The Window
She is seated at the window, barren of handsome men. Dressed in mourning and pensive, she requires attention from artists and demands reverence from dreamers. Faded by time, she regales and soothes afflicted souls.
She turns her eyes from the solitary street to the opposite hill, where the day disappears like an Asiatic king on a slow elephant. She observes the shade that advances with the furtive step of the beggar to some regal feast.
She shapes her disposition with the dwindling of the light; and watches how the painful cloudscapes compose a scene of holocaust, where her hope, chaste Iphigenia, succumbs amid laments.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
1.26.2012
La plaga / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Plague
My colleague, inspired by an equivocal curiosity and by a vehement sympathy for dejected and reprobate beings, was going around arm in arm with a lost girl.
I tried to dissuade him from such company, alleging the woman’s censurable bearing, affected by the memory of an insane brother, author of his own death.
We separated on a memorable night. Fortunes were being made and unmade in the den of the loudest uproar. The furnaces were spilling a chlorotic light and whetting the physiognomy of the gamblers. Anguish was electrifying the air of the place and suppressing the applause and laughter of the libidinous women.
A crowd of winged insects, fell, the next day, over the city and spread a contagious disease. Their larvae would domicile themselves in men’s hair and from there they would penetrate to devour the encephalon, aided by a sharp mechanism. They would toss from themselves a fibrous casing to protect them from any medicinal lotion. They would wound, in an irreparable manner, the resorts of thought and will. The infected would run through the streets shrieking.
My colleague resisted my advice of fleeing and came to perish, without news from anyone, at his house in the suburb.
The natives of the kingdom were abstaining from stepping within the environs of the cursed city. The agents of order situated at opportune places, were impeding the visits of petty thieves and were circumscribing the zone of the illness.
I braved the prohibition and managed to discover my friend’s fate.
I opened, after some struggle, the door to his house and I saw him lying on the floor, with signs of having rolled about.
Some spiders, with phosphorescent eyes and bland and tremulous feet, were jumping nimbly over his cadaver. The new breed had depopulated the city, running in pursuit of survivors.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
My colleague, inspired by an equivocal curiosity and by a vehement sympathy for dejected and reprobate beings, was going around arm in arm with a lost girl.
I tried to dissuade him from such company, alleging the woman’s censurable bearing, affected by the memory of an insane brother, author of his own death.
We separated on a memorable night. Fortunes were being made and unmade in the den of the loudest uproar. The furnaces were spilling a chlorotic light and whetting the physiognomy of the gamblers. Anguish was electrifying the air of the place and suppressing the applause and laughter of the libidinous women.
A crowd of winged insects, fell, the next day, over the city and spread a contagious disease. Their larvae would domicile themselves in men’s hair and from there they would penetrate to devour the encephalon, aided by a sharp mechanism. They would toss from themselves a fibrous casing to protect them from any medicinal lotion. They would wound, in an irreparable manner, the resorts of thought and will. The infected would run through the streets shrieking.
My colleague resisted my advice of fleeing and came to perish, without news from anyone, at his house in the suburb.
The natives of the kingdom were abstaining from stepping within the environs of the cursed city. The agents of order situated at opportune places, were impeding the visits of petty thieves and were circumscribing the zone of the illness.
I braved the prohibition and managed to discover my friend’s fate.
I opened, after some struggle, the door to his house and I saw him lying on the floor, with signs of having rolled about.
Some spiders, with phosphorescent eyes and bland and tremulous feet, were jumping nimbly over his cadaver. The new breed had depopulated the city, running in pursuit of survivors.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
1.25.2012
El emigrado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Emigrant
I was left alone with my son when the mortiferous plague had devastated the capital of the ruined kingdom. He had not emerged from infancy and he occupied me day and night.
I conceived and executed the project of settling in another city, more interned and safe. I took the child in my arms and crossed the savannah infected by the effluvia of the salt marsh.
I had to pass a small river. I found myself forced to dispute the ford with a man of advantaged stature, red hair and long teeth. His face declared desperation.
I pitied him despite his impertinent attitude and his injurious discourse.
I was able to take up lodgings at a long-abandoned house and I accommodated the child in a chamber of tapestries and rugs. He was enduring a slow fever and delirium manifested in screams.
The same inopportune man came to offer me, after a night of anguish, the remedy for my son. He was offering it for an exorbitant price, inwardly mocking my exiguous resources. I found myself in the position of dismissing him and cursing him.
I spent that day and the next without help of any kind.
I was keeping a vigil close to dawn, in the hostile night, when I felt, at the door to the street, a series of vehement loud knocks.
I looked out the window and saw only the street flooded in shadows.
My son was dying at that moment.
The man of citrine nature had been the author of the noise.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I was left alone with my son when the mortiferous plague had devastated the capital of the ruined kingdom. He had not emerged from infancy and he occupied me day and night.
I conceived and executed the project of settling in another city, more interned and safe. I took the child in my arms and crossed the savannah infected by the effluvia of the salt marsh.
I had to pass a small river. I found myself forced to dispute the ford with a man of advantaged stature, red hair and long teeth. His face declared desperation.
I pitied him despite his impertinent attitude and his injurious discourse.
I was able to take up lodgings at a long-abandoned house and I accommodated the child in a chamber of tapestries and rugs. He was enduring a slow fever and delirium manifested in screams.
The same inopportune man came to offer me, after a night of anguish, the remedy for my son. He was offering it for an exorbitant price, inwardly mocking my exiguous resources. I found myself in the position of dismissing him and cursing him.
I spent that day and the next without help of any kind.
I was keeping a vigil close to dawn, in the hostile night, when I felt, at the door to the street, a series of vehement loud knocks.
I looked out the window and saw only the street flooded in shadows.
My son was dying at that moment.
The man of citrine nature had been the author of the noise.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
1.18.2012
Cita comentada: Miyó Vestrini / Gabriel Payares
Commented Citation: Miyó Vestrini
This citation by Vestrini invites me to a reflection. Maybe hers was a generation of frustrated people, as she herself says, because having had so much youth and such a wealth of literary groups, important names and revolutionary proposals of radical ideologies, in sum, a frenetic and abundant time period, the future with its drowsiness and its eternal crisis, its slow and opulent decomposition of the country and its institutions, would have represented for them the absolute confirmation of the failure of the optimists, the beginning of the era of the hopeless and cynical. Were that to be so, Miyó foresaw it, and she chose to commit suicide before languishing and becoming a fossil.
We, who today remember that “lost generation” as the inhabitants of a type of golden era or, at least, a prodigious and abundant time, are on the other hand a disconsolate generation, born of its own broken dreams and guided in life by the maxim that the latter is elsewhere. By nature desirous, we have been given the fate of witnessing how the country intends to return to its own empty shell, and how, within a panorama of grandiloquence and of the highest numbers of weekly murder rates, amid poverty and marginality and historic petroleum prices, it has been our place to know ourselves as foreigners, since every form of nationalism hides and involves –compensates– a galloping defamiliarization. Our Venezuela doesn’t belong, doesn’t apply, to anyone. We have a borrowed, portable, mobile country. We are the generation of the precipice, who look toward the future down below and with dread, while we dream with the wings of our ancestors that were broken.
“I don’t think our generation will ever mean anything, for anyone,” Miyó said, and today we’re surprised how wrong she was.
{ Gabriel Payares, Blog Caribe, 9 January 2012 }
“[The collectives of the 50s and 60s] were experiences full of vitality, that were never able to crystallize. We are a burnt-out, lost generation. A generation of frustrated people” (1976)
This citation by Vestrini invites me to a reflection. Maybe hers was a generation of frustrated people, as she herself says, because having had so much youth and such a wealth of literary groups, important names and revolutionary proposals of radical ideologies, in sum, a frenetic and abundant time period, the future with its drowsiness and its eternal crisis, its slow and opulent decomposition of the country and its institutions, would have represented for them the absolute confirmation of the failure of the optimists, the beginning of the era of the hopeless and cynical. Were that to be so, Miyó foresaw it, and she chose to commit suicide before languishing and becoming a fossil.
We, who today remember that “lost generation” as the inhabitants of a type of golden era or, at least, a prodigious and abundant time, are on the other hand a disconsolate generation, born of its own broken dreams and guided in life by the maxim that the latter is elsewhere. By nature desirous, we have been given the fate of witnessing how the country intends to return to its own empty shell, and how, within a panorama of grandiloquence and of the highest numbers of weekly murder rates, amid poverty and marginality and historic petroleum prices, it has been our place to know ourselves as foreigners, since every form of nationalism hides and involves –compensates– a galloping defamiliarization. Our Venezuela doesn’t belong, doesn’t apply, to anyone. We have a borrowed, portable, mobile country. We are the generation of the precipice, who look toward the future down below and with dread, while we dream with the wings of our ancestors that were broken.
“I don’t think our generation will ever mean anything, for anyone,” Miyó said, and today we’re surprised how wrong she was.
{ Gabriel Payares, Blog Caribe, 9 January 2012 }
1.16.2012
La reforma / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Reform
The ecstatic gentleman has left through the arc of three doors, of forgotten style, of limitless lines and proportions. He observes the comet of agony and its reflection in the crystal sea.
