels never mention that Jesus went to the Temple to pray or to participate in any liturgical ceremony. His conduct was never ritualistic: he didn’t find the Father in the sacred space of the Temple nor in the sacred time of religious worship. He went to the Temple because that’s where people gathered and it was to them he directed his message. Jesus Christ spoke with the Father and of the Father in profane, secular time and spaces of life itself, the daily life of the city and countryside. The only violent action Jesus realized was the one he performed in the Temple (Mk 11,15-19; Mt 21,12-17; Lc 19,45-48; Jn 2,13-22) and his contemporaries judged that action as an “attack” against the Temple itself and everything it represented in the Israelite life of his time. In the Gospel of John (4,20-24) we’re told, as a teaching emanated from Christ himself, that neither sacred space, nor the religious ceremonies that are celebrated within it, constitute the adequate place to find God. He is found when one invokes Him “in spirit and in truth” throughout the concrete secularity of existence. And, with regards to Jesus’s conflict with the Law, he gave no importance to the norms of ritual purity (Mk 7,1-17), to prohibitions about food (Mk 7,18-23), to what is stipulated about fasting (Mk 2,18-22), to the social rejection, also legislated, that fell upon public sinners, who were his friends and shared the table with him (Mk 2,15-17), and upon prostitutes (Mt 21,4-31s); he also dispensed with norms regarding the treatment of and cohabitation with women, a group of whom accompanied him permanently (Lc. 8,1-3), some of them having a bad reputation (Lc 8,2). Finally, Christ’s axiom regarding the Law is the following: man is not made for the law but rather the law is made for man (Mk 2,27).
So, this national waterfall of rituals and political speeches that intend to employ Christian symbolism understood in a “religious” manner, not only attempts against the sane laicism of our life as a republic, that we should do everything possible for it to be the most modern (or postmodern) possible, it’s one of the pivots of what Christianity projects for us as anthropology.
2.
I think nothing and no one is less Christian than the rule of a caudillo and a caudillo. Both probably function in Venezuela and in countries neighboring ours as a funest Hispano-Arab inheritance, although other latitudes have known and also know the political dominance of a supposedly providencial man who presents himself as the galvanizer of a collective mobilization. There are very serious exegetes and theologians who affirm that this was the core of one of the great temptations of Jesus; this seems to be the meaning of one of the tests —the third and decisive one— that he faced in the desert during the preamble of his public activity (Mk 1,12s; Mt 4,8-10; Lc 4,1-13): these texts regarding the temptations constitute a tale, not a historical one, but rather a redactional and symbolic one, that wants to illustrate for us what stalked as the possibility of Jesus’s own consciousness going astray throughout his life. I’m speaking of the temptation of power. But with this crucial characteristic: the temptation of power in order to accomplish good deeds. It’s well-known that Israel awaited a political messiah, a warrior who was going to completely do away with the opprobrium and secular oppression of the country and its culture. The four canonical gospels explicitly indicate to us that all of Jesus’s close disciples thought, and they continued to believe it until the very moment of the passion, that Christ incarnated that political messianism, based on power and on the human triumph. After the miracle of the multiplication of bread (Mt 14,13-23; Mk 6,30-46; Jn 6,1-15), the enthusiastic multitude thought that Jesus was the awaited political messiah (Jn 6,4) and, in consequence, they wanted to proclaim him king. Jesus then retires “once again to the mountain, alone” (Jn 6,15). The disciples who identified with the popular enthusiasm didn’t want to lose the occasion for Christ to be proclaimed a political king. This is why both Matthew and Mark point out that Jesus had to “force them” (anagkáso) to get on the boat to leave that place (Mt 14,22; Mk 6,45).
That was the temptation I was referring to: the temptation of power. And it’s a temptation that, as I’ve said, can be clothed in a false consciousness: it is power, yes, but in order to transform it into a factor that multiplies good. And Jesus rejects that specific temptation from an impregnable conviction that he never ceased to explain to his closes followers, those he thought were particularly apt to understand it: the path to power and privilege leads one to keep a “reasonable” coexistence with the agents and factors that organize in this world the suffering and oppression of mankind. Society is not transformed from above (from power and fame) but rather from below (from the unarmed solidarity with those crucified throughout history) (Cf. Mt 16,22; Mk 8,33). From this conviction emerges an implacable denunciation of political power: “You know (...) that those who hold sway as rulers dominate nations as though they were their owners and the powerful impose their authority. This will not be the case amongst you, but rather if any of you want to grow you should become a servant to others” (Mk 10,42-43). And what also emerges is an enormous freedom facing him, facing power: when Jesus is told that Herod —who was the king of Galilee and thus the political chief of the region of Israel to which Jesus belonged— wanted to kill him (Lc 13,31) he tells them: “Go and tell that fox (...) that there is no room for a prophet to die outside Jerusalem” (Lc 13,32). In the Jewish culture of that time the “fox” was considered the animal that didn’t represent anything. Thus, it was as though he were saying: “Go and tell nobody...” And this was the king!
I’m not going to waste my possible reader’s time abounding the obvious: just as Jesus was a layman, not a priest or a professional theologian (as the so-called “lettered men” and scribes were) he didn’t want to be a caudillo. Despite his ascendance among the most impoverished masses of Israel he didn’t want to instrumentalize them with a political objective because for him God was not mediated by power, not any type of power, only by love (that prostituted but essential word). We all know what finally happened: he was assassinated as a “blasphemer” and “political criminal” by the civilian, military and religious authorities of his time. The masses he didn’t want to instrumentalize left him on his own. Completely alone, this man of unpronounceable innocence, tortured and executed as though he were a criminal and a dangerous revolutionary by institutional power, by the intellectual orthodoxy and their henchmen, had already warned his followers one day —those back then and those today—: “See how I’m sending you out as sheep among wolves: therefore be as cautious as snakes and as innocent as doves. But be careful with people, because they will take you to court, they will whip you in the synagogue and they will lead you in front of governors and kings for my cause; thus they will give testimony...” (Mt 10,16-18). Jesus did not live for the cross; when the dynamics of reality imposed it on him, he accepted it and assumed it, transforming it into an option of love, that is, an affirmation of life. This execution, this assassination carried out for religious and political reasons, that infamously crowned a life consumed by disinterested service to others, was left forever transformed into a forceful requisition, in the deepest and most intimate denunciation of any type of power, no matter how much it might try to be canonized.
