Intervalos / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Intervals

The decanted route
that emerged from our shore
was the great river
is a prairie, a diamond that covers us
here is its exact plane:
the rigor of its openings and closings,
its unfathomable lucidity when
the afternoon is fading,
when everyone has left and the house
is empty,
and the puppeteer and children
pretend to be adults.




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 2004 }

Escribo / Luis Enrique Belmonte

I Write

I write to scare off debt collectors
and to slip through the cracks of grey days
I write to understand those who suddenly lose their voice
and to listen to the cord played by the desert wind
and to lose what I have and to win and lose again
I write so the gypsies will take me with them.




Cuartos de alquiler (2005)




{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila, 2009 }

No me escribas, por favor / Luis Enrique Belmonte

Please, Don’t Write Me

Please, don’t write me,
because I can’t read your handwriting
and I’m scared of sealed envelopes
and I don’t wanna die in a mailbox
and I can’t stand snow or bridges
nor that distant mandolin music in my room.




Cuartos de alquiler (2005)




{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }

Los viejos / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Old People

I don’t know if old people live the immediate
I know they want to escape
like drunkards
and that
crouching
or standing
they arrive differently
and show up on time
for the great appointment
at a sea
on the edge of the sea

they don’t sleep either
nor are they alone
and yet
they always find themselves
they are always there
they wait calmly
drinking goat’s milk
in ample
corridors
just above the rooftops
in a village that
belongs to the moon
or in a hotel in Liverpool

nothing exists but instants
don’t come and contradict me
my dear, vain
thoughts
there is
the surplus
our lack
and
worry

what you long for
what burns
is young
and is antique
but
no mother speaks to us anymore
except
mother-fucking death
who eats
thrushes          thresholds
red cherries in the patio

old people would sing
but they occupy a foreign name
without a place on the map or in the
geography

so when they weigh me and
slit my throat
because of time
I too belong to another route
I step forward
I test north with my nape
and I am assaulted below
or amid
the water that springs thirst
by the vigilant spirit
of the old people
who
retrace the enormous curtain
or
want to scale
the wall
hiccuping furiously
guttural or natural
the successive jolts of an actual
verified
story
that happened

they would speak or sing then
if they had a vocal timbre
to make the name human for us.




Aire sobre el aire (1989)




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 2004 }

Leyendo a los otros / Juan Calzadilla

Reading Others

I learn from others no less
than what others learn from me.
I suppose by watching them, listening to them
daily, deciphering their faces like someone who reads
an old newspaper, observing how they administer
their habits, their gestures contaminated
by the city, alcohol, scars,
defeats, the lamp without a screen
at midnight amid gunshots,
insomnia and, finally, all the atrocities.

I learn strategies from people, with no
excuses. From me they also learn what belongs
to each of us. And reading my face they know me
and take no pity on me
and don’t forgive me.



1998




Translator’s note: The anthology this poem is translated from is available for free as a PDF file from Monte Ávila Editores. See the link below.




{ Juan Calzadilla, Ecólogo de día feriado. Antología personal, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2006 }

Ca(z)a: 24 / María Auxiliadora Álvarez

24

and me here
falling on myself
or scaring the kids
or scaring the dogs
Deafening
Or me outside             running
pulling out grass
flowers leaves
running
bitter Among the plots
far
among the final branches
so tall of the birds
leaving




Ca(z)a (1990)




{ María Auxiliadora Álvarez, Lugar de pasaje. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }

Experiencias menos objetivas / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Less Objective Experiences

to Henri Michaux


My body vomits in all seasons, the anxiety of my body and my clouds.

Spellbound mask of my will, who knew? I descended to the primitive forests of my nostalgia, I was returning sad and proud like the conquerors of night. Dusk adores the slavery of this desolate land. I am my own angel and my only demon. And I await, I await the future.

Patient workers of an embryonic Wonderland: you are too scrupulous to understand me. In a vulcanized creek, with the gold sandal of the deserts, through the coral door of the infernos you will enter, with your matrimonial code, with tyrannical laws, with the cranes of the horizon.

A ghost – very friendly, by the way – softly caresses my hair. And his tenderness like a lion strangled on the Milky Way will never return.