He repugns the tournament and the conversation in the palace of the nobles, dwelling of happiness. He has embraced the penitent life since his stay in Italy, in amends for youthful pastimes. He assisted, the eve before returning, an academic festival, where mythological surnames abounded. An abbé was reading a fictitious discourse, by the light of the torches, in a hall adorned with egregious busts and in the presence of the cardinals.
The German gentleman possesses once again his serious and profound soul. He discovers, around himself and in the universe, the vestiges of original and unsalvageable evil, the ruin of the insinuating will of Satan and he doubts he will save himself by his own merits.
He jealously serves Mary, mother of Jesus, and guides, in that manner, his acts toward the contentment and satisfaction of a perfect lady, abiding by the only principle, free of censure, from the urbanity of Italy, unfolded time and again in the book of Baldassare de Castiglione.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The ecstatic gentleman has left through the arc of three doors, of forgotten style, of limitless lines and proportions. He observes the comet of agony and its reflection in the crystal sea.
He repugns the tournament and the conversation in the palace of the nobles, dwelling of happiness. He has embraced the penitent life since his stay in Italy, in amends for youthful pastimes. He assisted, the eve before returning, an academic festival, where mythological surnames abounded. An abbé was reading a fictitious discourse, by the light of the torches, in a hall adorned with egregious busts and in the presence of the cardinals.
The German gentleman possesses once again his serious and profound soul. He discovers, around himself and in the universe, the vestiges of original and unsalvageable evil, the ruin of the insinuating will of Satan and he doubts he will save himself by his own merits.
He jealously serves Mary, mother of Jesus, and guides, in that manner, his acts toward the contentment and satisfaction of a perfect lady, abiding by the only principle, free of censure, from the urbanity of Italy, unfolded time and again in the book of Baldassare de Castiglione.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
1.14.2012
Persecución de la poesía / Armando Rojas Guardia
Persecution of Poetry
When I was looking for you
here, in this house
where simple things
build walls around habit
and appease me, help me sleep
on a tangible floor,
solidly sustained;
when I wanted you to arrive
daily like tea,
recognizable and aromatic
like the smoke from my pipe,
calm like lamp light,
vibrant like all the insects
attracted by that glow
that protects me from the night
and makes repose sweet
and introverts it;
when you were able to be Coltrane,
erudite sax that accompanies
a frugal dinner; or maybe Rilke
read when I get up from the table
(Rilke domesticated: some verses
to take advantage of the hours for rest
as suits a laborious man);
finally, when the lethargy
that precedes the habit of sleep
led me, attentive, towards the bed
to find you oneiric and somnambulant
suddenly the certainty, even corporeal,
arrived that you existed nowhere
not even in the everything
of this orderly life of peace,
in no sensitive place
and under no comforting light
(nor in the story of dreams).
Still and insomniac in the silence,
I knew you were in back: only the reverse
of each object, only the spine
of all the words of the poem
(unreachable spine, of course,
but that magnetizes the music of the verse),
barely the void of forms
where they are unleashed, already free
to be resolved in graceful nothingness
–a sweet, compact nothingness–
around which revolve, unknowingly,
every language of man, every gesture,
the entire syntax of things,
sharp night, snow of language,
that deafens the roar of the pages
and blurs lines like this one
with which I speak the parliament
of an actor never accustomed
to the theater’s enormous muteness
when everyone has left and the curtain
is only stirred by the wind,
the frozen wind of the night,
the sidereal wind, that doesn’t applaud,
or laugh, or cry, and dissipates
stage machinery, special effects and scenes,
in other words, this decorative fiction
(pipe and tea, lamps, insects,
Coltrane, Rilke, notebook dream)
abandoned at last: useless.
Hacia la noche viva (1989)
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }
When I was looking for you
here, in this house
where simple things
build walls around habit
and appease me, help me sleep
on a tangible floor,
solidly sustained;
when I wanted you to arrive
daily like tea,
recognizable and aromatic
like the smoke from my pipe,
calm like lamp light,
vibrant like all the insects
attracted by that glow
that protects me from the night
and makes repose sweet
and introverts it;
when you were able to be Coltrane,
erudite sax that accompanies
a frugal dinner; or maybe Rilke
read when I get up from the table
(Rilke domesticated: some verses
to take advantage of the hours for rest
as suits a laborious man);
finally, when the lethargy
that precedes the habit of sleep
led me, attentive, towards the bed
to find you oneiric and somnambulant
suddenly the certainty, even corporeal,
arrived that you existed nowhere
not even in the everything
of this orderly life of peace,
in no sensitive place
and under no comforting light
(nor in the story of dreams).
Still and insomniac in the silence,
I knew you were in back: only the reverse
of each object, only the spine
of all the words of the poem
(unreachable spine, of course,
but that magnetizes the music of the verse),
barely the void of forms
where they are unleashed, already free
to be resolved in graceful nothingness
–a sweet, compact nothingness–
around which revolve, unknowingly,
every language of man, every gesture,
the entire syntax of things,
sharp night, snow of language,
that deafens the roar of the pages
and blurs lines like this one
with which I speak the parliament
of an actor never accustomed
to the theater’s enormous muteness
when everyone has left and the curtain
is only stirred by the wind,
the frozen wind of the night,
the sidereal wind, that doesn’t applaud,
or laugh, or cry, and dissipates
stage machinery, special effects and scenes,
in other words, this decorative fiction
(pipe and tea, lamps, insects,
Coltrane, Rilke, notebook dream)
abandoned at last: useless.
Hacia la noche viva (1989)
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }
1.12.2012
Sin uso / Armando Rojas Guardia
Unused
But today I have confidence in the task
of telling you precisely this,
without a single cause
to motivate the insignificant citation
of the eyes and letters:
to merely type seven lines for you
like someone asking for air or happiness.
Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979)
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }
But today I have confidence in the task
of telling you precisely this,
without a single cause
to motivate the insignificant citation
of the eyes and letters:
to merely type seven lines for you
like someone asking for air or happiness.
Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979)
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }
1.11.2012
Poesía / Armando Rojas Guardia
Poetry
Made of crust,
of shipwrecked images,
convex,
refractory like a blind glass.
Made only of mist
and dust clouds.
Opaque vanity, interposing itself.
Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979)
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }
Made of crust,
of shipwrecked images,
convex,
refractory like a blind glass.
Made only of mist
and dust clouds.
Opaque vanity, interposing itself.
Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979)
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }
1.03.2012
Círculo de sombras / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Circle of Shades
Life for me is not
a geometric rigidity,
a formula, a rigorously
accepted custom, a page
succeeding itself day and night
with its infinite and monotonous
writing,
no, life is a whirlwind,
a vertigo of the contraries
that are ceaselessly produced, a
contradiction that grows
beyond itself
and flagellates itself
with its enormous whip,
sinks me into the void
and then rescues me
to smelt me again
in my closed circle of shades.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Círculo de sombras, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }
Life for me is not
a geometric rigidity,
a formula, a rigorously
accepted custom, a page
succeeding itself day and night
with its infinite and monotonous
writing,
no, life is a whirlwind,
a vertigo of the contraries
that are ceaselessly produced, a
contradiction that grows
beyond itself
and flagellates itself
with its enormous whip,
sinks me into the void
and then rescues me
to smelt me again
in my closed circle of shades.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Círculo de sombras, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }
12.27.2011
El jardinero de las espinas / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Gardener of Thorns
A bronze reliquary guarded, for more than a thousand years, the spoils of a Christian virgin thrown to the Tiber. I had reconstituted a few episodes from her journey in this world by means of short, linear news items from a devoted chronicle.
The church of her rest dominated a deserted way. The relics of the gardens and palaces declared the magnanimous effort of the ancients. I visited the spot in the middle of November, beneath an opal sky, naked and chilled. I stopped at the foot of a tree with unconquered leaves and persuaded them to tranquility by reciting a few augural verses by Virgil.
At that moment I divined one of the prodigies attributed to the martyred virgin. Her illusory image had consoled the days of a middle-aged exile, a sick man tossed far from mankind, impeded in his fern dwelling, and had placed in his hands the harp of Israfel. A Jew of immortal life had revealed to me the name of the first musician in the cortege of angels.
I reestablished myself from a delirious affect assuming a contemplative attitude, struggling to draw the ideal figure of the saint. I was deliberately lost in the solitude of a few burnished mountains and abandoned myself on a trail of stones. A swallow was deserting from its own in the month of the shades of Lent and created in front of me, getting tangled in my hair, the view of the deserted way and of the reliquary church in pontifical Rome.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
A bronze reliquary guarded, for more than a thousand years, the spoils of a Christian virgin thrown to the Tiber. I had reconstituted a few episodes from her journey in this world by means of short, linear news items from a devoted chronicle.
The church of her rest dominated a deserted way. The relics of the gardens and palaces declared the magnanimous effort of the ancients. I visited the spot in the middle of November, beneath an opal sky, naked and chilled. I stopped at the foot of a tree with unconquered leaves and persuaded them to tranquility by reciting a few augural verses by Virgil.