From the Gospel we Christians inherit a radical suspicion regarding the pretensions of leadership, of important positions, of the supposedly majestic, dazzling aura that seems to surround political and social triumph. If anyone had any doubts whether president Chávez was a caudillo of the most rancid and sad Latin American lineage, observe what they want to do with his passage through history: Chávez ascending into the sky, Chávez enthroned in the altar of a chapel in the 23 de Enero zone of Caracas (called the “Chapel of San Hugo Chávez”), Chávez multiplied in stamps sold at the entrance of churches and plaster busts that, it’s been said, people seek out so they can pray to him in the intimacy of their home, Chávez the second Simón Bolívar, Chávez the new liberator, Chávez the Redeemer, Chávez the “Christ of the poor.” All this would be amusing if it weren’t tragic. Because it’s a matter of an inextricable mixture of magical credulousness and naiveté for many with a deification, a mythologizing, a sacralization orchestrated by those in power. Biblically speaking, it is simply said, an idolatry. From the Christian point of view, it doesn’t make sense. We Christians believe that there has only been, only is and only will be a single messiah. And a crucified messiah. And crucified means that the “utopian” (in the sense Ernst Bloch uses) radical brotherhood of human relations, which is the central tenet of Christianity, can only be realized from the “utopia” of the cross: the total failure implied by the last scream of Jesus’s agony, abandoned by one and all, and which expresses God’s solidarity with history’s humiliated and offended, not from the majesty of power that uses the poor as instruments in order to dominate them —turning them into objects of political marketing— but rather from a solidarity that is defenseless, forsaken and left out in the open air alongside them. The failure of the cross is a counterweight to the heroic-promethean image that we create of the messiah. It doesn’t display any epic traits. The death of Jesus was not that of Socrates, parsimoniously drinking hemlock, accompanied by disciples and friends. His was wrapped in signs of a profound fright: an authentic sense of being horrified by suffering, torture, solitude and death itself which inevitably also seemed to him like the cause and mission of his life.
That identification of Chávez and Christ, being an idolatry and not making sense, was propitiated in more than one aspect by Chávez himself. He never tired of proclaiming that he obeyed the “first and greatest socialist in history.” In vain people responded that this affirmation contained an unforgivable anachronism: Jesus was not a socialist just like he wasn’t an aviator: socialism implies a theory of political, social and economic organization dating from the 19th century, that is, a considerable temporal distance from Christ’s life. It was useless. Until the end of his existence Chávez continued to believe and proclaim this nonsense. As it’s also nonsense, but this time it’s an absurdity that is dangerous because of its political consequences, to affirm —as is being done now by the supposed emulator of the deceased president— that “socialism is the kingdom of God on earth.” Regarding this statement, the following precisions turns out to be necessary: that “utopian” dream (in the worst sense, the etymological one, of the word: “there is no such place”) is found in its own way in Plato’s Republic, in the visionaries of the Fifth Monarchy, in the Medieval apocalyptics, in the anabaptists, in the Puritan theocrats, in the religious sectors of the anarchist movement: all those who have not believed and don’t believe —I’m citing George Steiner almost from memory— in the constitutive fallibility of man, in the permanent imperfection of the mechanisms of power, in the presence of inhumanity and evil within man’s existential condition and his historical achievements. They have believed and believe that the “civitas Dei” should be built now on earth and that a certain fanatical rigor at the service of the revolutionary ideal is indispensable: from there to sustaining that the ends justify the means and that some dose of political terror becomes necessary to obtain the edenic objective of the suppression of all oppression, there’s no more than a step or two.
The Kingdom of God, considered biblically, is a reality whose plenitude is meta and transhistorical, when God, as Paul of Tarsus says,“is in all things.” It is the responsibility of us human beings to progressively and always partially or in an unfinished manner draw closer to that plenitude, organizing the dynamics of history in such a manner that it reach closer to it. Someone might not like the appellative Kingdom of God. Many years ago a friend told me that we Christians should speak, not of the Kingdom but of the Republic of God. To make things clear, I invite the reader to remember that the first poetry collection by Ramón Palomares is titled El reino [The Kingdom]. And the Kingdom of God is a mythopoetic designation to allude to a goal —the sovereignty of God as a fraternal house of human abandonment, a definitive house that is he himself made presence among us— and that indeed we should make an effort to begin constructing here and now, always and at every moment under the threat of those powers that, according to the Gospel of Lucas (22,25), “take away liberty and make themselves be called benefactors” and which are money and the political and religious powers. From the future that goal acts as a constant critical instance that interpolates and questions our always limited and partial achievements, impeding the history and society we build from not remaining open, convening us for the ontological appointment to which we have been called at birth: “It will dry the tears from your eyes. There will no longer be death nor shame nor weeping nor pain. All the ancient things have passed” (Ap 21,4).
To pretend that this ontological convocation will be realized by socialism constitutes, to say the least, a senseless act: “The Kingdom of God should be understood as the Kingdom of Man: this is the theology of totalitarian utopias.” (George Steiner)
Armando Rojas Guardia Venezuelan poet, critic and essayist who played a fundamental role in the foundation of the literary group Tráfico, and who has published numerous collections of poetry and essays, among them Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979), Yo que supe de la vieja herida (1985), Poemas de Quebrada de la Virgen (1985), Hacia la noche viva (1989), "La nada vigilante" (1994) and El esplendor y la espera (2000).
Translator’s note: Armando Rojas Guardia lived at the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s spiritual community Solentiname in Nicaragua during the 1970s.