Elena y los elementos (1951)




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Barcelona: Editorial Lumen, 2004 }

Patas arriba en el techo / Ramón Palomares

Feet Up On the Roof

                                                             To Adriano González León

I know where to find him
where he sings now, eating ants
the bird who flies on top of clouds
the one who knows how to travel through dreams.
He was lying feet up on the roof
murmuring that he felt like killing
and scaring the dogs coming at him from the sky
and spitting tigers
and saying:
I’m definitely gonna fuck up any dogs that come my way
I sure as hell ain’t scared of them.
And with enormous blue wings he hit them and stuck knives in them
and he would call me and say:
Help me, help me.
Then he finished
and started getting into all the clouds
over there, far away, near a lagoon.




Paisano (1964)




{ Ramón Palomares, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2004 }

Conjura en Caracas / Israel Centeno

Conspiracy in Caracas

A daring historian could affirm that, from the 19th century until today, Venezuela can be associated with the syndrome of continuous conspiracy.

The final decade of the previous century was no different. One afternoon during those years convulsed by two coup attempts, rumors of social explosion and expectations fulfilled, after having published my first novel, Calletania, some friends invited me to a meeting at an apartment in downtown Caracas. The atmosphere was charged with murmurs, with music and with the thick halo of cigarette smoke. Ricardo Azuaje instigated the meeting, we were gathering to conspire. You could smell, beyond the alcohol vapors, the sour boastfulness of adrenaline, you could feel the suspense and expectations pulsing in the skin of those of us who, scattered on the floor, listened to salsa by the Fania All-Stars and to Nina Simone. You could sense we were on the eve of something, an event, an intriguing reality: writing a collaborative novel between six or eight people. We were immediately seized by enthusiasm, the grace of those who have discovered themselves as writers once they hear the resonance of their voices and wish to make it tangible in books.

At the time, Ricardo Azuaje had published Juana la roja y Octavio el sabrio. Maybe he was already working on Viste de verde nuestra sombra. Both novels reinvented themselves through humor, submerged with unexpected freshness in urban realities, in recent history, in urticant dailiness. Rubi Guerra had two collections of short stories out in which he debated between the glance of Juan Rulfo, ellipsis and the distortion of mirages in the petroleum fields that had already been narrated so accurately by Gustavo Díaz Solís in Arco secreto.

Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez was writing his first book of short stories Historias del edificio, and it’s likely he was outlining Retrato de Abel con isla volcánica al fondo; regarding my Calletania or El rabo del diablo, others will speak.

At that moment of conspiracy, we were brought together by the need to create a great novel, we were still naive and as with all events marked by a conspiratorial nature, we designed a strategy, and we delegated the responsibility for each one of the seditious members to elaborate a chapter in the story. We feverishly discussed the details, and sometimes it was hard to agree, but we were possessed by our certainty, we were rediscovering the power of the anecdote and the infinite possibilities of fictionalizing reality.

As we know, and as it tends to happen with the majority of plots, the illusion of creating the collective text and giving Venezuelan literary reality a smack in the face didn’t even reach a second discussion. Each one of us returned to our lives, to our immediate affairs, necessities and individual tastes took precedence, which is natural; only once in a while, during other encounters, someone has dared to bring up, for the sake of embarrassing us, the arrogance of that endeavor.

We also know, or I want to make it known, that it wasn’t an event lacking in transcendence because, as my grandfather said quoting a teacher: only works create faith. Ricardo Azuaje, focused on his tasks, reaffirmed his initial proposals, he wrote La expulsión del Paraíso. Rubi Guerra has moved beyond his dilemmas, he has consolidated a differentiated and solid voice in the map of literature written in Spanish. I would dare to risk that, along with Ednodio Quintero and José Napoleón Oropeza, he is one of the country’s most relevant short story writers in the second half of the century that just passed and of the one that now begins. He will give us much to talk about, it’s enough to read El discreto enemigo and Un sueño comentado; and many of you, readers in Spain, recognize in Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez the magisterial author, you have read and enjoyed him in Una tarde con campanas, in El libro de Esther and in Árbol de Luna, among other titles.

That decade of the nineties was a decade of initiations. Today, with the passing of time, along with authors who, for reasons of space, have been left out of this chronicle, we can say that Venezuelan literature is a tangible and vigorous fact.


Israel Centeno (Caracas, 1958) is the author of Criaturas de la noche (Alfaguara. Venezuela, 2000). He has just published Iniciaciones (Periférica) in Spain.




