Residue*
I declined my forehead on the plateau of revelations and terror, where the impartial dew of the parabola will not venture.
I departed to an illustrious city and the virgins would close their window to the accent of my sinister lute.
A chaste form, of celestial origin, was depositing her glacial kiss on my hair. She was arriving through my exile’s sleep, to my stone bed, pit of Job, abyss of the sorrows of Leopardi. Did she hurt her orange blossom feet?
A tree, emissary of the storm, lashes the horizon with its naked branch in the course of the monotonous day. My voice has frightened you away from my hard road, tempest bird, zenith of the sky’s cupola.
Geneva, March of 1930
*El Universal; Caracas, 13 June 1931. (Published by José Nucete Sardi in an article about Ramos Sucre.)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.28.2009
11.27.2009
El Mandarín / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Mandarin
I had lost the grace of the emperor of China.
I couldn’t address the citizens without warning them explicitly about my degradation.
A rival accused me of having extracted myself from my parents’ visit when they pressed the eardrum placed at the door of my audience.
My servants denied me the two old people, expired and toothless, and sent them away with blows from sticks.
I prostrated myself at the feet of the emperor when he was descending to his garden from the granite stairwell. I recovered his favor by comparing his face to the moon.
He entrusted me with the conquest and governance of a remote district, which had been overcome by disorder. I took advantage of the occasion to test my loyalty.
Misery had roused the natives. They were agonizing from hunger in the company of their furious dogs. The women were abandoning their creatures to horrifying pigs. It was impossible to plow the ground without provoking the emergence and diffusion of pestilent miasmas. Those beings wept at the birth of a son and they scrupulously saved up to buy a coffin.
I reestablished the peace by beheading the men and selling their skulls as amulets. My soldiers then cut off the hands of all the women.
The emperor honored me with his visit, he promoted me a few degrees in his favor and promised the disappearance of my rivals.
He smiled broadly when he noticed the arms of women turned into canes.
The daughters of my rivals went out to beg on the roads.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I had lost the grace of the emperor of China.
I couldn’t address the citizens without warning them explicitly about my degradation.
A rival accused me of having extracted myself from my parents’ visit when they pressed the eardrum placed at the door of my audience.
My servants denied me the two old people, expired and toothless, and sent them away with blows from sticks.
I prostrated myself at the feet of the emperor when he was descending to his garden from the granite stairwell. I recovered his favor by comparing his face to the moon.
He entrusted me with the conquest and governance of a remote district, which had been overcome by disorder. I took advantage of the occasion to test my loyalty.
Misery had roused the natives. They were agonizing from hunger in the company of their furious dogs. The women were abandoning their creatures to horrifying pigs. It was impossible to plow the ground without provoking the emergence and diffusion of pestilent miasmas. Those beings wept at the birth of a son and they scrupulously saved up to buy a coffin.
I reestablished the peace by beheading the men and selling their skulls as amulets. My soldiers then cut off the hands of all the women.
The emperor honored me with his visit, he promoted me a few degrees in his favor and promised the disappearance of my rivals.
He smiled broadly when he noticed the arms of women turned into canes.
The daughters of my rivals went out to beg on the roads.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.25.2009
Lied / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Lied
The hawthorns fill the hollow, from the ruined portico.
They weave their branches in a sinister manner, figuring crowns of martyrdom.
The lady of the white deer gives herself over to song, when she feels the lunar magic around her.
The burlesque echo augurs death from the thicket.
No one could speak the dread of the white deer.
Until that moment there had been no singing in the deserted mansion.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The hawthorns fill the hollow, from the ruined portico.
They weave their branches in a sinister manner, figuring crowns of martyrdom.
The lady of the white deer gives herself over to song, when she feels the lunar magic around her.
The burlesque echo augurs death from the thicket.
No one could speak the dread of the white deer.
Until that moment there had been no singing in the deserted mansion.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.24.2009
Carnaval / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Carnival
A woman with imperfect factions and a calm gesture obsesses my thought. A septentrional painter would have situated her in the course of a familiar scene, so as to distract himself from his melancholic genius, besieged by macabre figures.