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Prodavinci, 2 April 2013 }
4.08.2013
Fondo negro / Armando Rojas Guardia
Black Background
Clean and cold, the December night
is the perfect image of my soul:
Caracas burns outside, indifferent,
while I am a hole
s o v e r y l i g h t
where the minutes fall floating.
I think of nothing now. And want nothing.
No obligation. No agenda.
Barely this weightless quiet
to fill with music (Satie, perhaps)
and slow cigarettes and silence
and the black dream of peace, empty.
Hacia la noche viva (1989)
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }
Clean and cold, the December night
is the perfect image of my soul:
Caracas burns outside, indifferent,
while I am a hole
s o v e r y l i g h t
where the minutes fall floating.
I think of nothing now. And want nothing.
No obligation. No agenda.
Barely this weightless quiet
to fill with music (Satie, perhaps)
and slow cigarettes and silence
and the black dream of peace, empty.
Hacia la noche viva (1989)
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }
4.01.2013
Laude / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Laude
Venezuela owes the principal and most enduring of its credit to the bravery of those soldiers who surged impassioned and indocile in the 19th century. The healthy force of their nature didn’t degrade itself with timid modesty nor did it cede an inch to the hypocritical morality of societies in repose. Their north was never the renown of being shy and honorable, a lure for the gullible. They were all naive and violent men, of disproportionate and free lives.
How they invoke the malice of the colorless and the vengeance of the wrinkled and dyspepsic erudite a poor philosophy, in which the divining enthusiasm of poets does not provide its impulse, breaks the silence of its sepulcher and disturbs the sleep of its ashes.
Miserly criticism finds its most frequent occasion in the unruly and arrogant humor of the heroes. One does not discover the profound strength of lineage, the individual self-sufficiency, the confident gesture that made the Spanish grandfather the world’s consternation and nightmare.
Their glory consists in not giving up the temerarious challenge to the metropolis, and when we recognize such a merit, that of their leader continues to remain elevated and intact. Justice grows with the distribution of the prize, and there is dishonesty in saying Bolívar’s fame coincides with the reduction of his lieutenants.
From this prudish and bashful opinion is born docility as a reason for the credit of honors, the superficial examination of discord, the repeated sentence against the turbulent men who bloody and muddle the course of those years. It forgets that many entered into the matter in the same way; that they were separated by the most contrasted interest; that the events would have brought along with the test the aptitudes of the scale of hierarchy; that obstinate moods, finally submitted, credit the genius of Bolívar; that at the scene of mourning what was most off-putting, more than the amorous pastor, was the flock of peaceful beasts.
For the tame the medal of good conduct; for our heroes the elevated monument and perennial statue. They have imposed upon the respect of strangers the series of our annals with an effort that belongs to an epic, with extraordinary acts that would have been taken up, to perpetuate them, by the popular muse of the romancero. Occasionally they didn’t follow Bolívar’s reasons because of the fatality that isolates genius in his century. He pulls them along finally, and with such a dignified entourage, as though brave condors, presides half the world from the highest and most snowy peak of the Andes.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Venezuela owes the principal and most enduring of its credit to the bravery of those soldiers who surged impassioned and indocile in the 19th century. The healthy force of their nature didn’t degrade itself with timid modesty nor did it cede an inch to the hypocritical morality of societies in repose. Their north was never the renown of being shy and honorable, a lure for the gullible. They were all naive and violent men, of disproportionate and free lives.
How they invoke the malice of the colorless and the vengeance of the wrinkled and dyspepsic erudite a poor philosophy, in which the divining enthusiasm of poets does not provide its impulse, breaks the silence of its sepulcher and disturbs the sleep of its ashes.
Miserly criticism finds its most frequent occasion in the unruly and arrogant humor of the heroes. One does not discover the profound strength of lineage, the individual self-sufficiency, the confident gesture that made the Spanish grandfather the world’s consternation and nightmare.
Their glory consists in not giving up the temerarious challenge to the metropolis, and when we recognize such a merit, that of their leader continues to remain elevated and intact. Justice grows with the distribution of the prize, and there is dishonesty in saying Bolívar’s fame coincides with the reduction of his lieutenants.
From this prudish and bashful opinion is born docility as a reason for the credit of honors, the superficial examination of discord, the repeated sentence against the turbulent men who bloody and muddle the course of those years. It forgets that many entered into the matter in the same way; that they were separated by the most contrasted interest; that the events would have brought along with the test the aptitudes of the scale of hierarchy; that obstinate moods, finally submitted, credit the genius of Bolívar; that at the scene of mourning what was most off-putting, more than the amorous pastor, was the flock of peaceful beasts.
For the tame the medal of good conduct; for our heroes the elevated monument and perennial statue. They have imposed upon the respect of strangers the series of our annals with an effort that belongs to an epic, with extraordinary acts that would have been taken up, to perpetuate them, by the popular muse of the romancero. Occasionally they didn’t follow Bolívar’s reasons because of the fatality that isolates genius in his century. He pulls them along finally, and with such a dignified entourage, as though brave condors, presides half the world from the highest and most snowy peak of the Andes.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.30.2013
Parodia / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Parody
The knight has suddenly been enchanted by a maid, getting lost at the start of his career. He has startled his own mother’s thought, friend and lady to the favored young girl.
The knight goes on the road to the court, where a venerable king invites him.
The ladies appear to critique the young man’s naiveté and confess the gentleness of his figure, gathered in happy and evil groups. They flee frightened after witnessing the misfortune of a palace worker repressed with blows from a belt by the novice.
The maid proposes the legend of her man. She obtains her friend and lady’s permission, and pretends to be dead within view of the service people, criers of the event.
He secretly adopts the clothes and manner of a young man who hopes to run around the world and travel to the kingdom’s capital, dealing hand to hand with lost ones and killers and pretending to love maidens.
She insinuates herself with her lover and fascinates him with the signs and resources of a fertile imagination, dissuading him from his obstinate character and ascending him to consort of a principal woman.