{ Israel Centeno, Babelia, El País, 9 December 2006 }

Presagios / Ramón Palomares

Premonitions

                                                                  To Juan Sánchez Peláez

He saw a noose, it hung in his house.
There was a corpse outside
It was a fine and cruel noose
coming out the corpse’s mouth.

He saw a town, he heard screams,
they were coming to kill him
he was carrying a musket, sweating

Then he saw some cows grazing
and a clear and shining valley
and wars

He looked somewhere else
Isabel was in her hammock, swinging,
and beside her birds and enormous glowing leaves
That’s where the sea began to grow

Then Francisco started to lose himself
lose himself




Santiago de León de Caracas (1967)




{ Ramón Palomares, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2004 }

Un día de la semana I / Miyó Vestrini

One Weekday I

When you were born,
in 1938,
César Vallejo was dying.
When your little head,
your bellybutton,
your virgin little cunt,
were peeking into the world
from between your mother’s beautiful legs,
they were putting the poet in a hole.
They covered him with dirt
and you
were covered by memory.
You couldn’t choose.
Because if you choose
you live.
And if you live
you enjoy.
But enjoyment is the horror of sleep:
sleeping will be forever.
There will be a smell of fried peppers,
raucous voices at the bar.
It will be one day of the week,
when the furniture changes places at night
and in the morning,
women talk to themselves.
Your nose is sealed and your right eyebrow
is drooping more than the left one.
The thighs evened out,
the hair badly cut and the body lost
in a nightgown that covers up the grease in your waist.
Whether or not you had lunatic and sad grandparents,
will be established in the report
by a responsible functionary.
They will cross your arms over your chest
and it’s fatal,
because you will no longer be able
to use Afrin
to breathe better.
It’s not true your arms are convulsive
and your tantrums unpredictable.
False the glass you continue to steam up with your burps.
False your nipples, your reddish freckles.
Last night you had decided:
if I can’t sleep,
I’ll choose death.
But you didn’t expect the rack of lamb to melt,
soft,
creamy,
on your tongue.
You merely said:
two births,
ten abortions,
not a single orgasm.
And you took a long gulp of wine.
Vallejo too looked for a rack of lamb
in the menu at Le Coupole.
Everyone was looking at his sullen eyes,
while he merely thought about Beethoven’s silent ears.
He had asked his companion:
Why don’t you love me anymore?
What did I do?
How did I mess up?
The cassoulet pork left grease stains on his shirt.
Like you,
he felt a fatigued compassion for his body.
And he tried to guess who would be born that night,
as he tried to reconcile sleep.
Dying
requires time and patience.




{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }

La llamada / Miyó Vestrini

The Phone Call

When I asked him why he hadn’t called
he explained he’d been buried alive
and they hadn’t given him a phone.
On his thin chicken lips,
there is no,
or there was no,
daring at all.
Everything was strictly legal.
Is it that you don’t even believe in God?
If it wasn’t easy
you wouldn’t try.
Significance,
signifying,
significant,
sign.
I went to the balcony
and looked toward the park,
irritating brotherhood of squealing kids
and retarded birds.
I heard the remote control switching channels,
on mute.
At my back I felt,
his desire to put on his pants
and leave.
I went to the kitchen to peel potatoes.




{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }

Doctor Vila-Matas / Ednodio Quintero

Doctor Vila-Matas

No one doubts anymore that Enrique Vila-Matas is the living –and active– writer in his country, Spain, with the greatest international projection and one of the most original of the Spanish language. It would be enough to read the novel-essay Bartleby y compañía, that prodigy of inventiveness and imagination, to confirm there is no exaggeration in that hypothesis. So far this century, the prestige of Vila-Matas has surged until reaching that place reserved for the great, as well as being a rare case of a cult writer who sustains a high level of sales and nearly unanimous acceptance from critics in the thirty languages into which he has already been translated.

Few know that Enrique Vila-Matas maintains close ties with Venezuela, and in particular with the city of Mérida. Our author’s first incursion in the equinoctial regions of the New World, under the guidance of Sergio Pitol and Juan Villoro, in search of the oxygen that was scarce in his native peninsula, was to Mexico Tenochtitlán at the beginning of the nineties during the previous century.