At that moment I divined one of the prodigies attributed to the martyred virgin. Her illusory image had consoled the days of a middle-aged exile, a sick man tossed far from mankind, impeded in his fern dwelling, and had placed in his hands the harp of Israfel. A Jew of immortal life had revealed to me the name of the first musician in the cortege of angels.
I reestablished myself from a delirious affect assuming a contemplative attitude, struggling to draw the ideal figure of the saint. I was deliberately lost in the solitude of a few burnished mountains and abandoned myself on a trail of stones. A swallow was deserting from its own in the month of the shades of Lent and created in front of me, getting tangled in my hair, the view of the deserted way and of the reliquary church in pontifical Rome.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.23.2011
Textos del desalojo (fragmentos) / Antonia Palacios
Displacement Texts (fragments)
They’ll take all my belongings, all the offerings. The ones that arrived lifted in garlands and branches, ones that collapsed lavishing themselves, ones that remained in suspense, ones left behind for such long fatigues, ones of learned form, stable touch. They’ll arrive battling on top of things, on top of the old approximations, forgotten approximations, rolling ruins over land, the tangle barely begun, the pearl barely mounted. They will arrive fiercely, they will arrive with hatred, they will arrive with scorn proclaiming the void. They will strip me of everything: point, gesture, voice. They will suddenly appear amid circles, angles and rectangles, hard geometries of agonizing lines, infinite parallels without possible encounters, volumes of blood. They will strip me of everything, of the air, of the reflection, of the form. The hour will be concave, the sky will be concave, the earth will open its concave crater in the final offering.
Who lifts the predictions? Who opens the mysteries? Impotent challenge this non-existent announcement, there inside, there in the depths, endlessly there, miserable precision. Who unfolds the solemn doubt? Treading from one ruin to another ruin, touching its weight, weighing even the void, arriving, arriving barely, barely sustained in the repeated forms. Who investigates the walking, the falling, the dying? Oh seized time. Oh abandonment. Who stretches over the sharp edge, in the body, over the sharp edge, over fear, consumed by fear? Its silence of a space, the spaces of silence, and waiting, listening, breathing, divided until breath, pursued, faster, faster, the tides and the quakes, the crumblings, dust whirlwinds, and the days without substance fainting. Who folds herself, unravels herself, silences herself, in doubt’s fever?
In the center, in the exact center, concentric circles, formless matter, from the center, sharpened matter, there in the center, the contour palpable in vertigo, in the vertiginous instant that leaves the center behind, occult center, protected, in the late suspense of the instant that arrives in a scattering without contour, without a center, in the highest level where shadow nests, remote center. Far from the center the fluting, the fissures, scattered in convergent contours gathered in the center, and dispersed, faded flashes explode in the center, ephemeral flight, fatigued flight battling in the center’s limits, in the center, surrounding the center, oh it’s so heavy, oh how I moan, how I abyss myself in this center that folds over, this center that consumes itself, spiral of the center, oh how it oppresses me, dilated center! In the center, already centered, in the center fixed, fixed in the center, pierced by the center, already outside the center.
Textos del desalojo (1975)
{ Antonia Palacios, Ficciones y aflicciones, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
They’ll take all my belongings, all the offerings. The ones that arrived lifted in garlands and branches, ones that collapsed lavishing themselves, ones that remained in suspense, ones left behind for such long fatigues, ones of learned form, stable touch. They’ll arrive battling on top of things, on top of the old approximations, forgotten approximations, rolling ruins over land, the tangle barely begun, the pearl barely mounted. They will arrive fiercely, they will arrive with hatred, they will arrive with scorn proclaiming the void. They will strip me of everything: point, gesture, voice. They will suddenly appear amid circles, angles and rectangles, hard geometries of agonizing lines, infinite parallels without possible encounters, volumes of blood. They will strip me of everything, of the air, of the reflection, of the form. The hour will be concave, the sky will be concave, the earth will open its concave crater in the final offering.
Who lifts the predictions? Who opens the mysteries? Impotent challenge this non-existent announcement, there inside, there in the depths, endlessly there, miserable precision. Who unfolds the solemn doubt? Treading from one ruin to another ruin, touching its weight, weighing even the void, arriving, arriving barely, barely sustained in the repeated forms. Who investigates the walking, the falling, the dying? Oh seized time. Oh abandonment. Who stretches over the sharp edge, in the body, over the sharp edge, over fear, consumed by fear? Its silence of a space, the spaces of silence, and waiting, listening, breathing, divided until breath, pursued, faster, faster, the tides and the quakes, the crumblings, dust whirlwinds, and the days without substance fainting. Who folds herself, unravels herself, silences herself, in doubt’s fever?
In the center, in the exact center, concentric circles, formless matter, from the center, sharpened matter, there in the center, the contour palpable in vertigo, in the vertiginous instant that leaves the center behind, occult center, protected, in the late suspense of the instant that arrives in a scattering without contour, without a center, in the highest level where shadow nests, remote center. Far from the center the fluting, the fissures, scattered in convergent contours gathered in the center, and dispersed, faded flashes explode in the center, ephemeral flight, fatigued flight battling in the center’s limits, in the center, surrounding the center, oh it’s so heavy, oh how I moan, how I abyss myself in this center that folds over, this center that consumes itself, spiral of the center, oh how it oppresses me, dilated center! In the center, already centered, in the center fixed, fixed in the center, pierced by the center, already outside the center.
Textos del desalojo (1975)
{ Antonia Palacios, Ficciones y aflicciones, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.21.2011
El resfrío / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Cold
I have read in my childhood the memories of an artist of the violoncello, deceased far from her homeland, in the coldest spot on the globe. I have seen the image of the sepulcher in a book of stamps. An iron gate defends the accumulation of stones and the Byzantine cross. A hasty gust pours rain in the solitude.
The heroine reposes from a consecutive gallop, fright of the vile fox. The horse was about to perish in the flexible ties of a forest, in the inert mud.
The artist threw from her horse to the sordid Chinese river an ivory cup, held by means of a catch and consumed at the beginning of the cholera in the clumsy lymph. They have captured and consumed some fish that taste like dirt. The heroine used in a preferential mode the distinguished ivory, material of Roldan’s oliphant.
A sulphur sun was traveling along the floor in the atmosphere of a distant desert of sand and a sharp whistle, messenger of invisible darkness, spread a shadow of terror on the immense riverbed.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I have read in my childhood the memories of an artist of the violoncello, deceased far from her homeland, in the coldest spot on the globe. I have seen the image of the sepulcher in a book of stamps. An iron gate defends the accumulation of stones and the Byzantine cross. A hasty gust pours rain in the solitude.
The heroine reposes from a consecutive gallop, fright of the vile fox. The horse was about to perish in the flexible ties of a forest, in the inert mud.
The artist threw from her horse to the sordid Chinese river an ivory cup, held by means of a catch and consumed at the beginning of the cholera in the clumsy lymph. They have captured and consumed some fish that taste like dirt. The heroine used in a preferential mode the distinguished ivory, material of Roldan’s oliphant.
A sulphur sun was traveling along the floor in the atmosphere of a distant desert of sand and a sharp whistle, messenger of invisible darkness, spread a shadow of terror on the immense riverbed.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.18.2011
El senado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Senate
The pleas of the old men were filling the confines of the building. The open air had covered it with moss and lichen.
No one was able to unfurrow the victor’s brow and persuade him to clemency. The young king was ordering the torture from a seat of stone. He would not be moved before the athletic beauty of the captives.
The executioners were cutting the noble hair and affronting it with their feet. They were enjoying themselves wounding the luxuriant cervix.
The prisoners were offering themselves to death with a proud gesture, and assigning it a semblance of fatidical beauty.
The old men prostrated themselves when the sacrifice ended. The concert of their deep voices was rising in praise of the vanquished and in compensation for invisible justice.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The pleas of the old men were filling the confines of the building. The open air had covered it with moss and lichen.
No one was able to unfurrow the victor’s brow and persuade him to clemency. The young king was ordering the torture from a seat of stone. He would not be moved before the athletic beauty of the captives.
The executioners were cutting the noble hair and affronting it with their feet. They were enjoying themselves wounding the luxuriant cervix.
The prisoners were offering themselves to death with a proud gesture, and assigning it a semblance of fatidical beauty.
The old men prostrated themselves when the sacrifice ended. The concert of their deep voices was rising in praise of the vanquished and in compensation for invisible justice.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.15.2011
El sedentario / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Sedentary One
In the amber morning, the straggling bat returns to the sacrilegious tower of Faust. The reprobate bird of Moses arrives from gathering in the dungeons the threnody of the proselytizers of evil. It invades the chamber through the window faithful to the desert moon and infuses a sudden dread in the image of a man, portent of mechanical art.