I had reached the room of the party in the company of my turbulent friends, resolved to make the shadow of my tedium fade away. We were coming from an episode, where they had risked their lives for me.
The transvestite enemies surrounded us at once, after blocking the avenues. We admired the rough and obstinate assault, the firm fist of the swordsmen. They wordlessly multiplied their mortal blows, avoiding any declaration with their voice. They backed off, broken and sulking, leaving behind the trail of their blood in the snow on the ground.
My friends, seduced by the party’s racket, left me laid out on a divan. They tried to encourage my strength by means of a stimulating potion. I ingested an unhealthy drink, a briny liquor with green reflections, the very sediment of a groaning sea, frequented by the albatrosses.
They were lost in the turning of the party.
I was glimpsing the same figure of this moment. I was suffering the grief of the septentrional artist and noticing the presence of the woman with imperfect factions and a calm gesture during a pause in the dance of the dead.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
A woman with imperfect factions and a calm gesture obsesses my thought. A septentrional painter would have situated her in the course of a familiar scene, so as to distract himself from his melancholic genius, besieged by macabre figures.
I had reached the room of the party in the company of my turbulent friends, resolved to make the shadow of my tedium fade away. We were coming from an episode, where they had risked their lives for me.
The transvestite enemies surrounded us at once, after blocking the avenues. We admired the rough and obstinate assault, the firm fist of the swordsmen. They wordlessly multiplied their mortal blows, avoiding any declaration with their voice. They backed off, broken and sulking, leaving behind the trail of their blood in the snow on the ground.
My friends, seduced by the party’s racket, left me laid out on a divan. They tried to encourage my strength by means of a stimulating potion. I ingested an unhealthy drink, a briny liquor with green reflections, the very sediment of a groaning sea, frequented by the albatrosses.
They were lost in the turning of the party.
I was glimpsing the same figure of this moment. I was suffering the grief of the septentrional artist and noticing the presence of the woman with imperfect factions and a calm gesture during a pause in the dance of the dead.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.22.2009
La alborada / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Daybreak
The stirring of the swallows impedes the serenity of the celestial morning. The seraphic birds observe their vow of jubilation and poverty. They suggest a nostalgic and pious emotion. They disappear suddenly, inspiring the suspicion they are attending the calling of a benevolent and elderly hermit.
The ancient churches of the Episcopal city, inhabited by schoolchildren and doctors, occasionally make their bells coincide.
The sick man registers the surroundings from a balcony, profoundly secluded in his hermetic house. Dressed in white, he remains in an armchair. His candid and withered face reveals the effects of an illness contracted since childhood.
He has stayed up all night, feeling the sounds of a distant orchestra through the capricious air. The music insinuated the pastime of dancing in a radiant room.
The sick man has discarded the faith of his elders. He endures the protracted idleness by following the thoughts of desolate and reprobate philosophers and by penetrating the secrets of the ancient languages, with their lapidary beauty. He recalls fatality’s threat, the inexorable laws of the universe in strophes of Latinate sonority.
The sick man wraps his face with linen pulled up from his shoulders. He wants to hide the feeling of his latest composition from his affectionate maid and he speaks it in a low, soft voice.
The poet mocks the privilege of the genius, diabolical mercy transformed into ashes. The skeleton of the symbol dominates in his song of solitude and bitterness and it announces, through a bronze trumpet, oblivion’s perennial sovereignty.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The stirring of the swallows impedes the serenity of the celestial morning. The seraphic birds observe their vow of jubilation and poverty. They suggest a nostalgic and pious emotion. They disappear suddenly, inspiring the suspicion they are attending the calling of a benevolent and elderly hermit.
The ancient churches of the Episcopal city, inhabited by schoolchildren and doctors, occasionally make their bells coincide.
The sick man registers the surroundings from a balcony, profoundly secluded in his hermetic house. Dressed in white, he remains in an armchair. His candid and withered face reveals the effects of an illness contracted since childhood.
He has stayed up all night, feeling the sounds of a distant orchestra through the capricious air. The music insinuated the pastime of dancing in a radiant room.
The sick man has discarded the faith of his elders. He endures the protracted idleness by following the thoughts of desolate and reprobate philosophers and by penetrating the secrets of the ancient languages, with their lapidary beauty. He recalls fatality’s threat, the inexorable laws of the universe in strophes of Latinate sonority.
