¿Ernesto Cardenal vs. Armando Rojas Guardia?


On April 1 the Venezuelan poet Joaquin Marta Sosa published an article in El Nacional titled "Los poetas no fueron a Turiaca." In this brief essay (see my translation below, April 2), Marta Sosa recounted a recent conversation he had in Caracas with the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal, an old friend of his. The two poets ended up disagreeing vehemently about the current crisis in Venezuela.

Although Cardenal left the Sandinista party more than a decade ago, and in the recently-published final volume of his autobiography he denounces the Sandinistas as corrupt and misguided, he accepted an invitation to attend a government-sponsored poetry conference and festival in Caracas. Venezuelan poets who are opposed to the current regime were disinvited from this event, which was organized by Luis Alberto Crespo at the Casa Nacional de las Letras Andrés Bello.

Cardenal was a close friend of the poet Miguel Otero Silva, one of the founders of the newspaper El Nacional. He writes fondly of his visits to Caracas in his autobiography. However, it's unlikely that his recent visit could have been as pleasant.

Cardenal's disagreement with Marta Sosa is important to note because it reflects the disaster that the chavista regime has created in Venezuela. Those poets who do not swear allegiance to the chavista "process" are being ostracized along with the millions of other Venezuelans who signed in favor of a referendum against Hugo Chávez. Poets, of course, will survive this disaster since poems require no physical sustenance. But Cardenal (and most likely Amiri Baraka, who was also in attendance at the Festival Mundial de Poesía) has fallen for the chavista marketing scheme which aims to blame its own incompetence and neo-stalinist tendencies on the infamous empire to the north.

One poet I've been reading recently is Armando Rojas Guardia (Caracas, 1948). Sometime soon I'll post translations of a few of his poems. He is one of two hundred Venezuelan intellectuals who signed an Open Letter last February (See archives below, Feb 28) in protest of the chavista regime's dictatorial tendencies. As in most "revolutions" (even if ours in Venezuela is una revolución chimba, an absurd revolution) intellectuals are targeted for indoctrination and monetary compensation, or exclusion and exile. One hopes that Cardenal listened to his Venezuelan friends when he was in Caracas, and that he will soon realize that the chavistas have nothing save incompetence and conflict to offer.

In the second volume of his autobiography (Las ínsulas extrañas, Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2002) Ernesto Cardenal includes the following two portraits of Rojas Guardia as a young student of exteriorismo:

"Armando Rojas Guardia es de los mejores poetas de Venezuela, y para algunos es el mejor. Su padre tambien era poeta, y en mi juventud yo había sido amigo de él, cuando era embajador de Venezuela en Nicaragua. Armando, el hijo, llegó de veinte y pico de años a Solentiname, y formo parte de nuestra comunidad por varios meses. Había sido jesuita por unos pocos años, y después que salió de la Compañia me escribió desde Europa diciendome que había sabido de nuestra comunidad, y que le interesaba por los dos aspectos, lo místico y lo social. Le contesté que bueno pues, que llegara.

Fue en Solentiname que empezó a querer ser poeta, y a serlo mejor dicho, pues allí escribió sus primeros versos, los que después publicó como Diario de Solentiname."
(416)



"Con esa poesía exteriorista Armando Rojas Guardia describió las lluvias de septiembre en Solentiname, las hojas de los plátanos goteando, el lago de muy diversos azules y sus garzas, el grito angustiado del pocoyo, y el murmullo amoroso de la oropéndola. O también el lago es un blancor inmóvil en la madrugada, ya casi el amanecer, bajo un cielo tenebroso, antes que cante el gallo junto a la cocina y se oigan los primeros botes con motor. Y despues son los Salmos a las siete, con las golondrinas alborotadas por el olor de la lluvia, y más tarde se mira desde el taller el agua metálica y brillante como zinc..."
(417)