The knight solicits in vain the minister of his happiness at the wedding party.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The knight has suddenly been enchanted by a maid, getting lost at the start of his career. He has startled his own mother’s thought, friend and lady to the favored young girl.
The knight goes on the road to the court, where a venerable king invites him.
The ladies appear to critique the young man’s naiveté and confess the gentleness of his figure, gathered in happy and evil groups. They flee frightened after witnessing the misfortune of a palace worker repressed with blows from a belt by the novice.
The maid proposes the legend of her man. She obtains her friend and lady’s permission, and pretends to be dead within view of the service people, criers of the event.
He secretly adopts the clothes and manner of a young man who hopes to run around the world and travel to the kingdom’s capital, dealing hand to hand with lost ones and killers and pretending to love maidens.
She insinuates herself with her lover and fascinates him with the signs and resources of a fertile imagination, dissuading him from his obstinate character and ascending him to consort of a principal woman.
The knight solicits in vain the minister of his happiness at the wedding party.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.28.2013
La caza / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Hunt
The Duchess keeps, while riding a horse, a modest and gentle behavior. She reproaches the goshawk on the fist and sends it off in search of an indistinct bird.
The goshawk draws an uncertain flight and is correct about the path.
The beauty of the lady distracts me from following the course of the hunt. She is fully resplendent in the uniform field.
I pick up from the floor and discreetly put away a cordovan sole, fallen from her foot.
The Duchess notices the loss during a break from the active diversion.
I abstain from answering her anxious questions, painted with anger. A page brings to light the shame of my theft.
The Duchess laughs gracefully when she guesses the sign of a passion in the most unshorn of her villains.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The Duchess keeps, while riding a horse, a modest and gentle behavior. She reproaches the goshawk on the fist and sends it off in search of an indistinct bird.
The goshawk draws an uncertain flight and is correct about the path.
The beauty of the lady distracts me from following the course of the hunt. She is fully resplendent in the uniform field.
I pick up from the floor and discreetly put away a cordovan sole, fallen from her foot.
The Duchess notices the loss during a break from the active diversion.
I abstain from answering her anxious questions, painted with anger. A page brings to light the shame of my theft.
The Duchess laughs gracefully when she guesses the sign of a passion in the most unshorn of her villains.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
3.27.2013
Poema para ser leído en una falla eléctrica / Natasha Tiniacos
Poem To Be Read During An Electric Outage
Silence.
We’ll let silence describe things
and our hands lead the way
because everything’s naked in front of them.
Let’s speak the language of the secret
in this invitation to stop
in the friction of matches and crickets.
Let’s rebaptize ourselves with aromas
so that I can smell of guayaba whenever I need you.
Let’s dream
in this improvised century of lights
where we are
newly
primitive.
{ Natasha Tiniacos, Historia privada de un etcétera, Caracas: La Cámara Escrita, 2011 }
Silence.
We’ll let silence describe things
and our hands lead the way
because everything’s naked in front of them.
Let’s speak the language of the secret
in this invitation to stop
in the friction of matches and crickets.
Let’s rebaptize ourselves with aromas
so that I can smell of guayaba whenever I need you.
Let’s dream
in this improvised century of lights
where we are
newly
primitive.
{ Natasha Tiniacos, Historia privada de un etcétera, Caracas: La Cámara Escrita, 2011 }
3.26.2013
Natasha / Natasha Tiniacos
Natasha
My guilty secret
is to want a hurricane
baptized under my name
and I’d like
it to be destructive
so that
for many years
old cardboard men
will speak
tirelessly amazed
about my savagery
and while they drink
alone
their malt whiskey
they’ll remember how
I shook their homes
and threw all
their belongings
out the bathroom window.
{ Natasha Tiniacos, Historia privada de un etcétera, Caracas: La Cámara Escrita, 2011 }
My guilty secret
is to want a hurricane
baptized under my name
and I’d like
it to be destructive
so that
for many years
old cardboard men
will speak
tirelessly amazed
about my savagery
and while they drink
alone
their malt whiskey
they’ll remember how
I shook their homes
and threw all
their belongings
out the bathroom window.
{ Natasha Tiniacos, Historia privada de un etcétera, Caracas: La Cámara Escrita, 2011 }
3.25.2013
Respuesta a Paul Claudel / Natasha Tiniacos
Response to Paul Claudel
If the dog jumps in front of the mango tree incessantly
and can’t open the door
it’s my defeat.
If the caterpillar doesn’t find the window,
my ignorance
and if the elephant doesn’t talk,
my defeat
though unlike me
he’s baptized
with water of paradise.
{ Natasha Tiniacos, Historia privada de un etcétera, Caracas: La Cámara Escrita, 2011 }
If the dog jumps in front of the mango tree incessantly
and can’t open the door
it’s my defeat.
If the caterpillar doesn’t find the window,
my ignorance
and if the elephant doesn’t talk,
my defeat
though unlike me
he’s baptized
with water of paradise.
{ Natasha Tiniacos, Historia privada de un etcétera, Caracas: La Cámara Escrita, 2011 }
3.24.2013
Meditación al subir escalera mecánica / Natasha Tiniacos
Meditation On A Rising Escalator
I watch every step I don’t take
on the corrugated invoice of the years
that contracts and dilates
like the chest of an exhausted bird.
I won’t look away from the zenith
since the emptiness weaves laboriously toward my body
to take me to false paradise
and its rushed nakedness behind fitting rooms.
Everything can wait: the labyrinthine night
that yesterday dug its task in my eyes
like a lover the scratches
on my back,
in its own time.
I will distinguish the silver cantos
and I will see in my face the fissures
of this mechanical here and now
and I will be the bird
who from the last branch
finally
sighs for what has come and gone.
{ Natasha Tiniacos, Historia privada de un etcétera, Caracas: La Cámara Escrita, 2011 }
I watch every step I don’t take
on the corrugated invoice of the years
that contracts and dilates
like the chest of an exhausted bird.