Faust dominates the stupor and directs a fistful of dirt at the flying depravity, using the means of geomancy. He conjectures the loss of his soul in eternity when he recognizes the scattering of the dust on the table cloth.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
In the amber morning, the straggling bat returns to the sacrilegious tower of Faust. The reprobate bird of Moses arrives from gathering in the dungeons the threnody of the proselytizers of evil. It invades the chamber through the window faithful to the desert moon and infuses a sudden dread in the image of a man, portent of mechanical art.
Faust dominates the stupor and directs a fistful of dirt at the flying depravity, using the means of geomancy. He conjectures the loss of his soul in eternity when he recognizes the scattering of the dust on the table cloth.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.14.2011
Caracas, 26 de marzo de 1924 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Caracas, 26 March 1924
Mr. Lorenzo Ramos
Maracaibo, Agencia Banco Venezuela
Dear Lorenzo,
I received your letter. I read it with the utmost attention and visited Lecuna, who is willing to leave you there and contribute to your prosperity. It is to your benefit if you live within the four walls of your house. I’m taking into consideration what you say in your last letter. I had already written to you saying that you should write with the single adornment of the exact expression and cruelly suppressing whatever might sound like a discourse. The word should always be humble and plain. One should never call attention to oneself. Avoid bad company. There are many alcoholics among them. Live alone, but be polite.
You should have in your property the following books in French versions and in prose, except for the Bible, which should be the Protestant version by Cipriano de Valera:
The Iliad and Odyssey, Plutarch, Virgil, The Edda which is to say Scandinavian Mythology (this last book can be found for you by François Jarrin, Rue des Écoles 48 or J. Gamber, Rue Danton 7), the Divine Comedy, Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, Don Quijote in Spanish, Goethe’s Faust, Telemachus, the Thousand and One Nights.
Read, even if you don’t have them:
English theater (Shakespeare), Spanish theater (Lope de Vega, Calderón, Tirso de Molina, Alarcón), Greek theater (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), French theater (Molière, Racine and Corneille). With reading one drama by each author you have enough.
You have enough with one copy of each type of novel: Picaresque novel(Gil Blas). Novel of improbable qualities (Three Musketeers). Historical novel (Walter Scott). Typical English novel (Dickens, George Eliot who is a woman). Typical French novel (Balzac). Typical Russian novel (Dostoyevsky). Typical modern Spanish novel (Galdós, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, the dramatist is Ruiz de Alarcón).
The best manuals of universal history are the ones by Duruy, and the best history of Venezuela is the one by Baralt which you should own.
The day you’ve read all this you will possess an enormous literary culture. As you see, it’s not necessary to read many books, but rather books that are characteristic of each age.
J. Gamber, Rue Danton 7, is more obliging and active than Jarrin; when you write to him sign your name as Lorenzo Ramos, so he doesn’t confuse you with me. Tell him you don’t want deluxe editions, just decent ones.
You should own: F. Loliée, Histoire Des Littératures comparées.
Edmond Desmolins, À quoi tient la supériorité des Anglosaxons?
Get in touch with J. Gamber, the best agent. He lives in Paris, Rue Danton, 7.
Make sure to read the books I recommend first, and don’t let yourself be guided in that point by anyone else.
I’m willing to serve you with all my powers. Write to me whenever you’d like. Be polite and live alone. Please your fellow human beings and evade them. Make each person you deal with a friend, though not an importune friend but rather a useful friend.
(Unsigned)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Mr. Lorenzo Ramos
Maracaibo, Agencia Banco Venezuela
Dear Lorenzo,
I received your letter. I read it with the utmost attention and visited Lecuna, who is willing to leave you there and contribute to your prosperity. It is to your benefit if you live within the four walls of your house. I’m taking into consideration what you say in your last letter. I had already written to you saying that you should write with the single adornment of the exact expression and cruelly suppressing whatever might sound like a discourse. The word should always be humble and plain. One should never call attention to oneself. Avoid bad company. There are many alcoholics among them. Live alone, but be polite.
You should have in your property the following books in French versions and in prose, except for the Bible, which should be the Protestant version by Cipriano de Valera:
The Iliad and Odyssey, Plutarch, Virgil, The Edda which is to say Scandinavian Mythology (this last book can be found for you by François Jarrin, Rue des Écoles 48 or J. Gamber, Rue Danton 7), the Divine Comedy, Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, Don Quijote in Spanish, Goethe’s Faust, Telemachus, the Thousand and One Nights.
Read, even if you don’t have them:
English theater (Shakespeare), Spanish theater (Lope de Vega, Calderón, Tirso de Molina, Alarcón), Greek theater (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), French theater (Molière, Racine and Corneille). With reading one drama by each author you have enough.
You have enough with one copy of each type of novel: Picaresque novel(Gil Blas). Novel of improbable qualities (Three Musketeers). Historical novel (Walter Scott). Typical English novel (Dickens, George Eliot who is a woman). Typical French novel (Balzac). Typical Russian novel (Dostoyevsky). Typical modern Spanish novel (Galdós, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, the dramatist is Ruiz de Alarcón).
The best manuals of universal history are the ones by Duruy, and the best history of Venezuela is the one by Baralt which you should own.
The day you’ve read all this you will possess an enormous literary culture. As you see, it’s not necessary to read many books, but rather books that are characteristic of each age.
J. Gamber, Rue Danton 7, is more obliging and active than Jarrin; when you write to him sign your name as Lorenzo Ramos, so he doesn’t confuse you with me. Tell him you don’t want deluxe editions, just decent ones.
You should own: F. Loliée, Histoire Des Littératures comparées.
Edmond Desmolins, À quoi tient la supériorité des Anglosaxons?
Get in touch with J. Gamber, the best agent. He lives in Paris, Rue Danton, 7.
Make sure to read the books I recommend first, and don’t let yourself be guided in that point by anyone else.
I’m willing to serve you with all my powers. Write to me whenever you’d like. Be polite and live alone. Please your fellow human beings and evade them. Make each person you deal with a friend, though not an importune friend but rather a useful friend.
(Unsigned)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.08.2011
Consejos de orden intelectual para Lorenzo Ramos / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Advice of An Intellectual Order for Lorenzo Ramos
Writing well comes down to writing exact expressions. Achieving the exact expression, requires knowing the dictionary quite well. One has to study the dictionary, know the greatest number of words and turns or phrases. Turns or phrases are learned by continuously reading Baralt. Grammar is learned by continuously reading Exposición sobre los casos y oraciones by Eduardo Benot, Hernando bookstore, Madrid, and also by consulting the section devoted to grammar in the Memento Larousse, an indispensable work that is sold at François Jarrin, Paris, Rue des Ecoles 48. Don’t confuse Memento Larousse with other works by the same Larousse. That one has small treatises on matters indispensable to a civilized man.
French is dominated by constantly studying the French Ollendorf composed by Eduardo Benot, Hernando bookstore, Madrid.
One learns English by means of the English Ollendorf composed by Eduardo Benot, Hernando bookstore, Madrid. Each English word is learned with its pronunciation and accentuation according to what is said in the Cuyás dictionary. The words are learned from Spanish for the foreign tongue: pan is bread, and not bread is pan. One has to educate the ear by reading English aloud. It seems to me that one must seek out an American or English teacher after one knows the entire Benot method.
One must read preferring the major authors to minor ones, Virgil to Villaespesa. I recommend the Historia Universal by Juan Vicente González or the manuals by Duruy, who contains the entire universal history in six small manuals about each era (Middle Ages and, etc.).
What is written should have a single adornment: that of exactitude. What is written should not cause an effect, alarm in the reader, the expression should never sound like a discourse, like declamatory and tribunal eloquence. Never, in what is said, done or written, should one call attention to oneself. That principal is the foundation of all social virtues.
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Writing well comes down to writing exact expressions. Achieving the exact expression, requires knowing the dictionary quite well. One has to study the dictionary, know the greatest number of words and turns or phrases. Turns or phrases are learned by continuously reading Baralt. Grammar is learned by continuously reading Exposición sobre los casos y oraciones by Eduardo Benot, Hernando bookstore, Madrid, and also by consulting the section devoted to grammar in the Memento Larousse, an indispensable work that is sold at François Jarrin, Paris, Rue des Ecoles 48. Don’t confuse Memento Larousse with other works by the same Larousse. That one has small treatises on matters indispensable to a civilized man.
French is dominated by constantly studying the French Ollendorf composed by Eduardo Benot, Hernando bookstore, Madrid.
One learns English by means of the English Ollendorf composed by Eduardo Benot, Hernando bookstore, Madrid. Each English word is learned with its pronunciation and accentuation according to what is said in the Cuyás dictionary. The words are learned from Spanish for the foreign tongue: pan is bread, and not bread is pan. One has to educate the ear by reading English aloud. It seems to me that one must seek out an American or English teacher after one knows the entire Benot method.
One must read preferring the major authors to minor ones, Virgil to Villaespesa. I recommend the Historia Universal by Juan Vicente González or the manuals by Duruy, who contains the entire universal history in six small manuals about each era (Middle Ages and, etc.).
What is written should have a single adornment: that of exactitude. What is written should not cause an effect, alarm in the reader, the expression should never sound like a discourse, like declamatory and tribunal eloquence. Never, in what is said, done or written, should one call attention to oneself. That principal is the foundation of all social virtues.
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.07.2011
A Lorenzo Ramos / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
To Lorenzo Ramos
[September 1924]
[...]
by Marden and the ones by Prentice Mulford are much better. Life is like you think it; so, if you think of it badly, you go crazy with desperation. Take great care of your health; don’t get sick. I approve of you writing. For that, every day you will write a thought that is the logical consequence of the one you have printed on the previous day. Always write at the same hour. Compose with the utmost simplicity and the least amount of words. Don’t try to compose without knowing very well what you want to say. Never imitate what someone else has said, because each man is his own world, and moreover each man has within his spirit a mine where he can always find what he needs. Listen to yourself. Read Baralt, Ricardo León, Pardo Bazán, Cervantes, Mariana. Above all read Baralt very closely as though it were a book of prayers. With those authors you will learn how to handle Spanish. Constantly consult the dictionary. You can feel which adjective needs to be applied to the noun, and that’s the one that should be applied. Put original adjectives, suitable to you, that are your own opinion about what you think or see. To be original, it’s enough to listen to yourself, avoiding copying. But don’t forget that beauty comes before originality. Another thing, be very moderate when you write, don’t ever incur in exaggeration, in disproportion. Familiarize yourself a great deal with Baralt, read him every day. Every time you read a book, write your impressions, in a simple style, with least number of words, and with logic, deducing each thought from the previous one.
You need to study in depth the career you have, pay attention to finances, political economy, banks, and write about that. Don’t ever say así fue que, but rather así fue como; allí fue que, but rather allí fue donde; entonces fue que, but rather entonces fue cuando; por esto es que, but rather por esto es por lo que; tan es así, but rather tanto es así.
Writing is a thing of great patience, and it should not be omitted for a single day. One writes every day, without exception. To write well you need to have the greatest number of words and typical phrases memorized.
I repeat that you should choose a writer as a teacher, I recommend Baralt and Ricardo León. More the first.
I’m answering your letter from memory, because I can’t remember where I put it. Tell [...] that the persons he has dealt with have made him too irritable and mournful, which is to say, he practices the two defects that have killed Juan Miguel Alarcón. Tell him that irritation and lamentation can be gotten rid of with exercise. They tell me he eats too much. If you're going to eat too much you need to exercise frequently. But gluttony is always condemned, because it leads to arthritis.
I don’t think I have anything else to tell you.
A hug from
José Antonio
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
[September 1924]
[...]
by Marden and the ones by Prentice Mulford are much better. Life is like you think it; so, if you think of it badly, you go crazy with desperation. Take great care of your health; don’t get sick. I approve of you writing. For that, every day you will write a thought that is the logical consequence of the one you have printed on the previous day. Always write at the same hour. Compose with the utmost simplicity and the least amount of words. Don’t try to compose without knowing very well what you want to say. Never imitate what someone else has said, because each man is his own world, and moreover each man has within his spirit a mine where he can always find what he needs. Listen to yourself. Read Baralt, Ricardo León, Pardo Bazán, Cervantes, Mariana. Above all read Baralt very closely as though it were a book of prayers. With those authors you will learn how to handle Spanish. Constantly consult the dictionary. You can feel which adjective needs to be applied to the noun, and that’s the one that should be applied. Put original adjectives, suitable to you, that are your own opinion about what you think or see. To be original, it’s enough to listen to yourself, avoiding copying. But don’t forget that beauty comes before originality. Another thing, be very moderate when you write, don’t ever incur in exaggeration, in disproportion. Familiarize yourself a great deal with Baralt, read him every day. Every time you read a book, write your impressions, in a simple style, with least number of words, and with logic, deducing each thought from the previous one.
You need to study in depth the career you have, pay attention to finances, political economy, banks, and write about that. Don’t ever say así fue que, but rather así fue como; allí fue que, but rather allí fue donde; entonces fue que, but rather entonces fue cuando; por esto es que, but rather por esto es por lo que; tan es así, but rather tanto es así.
Writing is a thing of great patience, and it should not be omitted for a single day. One writes every day, without exception. To write well you need to have the greatest number of words and typical phrases memorized.
I repeat that you should choose a writer as a teacher, I recommend Baralt and Ricardo León. More the first.
I’m answering your letter from memory, because I can’t remember where I put it. Tell [...] that the persons he has dealt with have made him too irritable and mournful, which is to say, he practices the two defects that have killed Juan Miguel Alarcón. Tell him that irritation and lamentation can be gotten rid of with exercise. They tell me he eats too much. If you're going to eat too much you need to exercise frequently. But gluttony is always condemned, because it leads to arthritis.
I don’t think I have anything else to tell you.
A hug from
José Antonio
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.06.2011
Der Alchemist / Eduardo Mariño
Der Alchemist
I don’t long for any recompense. I only watch and wait.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
I don’t long for any recompense. I only watch and wait.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
12.05.2011
Evaristo Jiménez se niega a enterrar su barco / Eduardo Mariño
Evaristo Jiménez Refuses to Bury His Boat
Until the decrepitude of the word I didn’t know I carried such an unusual agony. Even then, I will never be able to convince myself of the futility of so much ocean.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
Until the decrepitude of the word I didn’t know I carried such an unusual agony. Even then, I will never be able to convince myself of the futility of so much ocean.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
12.02.2011
Terraza desde ninguna voz / Eduardo Mariño
Terrace from No Voice
Some hand will nervously seek the nervous company of another hand in the penumbra, one chair will slowly approach another and a silence like forbidden skin will come to swing behind the melody. I loose my eyes toward the door, distant like all doors, disquieting like my own exit, like no exit; I look outside and only guess at the rumor of your barefoot steps disturbing me in the night.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
Some hand will nervously seek the nervous company of another hand in the penumbra, one chair will slowly approach another and a silence like forbidden skin will come to swing behind the melody. I loose my eyes toward the door, distant like all doors, disquieting like my own exit, like no exit; I look outside and only guess at the rumor of your barefoot steps disturbing me in the night.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
12.01.2011
Ynés, 1993 / Eduardo Mariño
Ynes, 1993
The whole house was made of stone. The coffee was sour, the kisses at the door left dry lips, the tired glance as if returning from a thousand cities.
Only your name was a synonym for astonishment.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
The whole house was made of stone. The coffee was sour, the kisses at the door left dry lips, the tired glance as if returning from a thousand cities.
Only your name was a synonym for astonishment.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.28.2011
Siboney / Eduardo Mariño
Siboney
The light conceals you, but your sickly lineage has measure and a corporeal nature: make pain, now, make sangria of insides. Move your soul to the least modest side and it will be nighttime and you will be outside, where no one observes you, under the light, this light.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
The light conceals you, but your sickly lineage has measure and a corporeal nature: make pain, now, make sangria of insides. Move your soul to the least modest side and it will be nighttime and you will be outside, where no one observes you, under the light, this light.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.27.2011
Introduction for Cedar Sigo at Minor American
In the Preface to his 2003 novel The Mask of the Beggar, the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris outlines his methods:
“The artist or author does not have absolute control of his creations but is subject to being created afresh by the characters (or character-masks) he creates. In this way there is no final creation since finality is ceaselessly partial and subject to profoundest alterations.
The artist experiences an excitement, troubling and ecstatic, as he finds himself launched on pathways he never expected to travel and on which his intuition is aroused afresh.”
Cedar Sigo is both the creator and a participant of the “troubling and ecstatic” adventures we find in his verse. His books enact an unpredictable tension between control and intuition. They seek an awareness of how the poem might take root and unfold its charm, somewhere in the process of reading & writing. A few of the “character-masks” in his strange new book have accompanied him for over a decade, many of them first appearing in hand-crafted, semi-secret broadsides and chapbooks, others in private, typewritten letters. Reading his books, we can note how his poems have built up a repertoire of words and images that are distinctly his own. These familiar presences serve as signposts for the reader, though they remain unsettled. Some of these shades that inhabit his poetry include: hotels, blood, rooms, typewriters, windows, antique or rare editions, the city (as an event & organism), music and the night.
What we might hear tonight is a type of music played on vinyl. It actually begins with pause in the room when someone gets up to select the right record, stopping to admire its sleeve. We wait for the needle to drop, the orphic pulse of a figure leaning over an old machine, broadcasting. Please welcome Cedar Sigo.
(For the reading by Cedar Sigo & Ken Taylor at the Minor American reading series on 19 October 2011, Duke University, Durham, NC)
“The artist or author does not have absolute control of his creations but is subject to being created afresh by the characters (or character-masks) he creates. In this way there is no final creation since finality is ceaselessly partial and subject to profoundest alterations.
The artist experiences an excitement, troubling and ecstatic, as he finds himself launched on pathways he never expected to travel and on which his intuition is aroused afresh.”