Then in 93 we see him strolling with his figure of a Catalonian dandy through the hallways and salons of the Mérida hotel where the II Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas was being held. On that memorable occasion he coincided with Pitol and Villoro, César Aira, Jesús Díaz, R. H. Moreno Durán, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Sergio Chejfec, Pepe Barroeta, Salvador Garmendia and many others, establishing with some of them affectionate ties that still persist today. As an opening, Vila-Matas read at the Bienal a curious and original essay: “Recuerdos inventados” [Invented Memories], that in itself constitutes, beyond being a stupendous ars poetica for fiction, the enunciation of an aesthetic and of a writing project to which the author has remained faithful to this day. In the realm of the intimate and the personal, Enrique remained attached to the city in the mountains.

In August of 2001, Enrique Vila-Matas traveled to Caracas to receive the coveted Premio de Novela Rómulo Gallegos in its XII edition, which he was awarded because of his novel El viaje vertical. He stayed in Caracas for three days and then, in the company of Paula de Parma, he went to Mérida. In the tranquil Andean city, the recent prizewinner who was starting to savor the fruits of a success that was moreover well-deserved, found peace and calm. For twenty days he became a citizen of the city of students and he was recognized and greeted in plazas, cafés, parks and markets. Some identified him with the friendly name of Rómulo. “There goes the Rómulo,” they’d say when they saw him walk by. Enrique traveled throughout the mountainous region on a Homeric mule following the trail of the great artist of the Páramo region Juan Félix Sánchez, he ran like a teenager along a hill in Valle Grande, visited the Museo del Café in Tovar, learned the names of towns he’ll never forget: Mucujepe, Mucurubá, Tabay, Mucuchíes, Cacute, Escurufiní, Jají. And in a hotel more than 3,000 meters above sea level, a hotel amidst the clouds, with a tower that’s a perfect replica of the one in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” he suffered nightmares in which Belgian nurses in baby doll dresses appeared milking docile llamas imported from Peru.

It’s not so strange then that when invoking this second incursion in the city of his loves, Vila-Matas uses the word happiness without any prejudice.

Eight years later, invited by the VIII Bienal of Mérida, Enrique Vila-Matas returns to the city where, in one of his evening walks, followed by the elegant shadow and wearing a Fernando Pessoa hat, he discovered the authentic “Aleph” of Jorge Luis Borges on a corner of Avenida Tres.

In the interregnum, the life of Vila-Matas has been a true whirlwind, full of creativity, prizes and recognition, invitations to Chiromantic and Egyptologist conferences, Internet conversations, trips by canoe, airplane or train and cheerful appearances in the gossip newspapers. “The flirt with a certain Rita Malú they attribute to him is false,” affirms his life-long companion Paula de Parma, very seriously and trying not to laugh, shielded behind her savage detective glasses on a TV show.

Beyond the fame and the tinsel, the truth is that Vila-Matas has grown enourmously as a writer. His quick, terse and original prose has become more taut and refined like the chords of a lute played by a virtuoso musician. His most recent book, an exquisite hybrid: Dietario voluble, is one of the happiest events in recent years in our language.

Ah, and the romance of the famous writer with the mountainous city –which has extended to the entire country of Ramos Sucre and Eugenio Montejo– cannot be interrupted just like that, because from his luminous apartment in the city of Condal he welcomes visitors who bring him news from the other side of the ocean. He debates with Diómedes Cordero about the contents of Walter Benjamin’s lost suitcase. He answers a phone call from a friend of his –from Mérida– who is lost in a Tokyo neighborhood. He punctually responds to the e-mails of a girl from the Universidad de Los Andes writing a dissertation poisoned by Derrida. He collaborates with a bizarre and youthful magazine in Caracas called Plátano Verde. He forges alliances with photographers, journalists, students, bloggers, writing apprentices and trapeze artists, merely because of the fact, which is more than enough for him, that the tri-color band of a country named Venezuela appears on their passports.

Who should find it strange, then, that the Universidad de Los Andes in Mérida has awarded Enrique Vila-Matas, by virtue of his artistic and humanist merits, the Honoris Causa Doctorate in Literature. Tell me, who deserves it like he does?

When you see Enrique walk by on any street in Mérida or Tokyo, perhaps on the tree-lined avenue at the end of the earth –like his colleague Pasavento–, call him Doctor, Doctor Vila-Matas. You’ll see how he smiles mischievously.




Text read by Ednodio Quintero at the inauguration of the VIII Bienal de Literatura Mariano Picón Salas in Mérida on Wednesday, the 8th of July, 2009.