I won’t look away from the zenith
since the emptiness weaves laboriously toward my body
to take me to false paradise
and its rushed nakedness behind fitting rooms.
Everything can wait: the labyrinthine night
that yesterday dug its task in my eyes
like a lover the scratches
on my back,
in its own time.
I will distinguish the silver cantos
and I will see in my face the fissures
of this mechanical here and now
and I will be the bird
who from the last branch
finally
sighs for what has come and gone.
{ Natasha Tiniacos, Historia privada de un etcétera, Caracas: La Cámara Escrita, 2011 }
3.23.2013
Transgénicos (aria)
Transgenics (Aria)
This is the time of glow-in-the-dark dogs,
time in which sea monsters
are fiber optic cables,
time in which it’s common to see
a woman crying or vomiting on TV.
No reality is insignificant,
we’ve pressed the pedal of the instant
knocking over fugitive time.
#thethoughtofthelineage
#thatwantsitall
#oftheprimitivetongue
We’re taken by the anxiety for the explosion
we’re a tube of tempera
on the bed in white
just about to swarm the new antiquity,
the polaroid era not of upright man
but of the one who weaves
sustained to his elbows
immediacy and closeness.
I touch the screen/skin
with the tip of the fingers more intelligent
than all the fingertips that came before.
Fingerprints have evolved:
I touch the cold plastic and I feel you,
#Ifeelyou
The conversation hall speaks in composed time:
“You have signed on.”
You are a sustained action.
We are born without chordals or a notion of second place
in a world punctual with the now.
Whoever I might want to be blurs
in the unmasked, the fellow
with you, an ectoplasm, shadow 2.0
I don’t wantto contemplate my shoes anymore.
I write to you, I type, I bring you, I need you so much in
the time of glow-in-the-dark dogs,
time in which sea monsters
are fiber optic cables,
time in which it’s common to see
a woman crying or vomiting on TV.
No reality is insignificant,
we’ve pressed the pedal of the instant
holding fugitive time.
{ Natasha Tiniacos, Historia privada de un etcétera, Caracas: La Cámara Escrita, 2011 }
This is the time of glow-in-the-dark dogs,
time in which sea monsters
are fiber optic cables,
time in which it’s common to see
a woman crying or vomiting on TV.
No reality is insignificant,
we’ve pressed the pedal of the instant
knocking over fugitive time.
#thethoughtofthelineage
#thatwantsitall
#oftheprimitivetongue
We’re taken by the anxiety for the explosion
we’re a tube of tempera
on the bed in white
just about to swarm the new antiquity,
the polaroid era not of upright man
but of the one who weaves
sustained to his elbows
immediacy and closeness.
I touch the screen/skin
with the tip of the fingers more intelligent
than all the fingertips that came before.
Fingerprints have evolved:
I touch the cold plastic and I feel you,
#Ifeelyou
The conversation hall speaks in composed time:
“You have signed on.”
You are a sustained action.
We are born without chordals or a notion of second place
in a world punctual with the now.
Whoever I might want to be blurs
in the unmasked, the fellow
with you, an ectoplasm, shadow 2.0
I don’t want
I write to you, I type, I bring you, I need you so much in
the time of glow-in-the-dark dogs,
time in which sea monsters
are fiber optic cables,
time in which it’s common to see
a woman crying or vomiting on TV.
No reality is insignificant,
we’ve pressed the pedal of the instant
holding fugitive time.
{ Natasha Tiniacos, Historia privada de un etcétera, Caracas: La Cámara Escrita, 2011 }
3.22.2013
Con el poema / José Barroeta
With the Poem
It’s possible the title of the poem
has nothing to do with the poem.
It’s possible it’ll fail
and I will turn
into water
and the transformed water
will break the eye of the cadavers.
It’s possible
that everything exists
that we’re a stubborn
brief vigil
Elegías y olvidos (2006)
{ José Barroeta, Todos han muerto: Poesía completa (1971-2006), Barcelona: Editorial Candaya, 2006 }
It’s possible the title of the poem
has nothing to do with the poem.
It’s possible it’ll fail
and I will turn
into water
and the transformed water
will break the eye of the cadavers.
It’s possible
that everything exists
that we’re a stubborn
brief vigil
Elegías y olvidos (2006)
{ José Barroeta, Todos han muerto: Poesía completa (1971-2006), Barcelona: Editorial Candaya, 2006 }
3.21.2013
Homenaje a Vallejo / José Barroeta
Homage to Vallejo
I wanted to write but I wasn’t able to
my voice was closed VALLEJO. I had gone into
a cantina dirty as a mother
nothing not even the heart or bones could say.
They’d ask me and I’d answer with tears
with red, celestial heads.
I wanted to give and play and dream a hand to hand
with death
and I liked nothingness more than oblivion.
I don’t ask you what your poet death might be like
buried among us.
I can’t and I lock myself in the bones of that woman
so long
so extensive and so old in one’s skies.
The earth has not yet begun, POET,
you look like death and what I lived.
Culpas de juglar (1996)
{ José Barroeta, Todos han muerto: Poesía completa (1971-2006), Barcelona: Editorial Candaya, 2006 }
I wanted to write but I wasn’t able to
my voice was closed VALLEJO. I had gone into
a cantina dirty as a mother
nothing not even the heart or bones could say.
They’d ask me and I’d answer with tears
with red, celestial heads.
I wanted to give and play and dream a hand to hand
with death
and I liked nothingness more than oblivion.
I don’t ask you what your poet death might be like
buried among us.
I can’t and I lock myself in the bones of that woman
so long
so extensive and so old in one’s skies.
The earth has not yet begun, POET,
you look like death and what I lived.
Culpas de juglar (1996)
{ José Barroeta, Todos han muerto: Poesía completa (1971-2006), Barcelona: Editorial Candaya, 2006 }
3.20.2013
Arte de anochecer / José Barroeta
Art of Dusk
There is an art of dusk.
Of the body’s entry to the soul,
of fog to roundness
and the circle to the sky;
there is an art of light,
a field where dusk
is watching life
with the closed body.
There is an art of dusk,
a descent at the day’s entrance
into complete darkness.
An intermedium where you have to
receive and know everything without shuddering.
There is an art,
a landscape sometimes amiable,
sometimes grim,
where ascent and descent are accessories
of clean matter.
There is an art of dusk.
Whoever has lived or dreamed with forests,
lights and demons,
knows it.
Arte de anochecer (1975)
{ José Barroeta, Todos han muerto: Poesía completa (1971-2006), Barcelona: Editorial Candaya, 2006 }
There is an art of dusk.
Of the body’s entry to the soul,
of fog to roundness
and the circle to the sky;
there is an art of light,
a field where dusk
is watching life
with the closed body.
There is an art of dusk,
a descent at the day’s entrance
into complete darkness.
An intermedium where you have to
receive and know everything without shuddering.
There is an art,
a landscape sometimes amiable,
sometimes grim,
where ascent and descent are accessories
of clean matter.
There is an art of dusk.
Whoever has lived or dreamed with forests,
lights and demons,
knows it.
Arte de anochecer (1975)
{ José Barroeta, Todos han muerto: Poesía completa (1971-2006), Barcelona: Editorial Candaya, 2006 }
3.19.2013
Cuando el libro solo sirve para apuntalar una mesa coja / Israel Centeno
When the Book Only Serves to Hold Up An Uneven Table
The State publishing houses, although they incorporated a few independent voices, became institutions of governmental propaganda
Hugo Chávez came to power 14 years ago with a political project that in the name of inclusion systematized the exclusion of anyone who did not enroll in the “revolutionary project.” This did not leave out the cultural spectrum. The period that preceded Chávez’s government, with all its mistakes that can be pointed out, specifically in the editorial sector, was diverse and inclusive. One could find the most plural currents of thought and the promotional and informational platform treated them with a transcendent vision.
In order to understand the topic of Venezuela, we must note that the country lives off its petroleum rent. The State monopolized, since before the Chávez era, the book industry along with many other things. What happens when the State comes undone in the government, or is mixed or fused into it? It begins to demand in exchange first solidarity and then unconditional allegiance to the political project incarnated by the government.
If it’s true that before Hugo Chávez the policies of the State could alienate the production and distribution of the book, since 1998 up to now, the state of the politics, that is, the ideology, propaganda and an excessively populist and authoritarian sense of Chávez’s project, demanded to subordinate any of these disciplines to the Bolivarian project.
In the name of the people’s inclusion the people were excluded from the possibility of contrasting an ample catalog, and of authors of being part of it and enriching it. The State publishing houses, while they kept up appearances by incorporating a few independent voices, created ideological strategies, made their production biased and turned themselves into institutions of governmental propaganda.
I have heard the argument that the book sector grew, that we now have a national printing press, a literary agency, a book distributor and an organization for the promotion of the book. With the return of the independence of powers and if a serious comptroller’s office were to look into these institutions, more corruption than benefits would be revealed.
The International Book Fair (FILVEN), which had seven editions before Chávez, and in which I had the honor to work, was impoverished in its offerings, year after year we saw it become a monochrome fair, similar to the one put on in Havana.
The prestigious Rómulo Gallegos literary prize maintained its quality, but a condition was added to the verdict: it’s preferable, underlined, that the author be someone from the left.
Many things survived despite it all, maybe we can glimpse a positive aspect. Some literary biennials were able to maintain their independence. It’s worth noting the Mariano Picón Salas Biennial in Mérida. Others were swept out of the country, like the José Rafael Pocaterra Biennial of Valencia. The Venezuelan author found himself forced to knock on the doors of publishing houses outside the country. Independent editorial projects that have had to struggle against the obstacles the governmental control of access to dollars has imposed: a lack of materials and higher printing costs.
Critical spaces were closed.
There were no critiques without consequences.
We could say that this inclusive project that ended up excluding the plurality of authors and readers who seek a universality of ideas had a positive effect: it made the artist and the author reflect on how corrosive absolute dependence on the State can be and it moved them, perhaps touching their core survival instinct, to go out into the world and struggle for a space beyond the official orbits, to put forth editorial projects and to reinvent themselves in order to stay afloat.
Despite the propaganda and the effect caused by the free distribution of multitudinous editions of certain classic works, today no one can affirm this wasn’t populist squandering: those books ended up serving the most unusual functions without promoting reading. For the promotion of reading, one needs a coherent strategy that is sustained over time, alongside the inclusion of the amplitude of signifiers of human thought.
During these 14 years we saw revenge, an exhibition of resentments, a great deal of noise and “revolutionary” propaganda.
Israel Centeno (Caracas, 1958) is a novelist and editor. He has published the novel Hilo de cometa (Barcelona: Editorial Periférica).
{ Israel Centeno, El País, 13 March 2013 }
The State publishing houses, although they incorporated a few independent voices, became institutions of governmental propaganda
Hugo Chávez came to power 14 years ago with a political project that in the name of inclusion systematized the exclusion of anyone who did not enroll in the “revolutionary project.” This did not leave out the cultural spectrum. The period that preceded Chávez’s government, with all its mistakes that can be pointed out, specifically in the editorial sector, was diverse and inclusive. One could find the most plural currents of thought and the promotional and informational platform treated them with a transcendent vision.
In order to understand the topic of Venezuela, we must note that the country lives off its petroleum rent. The State monopolized, since before the Chávez era, the book industry along with many other things. What happens when the State comes undone in the government, or is mixed or fused into it? It begins to demand in exchange first solidarity and then unconditional allegiance to the political project incarnated by the government.
If it’s true that before Hugo Chávez the policies of the State could alienate the production and distribution of the book, since 1998 up to now, the state of the politics, that is, the ideology, propaganda and an excessively populist and authoritarian sense of Chávez’s project, demanded to subordinate any of these disciplines to the Bolivarian project.
In the name of the people’s inclusion the people were excluded from the possibility of contrasting an ample catalog, and of authors of being part of it and enriching it. The State publishing houses, while they kept up appearances by incorporating a few independent voices, created ideological strategies, made their production biased and turned themselves into institutions of governmental propaganda.
I have heard the argument that the book sector grew, that we now have a national printing press, a literary agency, a book distributor and an organization for the promotion of the book. With the return of the independence of powers and if a serious comptroller’s office were to look into these institutions, more corruption than benefits would be revealed.
The International Book Fair (FILVEN), which had seven editions before Chávez, and in which I had the honor to work, was impoverished in its offerings, year after year we saw it become a monochrome fair, similar to the one put on in Havana.
The prestigious Rómulo Gallegos literary prize maintained its quality, but a condition was added to the verdict: it’s preferable, underlined, that the author be someone from the left.
Many things survived despite it all, maybe we can glimpse a positive aspect. Some literary biennials were able to maintain their independence. It’s worth noting the Mariano Picón Salas Biennial in Mérida. Others were swept out of the country, like the José Rafael Pocaterra Biennial of Valencia. The Venezuelan author found himself forced to knock on the doors of publishing houses outside the country. Independent editorial projects that have had to struggle against the obstacles the governmental control of access to dollars has imposed: a lack of materials and higher printing costs.
Critical spaces were closed.
There were no critiques without consequences.
We could say that this inclusive project that ended up excluding the plurality of authors and readers who seek a universality of ideas had a positive effect: it made the artist and the author reflect on how corrosive absolute dependence on the State can be and it moved them, perhaps touching their core survival instinct, to go out into the world and struggle for a space beyond the official orbits, to put forth editorial projects and to reinvent themselves in order to stay afloat.
Despite the propaganda and the effect caused by the free distribution of multitudinous editions of certain classic works, today no one can affirm this wasn’t populist squandering: those books ended up serving the most unusual functions without promoting reading. For the promotion of reading, one needs a coherent strategy that is sustained over time, alongside the inclusion of the amplitude of signifiers of human thought.
During these 14 years we saw revenge, an exhibition of resentments, a great deal of noise and “revolutionary” propaganda.
Israel Centeno (Caracas, 1958) is a novelist and editor. He has published the novel Hilo de cometa (Barcelona: Editorial Periférica).
{ Israel Centeno, El País, 13 March 2013 }
3.18.2013
A Venezuelan-American Aesthetics
[Cathedral of Learning from Schenley Park, Pittsburgh, 2013]
There is no such thing as a Venezuelan-American aesthetics. I am inventing it right now as I write. I want to know two things: What is a Venezuelan-American and what might a Venezuelan-American aesthetics be?
I started writing Venepoetics in September of 2003 when I was living in Boston. I continued with Venepoetics in 2006 when I moved to Durham, NC, where I was fortunate enough to join a thriving community of writers whose friendship and camaraderie taught me a great deal as a writer. The dedication to a DIY approach to literature among these friends in North Carolina was an inspiration to me. Some of the projects I was privileged to witness in Durham were: the Minor American Reading Series, which kathryn l. pringle and Magdalena Zurawski brought with them from Oakland; Tony Tost’s online magazine Fascicle, which published my translations of the poet Juan Sánchez Peláez (Altagracia de Orituco, 1922 - Caracas, 2003); Brian Howe’s Mix Tape Reading Series; Chris Vitiello’s performances of conceptual poetry texts that would eventually be published in Irresponsibility (Ahsahta, 2008) and Obedience (Ahsahta, 2012); David Need’s Arcade Taberna Reading Series, devoted to longer poems, where I saw Fred Moten read the entirety of Hughson’s Tavern (Leroy Works, 2008), to mention one of many amazing nights at that series; hearing Laura Jaramillo read & comment on fragments of what would eventually become her book Material Girl (Subpress, 2012) in various informal reading group sessions that we held; the great house readings at Ken Rumble’s apartment and later on the readings he, Chris Vitiello & others organized at The Space, a former garage converted into a performance venue. I recall Brian Howe’s epic introduction with 80s pop musical accompaniment for Jon Leon’s reading there, and how Leon’s decadent poems resonated so perfectly in that bare room. Or the time we huddled there beside space heaters for an intimate reading by Stacy Szymaszek one winter night.
Not to mention the many readings in Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Carrboro that I attended over the years. Poetry in North Carolina’s so-called Research Trinagle during the late 2000s/early 2010s was a magical and productive realm. As I know it continues to be, after I’ve left. The encouragement and feedback I received from that community while I was researching and translating the work of José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Cumaná, Venezuela, 1890 - Geneva, Switzerland, 1930) helped make my translation of that poet a reality with the publication of From the Livid Country (San Francisco: Auguste Press) and Selected Works (New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press) in 2012. Thanks to the close readings Joseph Donahue and Dianne Timblin in particular gave me of those translations, I was able understand that Ramos Sucre’s work has a potential American audience, that it’s a matter of introducing his work to readers and making sure my translations remain faithful to his latinate vocabulary, his love of Shakespearean rhetoric and his distinct sense of the paragraph as a form of poetic measure.
I left Durham last year and now live in Pittsburgh. Since 2009, Venepoetics has mostly served as a workshop for my translations of Ramos Sucre. My new city turns out to have a connection to Venezuelan literature and to Ramos Sucre. The poet and critic Guillermo Sucre (1933) lived here in the early 1970s and it was in Pittsburgh that he wrote his study of Latin American poetry, La máscara, la transparencia: Ensayos sobre poesía hispanoamericana (1975). Sucre is a descendant of Ramos Sucre and his book includes a short but illuminating section on his poetry. Back in Venezuela in the late 1970s, Sucre taught a graduate seminar on Ramos Sucre at the Universidad Simón Bolívar, the first of its kind. In 1999 he wrote the introduction to Ramos Sucre’s complete works Obra poética, “Ramos Sucre: La pasión por los orígenes,” published in Mexico by Fondo de Cultura Económica and Universidad Simón Bolívar’s Editorial Equinoccio. In 2001 his former student in the Universidad Simón Bolívar seminar, Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio published an definitive critical edition of Ramos Sucre in Madrid, with the UNESCO-funded Colección Archivos, to which Sucre contributes an essay.