The sick man wraps his face with linen pulled up from his shoulders. He wants to hide the feeling of his latest composition from his affectionate maid and he speaks it in a low, soft voice.
The poet mocks the privilege of the genius, diabolical mercy transformed into ashes. The skeleton of the symbol dominates in his song of solitude and bitterness and it announces, through a bronze trumpet, oblivion’s perennial sovereignty.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.20.2009
El viaje / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Journey
My thought follows the inflections of her undulating voice.
A vaporous image announces itself behind the old, damp glass of the window and is quickly lost in the depths of the inner halls.
The building scratches, with its violent angles and profiles, the lazy shade.
I was ceaselessly marching, activated by a higher will.
The day struck to illuminate the deserted spot.
But night surprised me once more inside the inexorable circle of the hills.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
My thought follows the inflections of her undulating voice.
A vaporous image announces itself behind the old, damp glass of the window and is quickly lost in the depths of the inner halls.
The building scratches, with its violent angles and profiles, the lazy shade.
I was ceaselessly marching, activated by a higher will.
The day struck to illuminate the deserted spot.
But night surprised me once more inside the inexorable circle of the hills.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.18.2009
El romance del bardo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Romance of the Bard
I was banished from life. Within me I concealed a reverent love, a selfless devotion, macerating passions, for the courteous lady, distant from my reach.
Fatality had signed my forehead.
I would escape far from the city to meditate, amidst severe ruins, beside a monotonous sea.
Right there, animated by pain, the shadows of the past circled.
Our nation had perished resisting the excursions of an ignorant horde.
Tradition had linked victory in the presence of an illustrious woman, a survivor from an undefeated race. She had to accompany us spontaneously, unaware of her own importance.
We saw her, for the last time, day before the disaster, near the beach, wrapped in the turbulent wheel of sea birds.
Since then, only oblivion can amend the dishonor of defeat.
The grass grows on the battlefield, nourished by the blood of heroes.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I was banished from life. Within me I concealed a reverent love, a selfless devotion, macerating passions, for the courteous lady, distant from my reach.
Fatality had signed my forehead.
I would escape far from the city to meditate, amidst severe ruins, beside a monotonous sea.
Right there, animated by pain, the shadows of the past circled.
Our nation had perished resisting the excursions of an ignorant horde.
Tradition had linked victory in the presence of an illustrious woman, a survivor from an undefeated race. She had to accompany us spontaneously, unaware of her own importance.
We saw her, for the last time, day before the disaster, near the beach, wrapped in the turbulent wheel of sea birds.
Since then, only oblivion can amend the dishonor of defeat.
The grass grows on the battlefield, nourished by the blood of heroes.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.16.2009
Sturm und Drang / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Sturm und Drang
Carlyle elevates Cromwell with his austere and funereal entourage above the turbulent regicides of ninety-three. Taine wisely objects to him that the purpose of the latter contrasts with philanthropy, with the nearly egotistical motive of the Puritan. New ideals had ennobled the impassioned desire for reform throughout the XVIII century.
The generous effort of the Revolution occasions the very useful and abundant assertion that disinterested politics is the singular honor of France with the same title and in the same proportion as discursive, regular and consequential talent. This is to declare as the tenacious virtue of a people what is barely the merit and exclusive character of a certain unprecedented era. In the sentimental Europe of that century learned people concerned themselves with the fate of man, abstract and universal, as though they all practiced and honored reason, a faculty tending to omit the particular and the individuating. In Germany, at the time a seedbed for distracted and perplexed philosophers, there was a natural abundance of Weltbürgers or citizens of the world. The ones in England cheered in the face of a reprobate government the victories of Washington. It was fashionable to abstain from patriotism, considered small-minded, and to oscillate between Montesquieu’s constitutional monarchy and Rousseau’s democratic republic.
Two poets, Schiller and Shelley, at a mutual distance of thirty years, accommodate and portray the humanitarian feeling of those passionate days. Both of them dissatisfied, nebulous and oratorical. Intrepid heralds, irritated seers, beneath the stormy and enigmatic sky they sustain and vibrate a beam of rays in their right hands.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Carlyle elevates Cromwell with his austere and funereal entourage above the turbulent regicides of ninety-three. Taine wisely objects to him that the purpose of the latter contrasts with philanthropy, with the nearly egotistical motive of the Puritan. New ideals had ennobled the impassioned desire for reform throughout the XVIII century.
The generous effort of the Revolution occasions the very useful and abundant assertion that disinterested politics is the singular honor of France with the same title and in the same proportion as discursive, regular and consequential talent. This is to declare as the tenacious virtue of a people what is barely the merit and exclusive character of a certain unprecedented era. In the sentimental Europe of that century learned people concerned themselves with the fate of man, abstract and universal, as though they all practiced and honored reason, a faculty tending to omit the particular and the individuating. In Germany, at the time a seedbed for distracted and perplexed philosophers, there was a natural abundance of Weltbürgers or citizens of the world. The ones in England cheered in the face of a reprobate government the victories of Washington. It was fashionable to abstain from patriotism, considered small-minded, and to oscillate between Montesquieu’s constitutional monarchy and Rousseau’s democratic republic.
Two poets, Schiller and Shelley, at a mutual distance of thirty years, accommodate and portray the humanitarian feeling of those passionate days. Both of them dissatisfied, nebulous and oratorical. Intrepid heralds, irritated seers, beneath the stormy and enigmatic sky they sustain and vibrate a beam of rays in their right hands.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.15.2009
La entrevista / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Interview
The beautiful girl rests at leisure on the armchair filling it with her person and with the ribbons and frills of her sumptuous dress.
Behind her I watch the field of joyous herbs and where it ends at the mountain of sapphire.
The transhumant lady refers the mishaps of mundane life, punishment of the susceptible intelligence. She reproduces the gesture of flavorlessness and becomes self-absorbed for a while, keeping a lenitive pause.
The majesty of her beauty increases when we stop for diuturnal rest, relief for a dissatisfied soul. The torrent mitigates a rip in the sierra and sums up, in a pond, the landscape’s heavy atmosphere.
The beautiful girl perfects the spell of her ivory face, untying the blackish hair, where a humble spike of wheat is lost.
She fears the uncertainties of the air, warned by the dissonances and preludes of autumn’s harp, and begins on the road home.
She assumes the bearing and step of a telluric divinity, announced by a long thunder of cymbals.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The beautiful girl rests at leisure on the armchair filling it with her person and with the ribbons and frills of her sumptuous dress.
Behind her I watch the field of joyous herbs and where it ends at the mountain of sapphire.
The transhumant lady refers the mishaps of mundane life, punishment of the susceptible intelligence. She reproduces the gesture of flavorlessness and becomes self-absorbed for a while, keeping a lenitive pause.
The majesty of her beauty increases when we stop for diuturnal rest, relief for a dissatisfied soul. The torrent mitigates a rip in the sierra and sums up, in a pond, the landscape’s heavy atmosphere.
The beautiful girl perfects the spell of her ivory face, untying the blackish hair, where a humble spike of wheat is lost.
She fears the uncertainties of the air, warned by the dissonances and preludes of autumn’s harp, and begins on the road home.
She assumes the bearing and step of a telluric divinity, announced by a long thunder of cymbals.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.14.2009
Lo nunca proyectado / Alfredo Silva Estrada
The Never Projected
in seven etchings by Gego
1.
The never projected
sustains itself in true shadows
2.
The never projected
varies its instant in the unusual crossing
3.
The never projected
lets itself be seen circling its clearance
4.
The never projected
affirms itself in the turning of willing light
5.
The never projected
up in the air of the glance lifts its rhythm
6.
The never projected
plots its resurgence with the same variant
7.
The never projected
lives its slight chance of plain lights
1967
{ Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992 }
in seven etchings by Gego
1.
The never projected
sustains itself in true shadows
2.
The never projected
varies its instant in the unusual crossing
3.
The never projected
lets itself be seen circling its clearance
4.
The never projected
affirms itself in the turning of willing light
5.
The never projected
up in the air of the glance lifts its rhythm
6.
The never projected
plots its resurgence with the same variant
7.