Cedar Sigo is both the creator and a participant of the “troubling and ecstatic” adventures we find in his verse. His books enact an unpredictable tension between control and intuition. They seek an awareness of how the poem might take root and unfold its charm, somewhere in the process of reading & writing. A few of the “character-masks” in his strange new book have accompanied him for over a decade, many of them first appearing in hand-crafted, semi-secret broadsides and chapbooks, others in private, typewritten letters. Reading his books, we can note how his poems have built up a repertoire of words and images that are distinctly his own. These familiar presences serve as signposts for the reader, though they remain unsettled. Some of these shades that inhabit his poetry include: hotels, blood, rooms, typewriters, windows, antique or rare editions, the city (as an event & organism), music and the night.
What we might hear tonight is a type of music played on vinyl. It actually begins with pause in the room when someone gets up to select the right record, stopping to admire its sleeve. We wait for the needle to drop, the orphic pulse of a figure leaning over an old machine, broadcasting. Please welcome Cedar Sigo.
(For the reading by Cedar Sigo & Ken Taylor at the Minor American reading series on 19 October 2011, Duke University, Durham, NC)
11.26.2011
Poética / Miguel James
Poetics
Let’s say
that poetry
is writing
and speaking
words
and pretty things
The rest
Is Prose
And Tragedy.
A las diosas del mar (1999)
{ Miguel James, Mi novia Ítala come flores y otras novias, Mérida: Ediciones Mucuglifo, 2007 }
Let’s say
that poetry
is writing
and speaking
words
and pretty things
The rest
Is Prose
And Tragedy.
A las diosas del mar (1999)
{ Miguel James, Mi novia Ítala come flores y otras novias, Mérida: Ediciones Mucuglifo, 2007 }
11.21.2011
Contra la policía / Miguel James
Against the Police
My entire Oeuvre is against the police
If I write a Love poem it’s against the police
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police
And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police
I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police
All my prose is against the police
My entire Oeuvre
Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against the police.
Kentakes, poemas para la reina y otras obras maestras (2003)
{ Miguel James, Mi novia Ítala come flores y otras novias, Mérida: Ediciones Mucuglifo, 2007 }
My entire Oeuvre is against the police
If I write a Love poem it’s against the police
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police
And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police
I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police
All my prose is against the police
My entire Oeuvre
Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against the police.
Kentakes, poemas para la reina y otras obras maestras (2003)
{ Miguel James, Mi novia Ítala come flores y otras novias, Mérida: Ediciones Mucuglifo, 2007 }
11.20.2011
Las otras ruinas circulares / Gabriel Payares
The Other Circular Ruins
It’s always a discomfort to speak in generational terms: whoever does it runs the risk of raising a banner in the name of many. Which is why in the following lines I’ll try, in any case, to speak from a perspective that’s my own, singular and personal. I think that those of us who were born in the eighties were fated to begin writing surrounded mostly by ruins: those of a formal educational system, for example, that a long time ago lost its bearings and collapsed, in a frank and open demonstration of the scant interest Venezuelans take in the construction of their future generations; but also the ruins of a culture of citizenship, manifested in the post-apocalyptic aspect of our unloved cities, in our shameful political behavior or in the brutal quota of violence that day by day desensitizes us to death and suffering. A country in ruins, then, to reiterate the journalistic cliché. I’m afraid this won’t be a very hopeful reading.
But it’s not my intention to repeat here what everyone knows, rather to own that metaphor for a while: ruins are, at once, remembrance of an ancient project and totem of a future desire, and that is precisely the idea that governs our particular imaginary of home: since every moment in the past was always better, we’ve chosen to wait for it to magically repeat itself; we are the debtors of Bolívar’s cadaver, waiting for the instant when he’ll rise from his bicentennial tomb and rescue us. The term “ruin,” [ruina] on the other hand, contains the word “contemptible” [ruin], whose most obvious meaning is linked to a state of moral degradation, of evil, of vileness. And it isn’t accidental: our crisis, it has already been said quite frequently, is a profound moral crisis, which both film and literature have tried to echo, maybe not in the most effective manner. It’s enough to recall the films of the nineties, incapable of overcoming their surprise at the country’s growing marginal communities, or the literary production of more or less the same era, half obsessed with finding answers in national historical references, as in that branch of fiction that Luz Marina Rivas has baptized as “intrahistoric,” and likewise with the idea of reporting an increasingly coarse reality, perhaps as a strategy to digest it: to make it fit within a narrative, to summarize it, quantify it.
Whatever the case, the conclusion this leads to was already announced to us by the great Juan Liscano, when he affirmed that our creators have always succumbed to an imperative desire for realism, for an artist’s commitment to his corresponding historical moment, in frank detriment however of the deployment of his inner worlds. The exercise of fiction, it seems, constitutes in our country a form of cultured referentiality, and in obedience, quite often, to a political mandate that assumes the writer’s role is to raise the awareness of the masses, to “open their eyes” to reality, as if people were sleeping and expectant, waiting for an illuminated figure to point the way for them or speak as their representative. Seen in this manner, it is the literary equivalent of populism, whose most recent evolution proposes one write for a “basic” reader, one who is “down to earth” and “average,” like a reading for invalids, and which in many cases is merely an excuse to hide the scarce poetic projection of the whoever is writing. I think one should distrust whoever proposes a decaffeinated literature for vacations.
The critic Carlos Sandoval critiqued something similar in a recent edition of the Bienal Mariano Picón Salas prize, when he referred to the predominance, in our 21st century fiction, of proposals that are incapable of “...overcoming the anecdotal and descriptive.” Our fictional muscle, it seems, continues to be just as weak as before, despite the fact that the unbearable social crisis, to which a political crisis has been added, already has more popular figures that concern themselves with it, such as journalists and data analysts, political scientists or pollsters, and that historical discourse, which today resounds louder than ever, remains a territory for scholars of the field and historians. So what then is the role, the place of the writer today?
There’s more than one answer. For some it’s found under the lights and cameras, in hundreds of photos tagged on Facebook, new stars of the naked king, of the writer who never writes, or in interminable lists of blogs and web pages of varied and often contradictory poetic value. For others it’s found anchored in the idea of the city, in the description of urban surroundings like postmodern chroniclers of the Indies, determined to combat the worn out rural and epic discourse of the independence era with a paradoxical exaltation of our impoverished modernity. And for a very few the writer’s place is in the dark, struggling with language in order to attempt to create a world of one’s own, an “inner meadow” –as the cartoon character Miguelito by Quino would say– that will allow him to endure (or not) Venezuela’s crushing and autonomous reality. “More fiction and less realism” was also the diagnosis of the fiction writer from Trujillo Carolina Lozada, in a recent interview, worried about the myopia with which we seem to contemplate the task of writing, a myopia that gets worse with the deficit of specialized editors in the country and which moreover forgets that the commitment of every writer is first to fiction, to poetry, to finding the answers to life in a language that is his own and autonomous, as free as possible yet believable, by which I mean, with the production of keys that can interpret not only the country and the world, but also the self: the writer’s commitment should be profoundly subjective, and it should be a priority in his life.
Maybe for thinking in this manner it’s been my role to insist, maybe foolishly, stubbornly, stupidly even, in mistrusting the excessive celebratory eagerness to which we tend to be so disposed. The recent multiplication of young voices willing to enter into the field of writing should no doubt make us happy, but not so much as to affirm the existence of a boom, or much less of a golden age for our fiction, irresponsible affirmations that simply raise the bar beyond reach, sentencing us later to settling with what exists, since as our invisible friends say, “this is what we got.” A disservice, in my opinion, for those of us who have the hope of being read, and which ends up being more painful today, in the light of the implacable recession we suffer in the editorial world. Where are they now, the voices who sang about our unstoppable advance, our golden age, our editorial flowering? It ends up being ironic, what’s more, that we celebrate a realist literature without having our feet firmly on the ground, ignoring the fact that in literary matters, one, two or three books published are little more than the beginning of a career, and not the cusp and much less the goal, and that complacency, short cuts and immediacy, conditions so in tune with our sad idiosyncrasy, once again play, just as they do in other realms of experience, openly against us. Moral: we shouldn’t want to resuscitate, like voodoo priests, that better past that our abundant ruins accuse. The road lies, instead, in the demanding maturation of our incipient talents and excellence: if we never learned how to sow our petroleum, at least we should learn to cultivate patience. Cadenas has said it: “culture is a thing of patience.”
And in this sense, I would like to close by remembering what the good Ednodio Quintero was kind enough to share with me one day, a product of his readings of the Argentine César Aira: the samurai from Los Andes told me there are two ways to become a writer, which are: to publish first and then write, a strategy that guarantees a quick access to fame, or writing first and publishing later, by which you place your wager on the rigors of transcendence. And since it will be time that decides the wheat from the chaff, we should procure to keep our feet on the ground, and in the best of cases, and paraphrasing a famous Spanish painter, let time find us writing. Everything else, I’m afraid, is new illusions.
Thank you very much.
Text read at the Universidad de Carabobo, in the city of Valencia, by invitation from the Jornadas de Voz Creativa 2011.
{ Gabriel Payares, Blog Caribe, 18 November 2011 }
It’s always a discomfort to speak in generational terms: whoever does it runs the risk of raising a banner in the name of many. Which is why in the following lines I’ll try, in any case, to speak from a perspective that’s my own, singular and personal. I think that those of us who were born in the eighties were fated to begin writing surrounded mostly by ruins: those of a formal educational system, for example, that a long time ago lost its bearings and collapsed, in a frank and open demonstration of the scant interest Venezuelans take in the construction of their future generations; but also the ruins of a culture of citizenship, manifested in the post-apocalyptic aspect of our unloved cities, in our shameful political behavior or in the brutal quota of violence that day by day desensitizes us to death and suffering. A country in ruins, then, to reiterate the journalistic cliché. I’m afraid this won’t be a very hopeful reading.
But it’s not my intention to repeat here what everyone knows, rather to own that metaphor for a while: ruins are, at once, remembrance of an ancient project and totem of a future desire, and that is precisely the idea that governs our particular imaginary of home: since every moment in the past was always better, we’ve chosen to wait for it to magically repeat itself; we are the debtors of Bolívar’s cadaver, waiting for the instant when he’ll rise from his bicentennial tomb and rescue us. The term “ruin,” [ruina] on the other hand, contains the word “contemptible” [ruin], whose most obvious meaning is linked to a state of moral degradation, of evil, of vileness. And it isn’t accidental: our crisis, it has already been said quite frequently, is a profound moral crisis, which both film and literature have tried to echo, maybe not in the most effective manner. It’s enough to recall the films of the nineties, incapable of overcoming their surprise at the country’s growing marginal communities, or the literary production of more or less the same era, half obsessed with finding answers in national historical references, as in that branch of fiction that Luz Marina Rivas has baptized as “intrahistoric,” and likewise with the idea of reporting an increasingly coarse reality, perhaps as a strategy to digest it: to make it fit within a narrative, to summarize it, quantify it.
Whatever the case, the conclusion this leads to was already announced to us by the great Juan Liscano, when he affirmed that our creators have always succumbed to an imperative desire for realism, for an artist’s commitment to his corresponding historical moment, in frank detriment however of the deployment of his inner worlds. The exercise of fiction, it seems, constitutes in our country a form of cultured referentiality, and in obedience, quite often, to a political mandate that assumes the writer’s role is to raise the awareness of the masses, to “open their eyes” to reality, as if people were sleeping and expectant, waiting for an illuminated figure to point the way for them or speak as their representative. Seen in this manner, it is the literary equivalent of populism, whose most recent evolution proposes one write for a “basic” reader, one who is “down to earth” and “average,” like a reading for invalids, and which in many cases is merely an excuse to hide the scarce poetic projection of the whoever is writing. I think one should distrust whoever proposes a decaffeinated literature for vacations.
The critic Carlos Sandoval critiqued something similar in a recent edition of the Bienal Mariano Picón Salas prize, when he referred to the predominance, in our 21st century fiction, of proposals that are incapable of “...overcoming the anecdotal and descriptive.” Our fictional muscle, it seems, continues to be just as weak as before, despite the fact that the unbearable social crisis, to which a political crisis has been added, already has more popular figures that concern themselves with it, such as journalists and data analysts, political scientists or pollsters, and that historical discourse, which today resounds louder than ever, remains a territory for scholars of the field and historians. So what then is the role, the place of the writer today?
There’s more than one answer. For some it’s found under the lights and cameras, in hundreds of photos tagged on Facebook, new stars of the naked king, of the writer who never writes, or in interminable lists of blogs and web pages of varied and often contradictory poetic value. For others it’s found anchored in the idea of the city, in the description of urban surroundings like postmodern chroniclers of the Indies, determined to combat the worn out rural and epic discourse of the independence era with a paradoxical exaltation of our impoverished modernity. And for a very few the writer’s place is in the dark, struggling with language in order to attempt to create a world of one’s own, an “inner meadow” –as the cartoon character Miguelito by Quino would say– that will allow him to endure (or not) Venezuela’s crushing and autonomous reality. “More fiction and less realism” was also the diagnosis of the fiction writer from Trujillo Carolina Lozada, in a recent interview, worried about the myopia with which we seem to contemplate the task of writing, a myopia that gets worse with the deficit of specialized editors in the country and which moreover forgets that the commitment of every writer is first to fiction, to poetry, to finding the answers to life in a language that is his own and autonomous, as free as possible yet believable, by which I mean, with the production of keys that can interpret not only the country and the world, but also the self: the writer’s commitment should be profoundly subjective, and it should be a priority in his life.
Maybe for thinking in this manner it’s been my role to insist, maybe foolishly, stubbornly, stupidly even, in mistrusting the excessive celebratory eagerness to which we tend to be so disposed. The recent multiplication of young voices willing to enter into the field of writing should no doubt make us happy, but not so much as to affirm the existence of a boom, or much less of a golden age for our fiction, irresponsible affirmations that simply raise the bar beyond reach, sentencing us later to settling with what exists, since as our invisible friends say, “this is what we got.” A disservice, in my opinion, for those of us who have the hope of being read, and which ends up being more painful today, in the light of the implacable recession we suffer in the editorial world. Where are they now, the voices who sang about our unstoppable advance, our golden age, our editorial flowering? It ends up being ironic, what’s more, that we celebrate a realist literature without having our feet firmly on the ground, ignoring the fact that in literary matters, one, two or three books published are little more than the beginning of a career, and not the cusp and much less the goal, and that complacency, short cuts and immediacy, conditions so in tune with our sad idiosyncrasy, once again play, just as they do in other realms of experience, openly against us. Moral: we shouldn’t want to resuscitate, like voodoo priests, that better past that our abundant ruins accuse. The road lies, instead, in the demanding maturation of our incipient talents and excellence: if we never learned how to sow our petroleum, at least we should learn to cultivate patience. Cadenas has said it: “culture is a thing of patience.”
And in this sense, I would like to close by remembering what the good Ednodio Quintero was kind enough to share with me one day, a product of his readings of the Argentine César Aira: the samurai from Los Andes told me there are two ways to become a writer, which are: to publish first and then write, a strategy that guarantees a quick access to fame, or writing first and publishing later, by which you place your wager on the rigors of transcendence. And since it will be time that decides the wheat from the chaff, we should procure to keep our feet on the ground, and in the best of cases, and paraphrasing a famous Spanish painter, let time find us writing. Everything else, I’m afraid, is new illusions.
Thank you very much.
Text read at the Universidad de Carabobo, in the city of Valencia, by invitation from the Jornadas de Voz Creativa 2011.
{ Gabriel Payares, Blog Caribe, 18 November 2011 }
11.18.2011
V / Eduardo Mariño
V
1.
Tomorrow, the thousandth augury, the fearsome memory, God’s remorseful urge, the moribund sacrament, the terrible gods miserably cornered at the tip of the dream; childhood decrees a spectral silence, all of this, the challenge and the awe from me a promise:
2.
Never, the sentences, the hanging moons, the hands drowning in the fog, the wax boiling in the eyes, lying, subjugating. Celaeno, evening goodbyes, inequalities in the final skin that consecrate the least of man’s rights, of the illuminated dream that drags its name and its disgrace; the walls erase all signs of names and the secret senses awaken an ironic nostalgia of seas, suns that fall, heroes, unfinished journeys, stories that turn and turn without a face, without a number, nameless, timeless:
3.
Yesterday, a sail on the horizon, a candle on your table, a cave in the sand, a bloodless conquest, packed with previous attempts. The Word names the prohibited altars and the astonishing lines of Fire. I know that the hard spiral of this immense crucible of ignominies spies on me with its terrible, black, open and restless hair, its tiny tiger’s smile and the dagger at its belt, cruelly sharpened, eternal, inextinguishable in my side, its blade, the weak gratings that occasion the misfortune of a single caress:
4.
Eternity, of whose secret songs someone has said they reveal the time and place of a revenge. With certainty I know it corresponds to its infallible condition of witness, to consider this wound a triumph, an overwhelming defeat or simply a grateful reminder for the Dharma of these hours under the sign of the Desert of Fire.
Por si los dioses mueren (1995)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
1.
Tomorrow, the thousandth augury, the fearsome memory, God’s remorseful urge, the moribund sacrament, the terrible gods miserably cornered at the tip of the dream; childhood decrees a spectral silence, all of this, the challenge and the awe from me a promise:
2.
Never, the sentences, the hanging moons, the hands drowning in the fog, the wax boiling in the eyes, lying, subjugating. Celaeno, evening goodbyes, inequalities in the final skin that consecrate the least of man’s rights, of the illuminated dream that drags its name and its disgrace; the walls erase all signs of names and the secret senses awaken an ironic nostalgia of seas, suns that fall, heroes, unfinished journeys, stories that turn and turn without a face, without a number, nameless, timeless:
3.
Yesterday, a sail on the horizon, a candle on your table, a cave in the sand, a bloodless conquest, packed with previous attempts. The Word names the prohibited altars and the astonishing lines of Fire. I know that the hard spiral of this immense crucible of ignominies spies on me with its terrible, black, open and restless hair, its tiny tiger’s smile and the dagger at its belt, cruelly sharpened, eternal, inextinguishable in my side, its blade, the weak gratings that occasion the misfortune of a single caress:
4.