Sucre’s La máscara, la transparencia remains in print and, with its lengthy chapters on figures such as Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz and César Vallejo, it’s rightfully considered an essential book for understanding 20th century Latin American poetry. So as I now work on translating and editing a bilingual edition of Ramos Sucre’s Complete Works, I do so in a city that has indirect traces of his writing.
I recently wrote a brief translator’s introduction to a feature on Venezuelan poetry that I've edited for Typo magazine entitled Venezuelan Poetry: 1921-2001 (which will be published in June). In the process of writing that note I came to realize that what I’ve been doing over this past decade, and longer actually, is related to the notion of deciphering and defining what it means to be a Venezuelan-American. This process has technically been going on since I was born in Cambridge, MA in 1970 to a Venezuelan father and an American mother. My parents moved around a great deal, so my experiences of Venezuela were always fleeting. I don’t remember my first visit to Venezuela in 1973. My parents and I moved there via freight ship from New York City to the port of La Guaira in 1976, a trip that took a week down the Eastern seaboard and through the Caribbean. My brother was born soon after our arrival in Caracas.
I still recall the first time I saw the mountainous coastline of Venezuela rise up from the sea as we approached land. Every time I fly back to Venezuela in recent years, I can’t help but be moved when I see that coastline approaching from the airplane window. We lived in Venezuela until 1978, when my mother, my brother and I moved to Woods Hole, MA, where my sister was born and where I repeated second grade because I had to learn how to read and write in English. Between 1979 and 1981 we lived again in Caracas. 1981-1982 found us in the town of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where my American grandmother lived for over two decades. My final interlude in Venezuela was a tumultuous six months in Caracas in 1982, during my parents’ protracted and contentious divorce.
Certain episodes of my childhood in the United States, Venezuela and Mexico resembled scenes that could have taken place in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, as my parents enacted many of the dreams and failures of the global counterculture in the sixties and seventies (long hair, vegetarianism, drugs, organic food co-ops, yoga, The Beatles). I have distinct memories of spending time with our guru Sri Swami Satchidananda at lectures he gave in Cambridge, MA in the early seventies. A Venezuelan-American aesthetics for me is directly tied to my experience as a child in the afterglow of the counterculture as it faded into the seventies and eighties, across three countries.
My work as a translator probably began in 1973, during that first trip I took to Venezuela which I don’t remember. Or maybe it began in our home in Cambridge, when my father would speak to me in Spanish and my mother in English. The first Venezuelan poet I read whose work moved me to translate it, so that I could share it with friends, was Juan Sánchez Peláez. It was his last collection Aire sobre el aire (1989), which I bought at a book fair in Providence, RI in 1997. Since that fundamental experience as a reader, I’ve been engaged with researching and translating Venezuelan poetry to varying degrees.
I think Venezuelan literature does not exist outside Venezuela. By this I mean that hardly any Venezuelan writers have been translated and none of my poet friends here in the U.S. have read any Venezuelan writers. This is not their fault, it’s simply the reality of Venezuelan literature in the global market. It does not exist outside Venezuela. My project of making this literature known via Venepoetics, and more recently with various translations in books, magazines and hand-made pamphlets, is inherently a Venezuelan-American one. English is my primary language, though I speak Spanish fluently and read equal amounts of literature in English and Spanish. My project, which now feels like a life-long endeavor, can only be done here from the United States and after decades of moving back and forth between two very different countries.
In my introduction to Venezuelan Poetry: 1921-2001, I mention Devendra Banhart as an inspiration for some of my own work as a writer and translator. I don’t think Banhart knows what a Venezuelan-American aesthetics might be, either. But when Banhart covers a Simón Díaz song or alludes to Venezuela in his music, he is creating a Venezuelan-American aesthetics. And it’s a pleasure for me to encounter his music and listen to it through this filter of wanting to understand and define what it means to create as a Venezuelan-American. Not on a sociological level and definitely not as a marketing tool. After all, what is invisible will avoid classification and marketing. My interest is more obscure, personal. As Ralph Ellison writes: “Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. [...] Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead.”
One of the roots of a Venezuelan-American aesthetics, which I'm inventing now, out of nothing, might also be the concert Guns N’ Roses gave in Caracas on November 25th, 1992. An 11-year-old Devendra Banhart was at that show which would eventually have a huge impact on him as an artist. In a November 6, 2009 interview with the New York Times, and on other occasions, Banhart mentions the concert:
Q. Do you remember your first concert?
A. Guns N’ Roses. I was like 10. Ninety percent of Caracas was there. There were all these rumors: Axl was going to turn his back to the crowd, he was going to call us monkeys. We were so excited. “Axl’s going to call us monkeys!”
This seems perfect to me, Axl Rose’s semi-racist attitude towards Venezuela feeding the legend of his arrival in Caracas, for a concert that’s still talked about in reverential tones today in Venezuela. As Banhart says, almost everyone in Caracas was there. Guns N’ Roses in 1992 were at the peak of their career, on the infamous Use Your Illusion world tour. A decade later, Banhart would begin releasing his own music here in the U.S.
A recurring motif in José Antonio Ramos Sucre’s texts is the image of a tower. During my weekly jogs in Schenley Park here in Pittsburgh I catch glimpses of the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning through the forest trees. I like to think that tower would have appealed to Ramos Sucre for its Late Gothic Revival style that recalls the medieval settings for many of his texts. I read that tower through my translations of Ramos Sucre. And I read Ramos Sucre through this rough, preliminary sketch of a Venezuelan-American aesthetics.
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