{ Ednodio Quintero, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 5 September 2009 }

Manuscritos de autores / Rafael Cadenas

Author Manuscripts
(In the Houghton Library)

These dark veins break through the fence of time. Deep calligraphies of a fortunate redemption. Distances ambush like seeds. Visitors lean over the glass where those shelved voices whisper a secret. They remain inscribed in nothingness with resounding traces that bore through it, prolonging themselves in search of dialogue.


*


Manuscritos de autores
(En la Houghton Library)

Estas venas oscuras rompen las vallas del tiempo. Hondas caligrafías de una venturosa redención. Asaltan como simientes las distancias. Los visitantes se asoman a las vitrinas donde esas voces empozadas les susurran un secreto. Siguen inscritas en la nada con trazos rotundos que la horadan prolongándose en busca del diálogo.




{ Rafael Cadenas, Letras Libres (Mexico), July 2005 }

“Los moldes han desaparecido” / Carmen Victoria Méndez

“The molds have disappeared”


Rafael Cadenas, “the poet of silence,” won the 2009 Prize in Romance Language Literature yesterday.


“I never really know if the poems pass the test,” said Rafael Cadenas, by phone, a few hours after the announcement of the verdict that turns him into the winner of the 2009 Prize in Romance Language Literature, awarded yesterday during the Guadalajara International Book Fair in Mexico. The prize, which comes with a $150,000 dollar award, was previously known as the Premio Juan Rulfo de Literatura.

The jury, composed of seven literary critics, presented its deliberation in the voice of the Venezuelan Gustavo Guerrero, who praised the work of his compatriot, according to international news agencies. “Lucid and vigilant, Cadenas has not hesitated in breaking with the forms, genres and discourses most frequently used in modern poetry (...) Today, Cadenas embodies for the very young the horizon of a word that distances itself from traditional lyricism and brings with it the imperative of giving a voice to that which, by other means, can no longer find spaces to speak in our time,” he added.

The recipient of the prize harvests a vast oeuvre as a poet, essayist and translator. His most prominent books include Los cuadernos del destierro (1960), Falsas maniobras (1966), Intemperie (1977) and Gestiones (1992). From his home in Caracas, Cadenas confessed that “the news was a surprise on Saturday, which is when they told me about the prize. They asked me to keep it a secret until today (yesterday). The reading of the verdict was a couple hours ago. Afterward, Gustavo Guerrero put me in touch via telephone with several journalists who asked me questions, which is a bit unusual because I always answer in writing. I’m very laconic.”

Cadenas told the press he feels thankful to Mexico for many things, “including my readings of its writers and poets.” He also mentioned that he would travel to Guadalajara to receive the prize, which recognizes an author for the body of his work in any genre.

Guerrero presented Cadenas as “the poet of silence.” During the conversation with the Mexican press, the author commented that “silence is a characteristic of poetry that I miss in fiction.” He also read a short poem that relates to the topic. “Of course, there were political questions, which aren’t scarce, even if some might try to keep the news of the prize on a literary plane. I said what I always tell my Latin American friends: that they take care of their democracy, even if it’s deficient, so that they don’t lose it and have power fall into the hands of some caudillo.”

The author from Barquisimeto highlights the variety within poetry today. These days “the poet has to invent the form for each poem because the traditional molds have disappeared. In the past, what the poet had to do was choose any of the existing molds and express himself through it.”

It is precisely in that variety that one of the mayor literary virtues of Cadenas is to be found, in the words of the jury, who have qualified him as a poet of ruptures.

Although he prefers to avoid the label, the author acknowledges he has kept himself at the margins of traditional literary canons. “Since I began writing, I adopted what can be called the modern style, and I’ve been quite firm in that respect. In what I write there is no actual meter, rhyme or stanzas in the traditional sense. Besides, I use the prose poem, and what I’ve been writing lately are very brief poems, but in any case, I never know if the poems really pass the test.”

Regarding the relevance of the genre in the world today, Cadenas adds that although poetry is a genre of minorities, that doesn’t keep it from being influential. “Poetry has always been something that is read by few people and even though it doesn’t carry the same weight as the essay or the article, it achieves an effect that influences other zones of the human being. Besides, readers of poetry are very loyal; in a certain way they’re poets as well.”

At the moment, Cadenas is trying to organize a book. “That always goes slowly; in my case it’s even slower because I work the poems a great deal, I revise a lot and wait a long time, maybe too long,” reveals the man who on one occasion said that he “writes from normality with a sense of awe.”




{ Carmen Victoria Méndez, Tal Cual, 1 September 2009 }