La noche / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Night

I was lost in an indescribable world. An English bard had referred me to the visions and dreams of Endymion, pointing out his disappearance from men and his departure to a happy remoteness.
     I did not achieve the Hellenic shepherd’s luck. I traveled the road outlined amid a jungle, toward a group of horizontal rocks, distant simulacra of a dwelling. From the denseness, the vermin used by magicians from other times in pernicious ministry threatened and roared.
     A phosphorescent beetle hung from my shoulders. I had distinguished its image on the lid of a coffin, in the first room of a blind pantheon.
     The moon revealed Cordelia’s compassionate and tearful face and I governed my steps according to its erroneous journey.
     I emerged on the coast of an impassable sea and I was invited and lavished with favors by a race of pensive fishermen. They would hang the nets over the shrubs of an austere coastline and lived under the open air, entranced by a dark purple light diffused in the atmosphere. They tread a granite floor, the oldest on earth.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }