(Postmodern) Caracas


What would an English edition of Juan Sánchez Peláez Obra poética (Lumen, 2004) (reviewed in this month's Letras Libres) look like? How many translators would it need? A mentor and friend to many fellow writers in Venezuela (including Eugenio Montejo, Elizabeth Schön, Luis Alberto Crespo, Rafael Cadenas, Vicente Gerbasi, Antonia Palacios), while having his own very strange quiet style, infinite but distanced urban adherence, suburb or library, garden, writing against Venezuela in its material and political presences, writing rather for muses in classical variations, the nine goddesses.

Allied with trees, mountains, cliffs, clouds over a back yard garden or courtyard, "mundos invisibles" in one of the nine new poems in the final chapter of the collection. His first book Elena y los elementos (1951) written reading France from Chile and Venezuela. His second book, Animal de costumbre (1959) contemporary to Jesús Rafel Soto's geometrical abstract paintings and sculptures, written in Paris where he lived in the early to mid 1950s. (Postmodern) Caracas is necessarily Paris, Madrid, London, New York, Boston, Miami, Mexico D.F.


"Viví mi primera etapa en París en las peores condiciones económicas. Oswaldo Barreto, cuando nos encontramos por azar frente al parque Luxemburgo, me dio al poco tiempo de mi llegada alojamiento en su buhardilla. ¡Pero qué importaba la pobreza, si estaba en París, había días luminosos y estaba entre amigos!"
—Miyó Vestrini, Entrevista con Juan Sánchez Peláez, El Nacional, 17 October 1982.


Postmodernist, dissident against militarism and caudillismo. In April 2001, he published three poems in Verbigracia, El Universal's weekly literary supplement edited by Patricia Guzmán. (Mis)read as Venezuela's first postmodern poet in 1951. Olson contemporary? Prophetic mode with private gestures (alchemical). Latin American origins of the word 'postmodern.'


"Charles Olson, writing to his fellow-poet Robert Creeley on return from Yucatan in the summer of 1951, started to speak of a 'post-modern world' that lay beyond the imperial age of the Discoveries and the Industrial Revolution. 'The first half of the twentieth century,' he wrote soon afterwards, was 'the marshalling yard on which the modern was turned to what we have, the post-modern, or post-West.'"
—Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity, Verso, 1998.


Semi-secret & influential poet. One of his last public acts was signing an open letter ("S.O.S. Venezuela") by Venezuelan intellectuals in support of the month-long workers strike against the incipient dictatorship of Hugo Chávez in December of 2002.




PD
(Juan Sánchez Peláez signed this open letter against Chavismo along with Adriano González León, Rafael Cadenas, Eugenio Montejo, Guillermo Sucre, Elizabeth Schön, María Fernanda Palacios, Edda Armas, Israel Centeno, Ana Teresa Torres, Yolanda Pantin, Victoria de Stefano, Rafael Arráiz Lucca, Elías Pino Iturrieta, Manuel Caballero, Antonio López Ortega, Isaac Chocrón, Elisa Lerner, Márgara Russotto, Oscar Marcano, Leonardo Padrón, Alexis Márquez Rodríguez, Oscar Sambrano Urdaneta, María Ramirez Ribes, Milagros Socorro, Eduardo Liendo, Antonieta Madrid, Patricia Guzmán, Milagros Mata Gil, Juan Carlos Méndez Guedez, Federico Vegas, Slavko Zupzic, Carlos Pacheco, Luz Marina Rivas, Maribel Espinoza, Rodolfo Izaguirre, Belén Lobo, Blanca Strepponi, Harry Almela, Silda Cordoliani, Igor Barreto, Alberto Barrera Tyszka, Ibsen Martínez, Carlos Oteyza, Leonardo Azparren, Mary Ferrero, Gabriela Rangel, Ariel Jiménez, Iris Peruga, Verónica Jaffé, Angelina Jaffé, Jacqueline Goldberg, Eleonora Requena, Alexis Romero, Gisela Kozak, José Luis Palacios, María Celina Nuñez, Vladimir Vera, Sonia Chocrón, Roberto Echeto, Angel Gustavo Infante, Juan Carlos Chirinos, Graciela Bonnet, Fernando Cifuentes, María Griselda Navas, Francisco Javier Pérez, María del Pilar Puig, José Carlos Terrada, José Antonio Parra, Silvio Orta Cabrera, Mercedes Sedano, Carmen Vincenti, Violeta Rojo, Annabelle Aguilar, Belkis Arredondo, Edgardo Malaver Larez, Vilma Ramia, Gustavo Guerrero, Leonardo Milla, Beatriz González Stephan, Ana María del Re, Nines Pérez Luna, Elena López Meneses, Pedro Castillo, Maranta Rubiera, Silva Consolini, Sagrario Berti, Alicia Torres, Martha de la Vega, Diana Lichy, Miguel Gomes, María Josefina Barajas, Joaquín Marta Sosa, Boris Muñoz, Humberto Mata, Matilde Daviú, Cristian Alvárez, Alfredo Herrera Salas, Sonia González, Kiria Kariakin, Eduardo Casanova, Victor Krebs, María Elena Maggi, Helena González Cuello, Katyna Henríquez, María Elena Ramos, Corina Michelena, Boris Izaguirre, María Auxiliadora Alvárez.)