Eternity, of whose secret songs someone has said they reveal the time and place of a revenge. With certainty I know it corresponds to its infallible condition of witness, to consider this wound a triumph, an overwhelming defeat or simply a grateful reminder for the Dharma of these hours under the sign of the Desert of Fire.
Por si los dioses mueren (1995)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.15.2011
“El tema del mar es inagotable y apenas nos hemos asomado a él”: Entrevista a Rubi Guerra / Roberto Echeto
“The topic of the sea is inexhaustible and we’ve barely glanced at it”: An Interview with Rubi Guerra
The Venezuelan writer Rubi Guerra was born in San Tomé, state of Anzoátegui, in 1958. His published titles include El discreto enemigo (2001), Un sueño comentado (2004), La tarea del testigo (2007) and Las formas del amor y otros cuentos (2010). On this occasion he speaks with us about the sea, about books and about the disturbing relationship between literature and society.
What’s the relationship like between books, your surroundings and yourself? I ask because you live in Cumaná, a city we assume is closer to activities related to the sea, tourism and the happiness of living in shorts, rather than to literature.
You can’t find too many books in Cumaná; that’s a reality that can’t be overlooked. Very few bookstores and a public library that is updated with difficulty. It is, perhaps, one of the most discouraging aspects of living here. Although, on the other hand, books are so expensive right now that many of the few that are available can’t be bought. Over time, I’ve been gathering some books that help me write, pass the time, live. Sometimes I ask myself how people can write here, in this hot, noisy, violent city with so few cultural or spiritual incentives, or whatever we might want to call them. If you head out to the city’s beaches, you’ll find people in shorts and bikinis, empanda, beer and hot dog vendors, unemployed people, vagabonds, beggars and thieves, entire families with their dogs and cats, high school students listening to reggaeton, lovers without money for a hotel, shoreline fishermen. People who live happily, unhappily, indifferently. Five thousand years ago the Guaiquerí indians used to fish on these beaches; five hundred years ago the Spanish soldiers, the Franciscans and the Tyrant Aguirre passed through here; Sir Walter Raleigh was defeated here; José Rafael Pocaterra threw two thousand rifles into the gulf here when the Falke ship was fleeing from the forces of Gómez. Many things have happened and continue to happen. So I suppose that because of that humanity –of which one forms a part– you end up making literature. Or try to.
Regarding the previous question, why do you think it is we haven’t created a literature of the sea? Are there too few works with the sea as a topic in our libraries or do the necessary ones exist?
I haven’t made a list, but I too have the impression that the sea as a topic appears very little in our literature. If I start to think about it, a limited number of books come to mind (most of them written before 1960), and it’s curious because we have an immense coastal strip. It would be logical to expect that such a fascinating landscape, to which so many human activities are associated, would generate a great literature. Obviously that’s not the case. Determining why is difficult. A disinterest in the landscape, which reminds us of costumbrismo? Ignorance? A concentration on our urban surroundings? I don’t know. What I’m sure about is that the topic of the sea, in its multiple varied aspects, is inexhaustible, and we’ve barely glanced at it.
Is there a relationship between literature and society? Do you think the books we read (whether the ones our education programs require or the ones we acquire on our own) help define us as individuals and as a society or, on the contrary, that literature doesn’t have anything to do with such delicate matters?
As individuals, we can’t stop seeing ourselves as being affected by the society we live in, by its forms of organization, its forms of exercising power, its belief system; but, at the same time, we aren’t chained to that society. Fortunately, the more or less organized forces of society are opposed by the more or less chaotic forces of the unconscious, of desire, of dreams, of impulses. Curiously, books participate in both orders: they help us form ourselves as individuals and legitimize the social fabric, but they also introduce doubt, heresy, impossible worlds, the unproductive, the capricious, the gratuitous, what is not bound to any norm. We have to be thankful for that. We are social beings in a permanent fight against the social. Members of a herd who march in solitude.
How do you perceive the opportunities for publishing being an author who lives in a province of the country? Are authors in the provinces taken into account as much as authors in the capital?
I’ve published the books I’ve wanted to publish. Living in the provinces hasn’t affected me in that sense. So I can’t complain about the opportunities. Of course, that’s my personal experience. I think I’ve been lucky. I do think my books would circulate more or would be more visible if I lived in Caracas. I’m aware that many people in the provinces find publishing to be very difficult simply because in their regions or cities there are no publishing houses, neither public or private. Whether we like it or not, Caracas continues to be the great center of editorial production and it’s also the promotional center. In a certain manner, what happens outside Caracas doesn’t exist. It would be great if this situation were different, but in order for that to happen many things would have to change: better systems of promotion and dissemination, a greater effectiveness in the distribution of books, the creation of new bookstores in the provinces, among other things.
{ Roberto Echeto, Santillana Ediciones Generales Venezuela, 14 November 2011 }
The Venezuelan writer Rubi Guerra was born in San Tomé, state of Anzoátegui, in 1958. His published titles include El discreto enemigo (2001), Un sueño comentado (2004), La tarea del testigo (2007) and Las formas del amor y otros cuentos (2010). On this occasion he speaks with us about the sea, about books and about the disturbing relationship between literature and society.
What’s the relationship like between books, your surroundings and yourself? I ask because you live in Cumaná, a city we assume is closer to activities related to the sea, tourism and the happiness of living in shorts, rather than to literature.
You can’t find too many books in Cumaná; that’s a reality that can’t be overlooked. Very few bookstores and a public library that is updated with difficulty. It is, perhaps, one of the most discouraging aspects of living here. Although, on the other hand, books are so expensive right now that many of the few that are available can’t be bought. Over time, I’ve been gathering some books that help me write, pass the time, live. Sometimes I ask myself how people can write here, in this hot, noisy, violent city with so few cultural or spiritual incentives, or whatever we might want to call them. If you head out to the city’s beaches, you’ll find people in shorts and bikinis, empanda, beer and hot dog vendors, unemployed people, vagabonds, beggars and thieves, entire families with their dogs and cats, high school students listening to reggaeton, lovers without money for a hotel, shoreline fishermen. People who live happily, unhappily, indifferently. Five thousand years ago the Guaiquerí indians used to fish on these beaches; five hundred years ago the Spanish soldiers, the Franciscans and the Tyrant Aguirre passed through here; Sir Walter Raleigh was defeated here; José Rafael Pocaterra threw two thousand rifles into the gulf here when the Falke ship was fleeing from the forces of Gómez. Many things have happened and continue to happen. So I suppose that because of that humanity –of which one forms a part– you end up making literature. Or try to.
Regarding the previous question, why do you think it is we haven’t created a literature of the sea? Are there too few works with the sea as a topic in our libraries or do the necessary ones exist?
I haven’t made a list, but I too have the impression that the sea as a topic appears very little in our literature. If I start to think about it, a limited number of books come to mind (most of them written before 1960), and it’s curious because we have an immense coastal strip. It would be logical to expect that such a fascinating landscape, to which so many human activities are associated, would generate a great literature. Obviously that’s not the case. Determining why is difficult. A disinterest in the landscape, which reminds us of costumbrismo? Ignorance? A concentration on our urban surroundings? I don’t know. What I’m sure about is that the topic of the sea, in its multiple varied aspects, is inexhaustible, and we’ve barely glanced at it.
Is there a relationship between literature and society? Do you think the books we read (whether the ones our education programs require or the ones we acquire on our own) help define us as individuals and as a society or, on the contrary, that literature doesn’t have anything to do with such delicate matters?
As individuals, we can’t stop seeing ourselves as being affected by the society we live in, by its forms of organization, its forms of exercising power, its belief system; but, at the same time, we aren’t chained to that society. Fortunately, the more or less organized forces of society are opposed by the more or less chaotic forces of the unconscious, of desire, of dreams, of impulses. Curiously, books participate in both orders: they help us form ourselves as individuals and legitimize the social fabric, but they also introduce doubt, heresy, impossible worlds, the unproductive, the capricious, the gratuitous, what is not bound to any norm. We have to be thankful for that. We are social beings in a permanent fight against the social. Members of a herd who march in solitude.
How do you perceive the opportunities for publishing being an author who lives in a province of the country? Are authors in the provinces taken into account as much as authors in the capital?
I’ve published the books I’ve wanted to publish. Living in the provinces hasn’t affected me in that sense. So I can’t complain about the opportunities. Of course, that’s my personal experience. I think I’ve been lucky. I do think my books would circulate more or would be more visible if I lived in Caracas. I’m aware that many people in the provinces find publishing to be very difficult simply because in their regions or cities there are no publishing houses, neither public or private. Whether we like it or not, Caracas continues to be the great center of editorial production and it’s also the promotional center. In a certain manner, what happens outside Caracas doesn’t exist. It would be great if this situation were different, but in order for that to happen many things would have to change: better systems of promotion and dissemination, a greater effectiveness in the distribution of books, the creation of new bookstores in the provinces, among other things.
{ Roberto Echeto, Santillana Ediciones Generales Venezuela, 14 November 2011 }
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)