The never projected
lives its slight chance of plain lights
1967
{ Alfredo Silva Estrada, Acercamientos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992 }
11.13.2009
El clamor / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Clamor
I lived submerged in the shadow of a lethal garden. An affectionate being had left me in solitude and I constantly honored her memory. A few high walls, of a secular old age, were defending silence. The willows were sporting flowers of alien branches, which I myself had sewn into their sterile foliage.
I have departed that city, founded on stony ground, during a night’s narcotic dream and have forgotten the path home. Did I see its name while reading the apostles’ course? I was at the mercy of my elders’ judgment and I didn’t ask them, before their death, about my birthplace.
Nostalgia becomes sharp occasionally. The voice of the affectionate being visits me across faded time and I force my thought until I fall into delirium.
I have glimpsed the city in the course of a soliloquy, finding myself ill and decayed. The polite voice was imploring me from a prison’s enclosure and a crowd was impeding me from a rescue attempt. The abominable faces were reconciling with the symbols of their flags.
I tended not to leave my house in the city of my childhood. My parents would stop me at the front door with a gesture of terror.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I lived submerged in the shadow of a lethal garden. An affectionate being had left me in solitude and I constantly honored her memory. A few high walls, of a secular old age, were defending silence. The willows were sporting flowers of alien branches, which I myself had sewn into their sterile foliage.
I have departed that city, founded on stony ground, during a night’s narcotic dream and have forgotten the path home. Did I see its name while reading the apostles’ course? I was at the mercy of my elders’ judgment and I didn’t ask them, before their death, about my birthplace.
Nostalgia becomes sharp occasionally. The voice of the affectionate being visits me across faded time and I force my thought until I fall into delirium.
I have glimpsed the city in the course of a soliloquy, finding myself ill and decayed. The polite voice was imploring me from a prison’s enclosure and a crowd was impeding me from a rescue attempt. The abominable faces were reconciling with the symbols of their flags.
I tended not to leave my house in the city of my childhood. My parents would stop me at the front door with a gesture of terror.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.12.2009
Sobre la poesía elocuente / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Regarding Eloquent Poetry
Eloquence is the natural gift of persuading and moving people. Rhetoric, the art of good speech, is a loyal or disloyal servant of eloquence, and when it uses high-sounding or superfluous words it deserves the name of declamation. So there is no excuse for maliciously confusing eloquence, the advantage of content, emanating from vehement affect or from sincere conviction, with the declamation that is the vice of expression, defective rhetoric.
Some poets sustain that we must twist the neck of eloquence, and it suits us to object that such severity should only be used with declamation, because that fortunate gift serves enthusiastic and lyric poetry quite well. Besides, we must distinguish between old-fashioned, egotistical poets and communicative poets, apostolate and ready for combat, bards with prophetic breath and impassioned sympathy who exercise a national or humanitarian function. The latter can never dispense with eloquence and will inevitably express themselves in images, a medium that can enunciate the most arduous philosophy and communicate emotion electrically. The image is the concrete and graphic manner of expressing oneself, and it declares a fine emotiveness and emanates from the sharp organization of the corporeal senses. A few dialecticians, enamored of the universal and featureless idea, reprove this manner of expression, considering it to be of humble sensory origin, and advocating for the supremacy of intelligence, by which they insist on the different faculties of the human mind, most likely a totality without parts.
The image is always close to the symbol or it gets confused with it, and, beyond being graphic, it leaves a trail of a certain vagueness and sanctity that is typical of the best poetry, closer to music than to sculpture.
The image, an expression of the particular, is suitable especially with poetry, because art is individualizing.
The image is a concrete and sympathetic medium of expression, apt for emphasizing the sublime and independent ideas of metaphysics and the contingent notions of experience, and it simultaneously communicates the affections. But it never stops being a medium of expression, and whoever uses it as an end becomes a vicious rhetorician, a declaimer.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Eloquence is the natural gift of persuading and moving people. Rhetoric, the art of good speech, is a loyal or disloyal servant of eloquence, and when it uses high-sounding or superfluous words it deserves the name of declamation. So there is no excuse for maliciously confusing eloquence, the advantage of content, emanating from vehement affect or from sincere conviction, with the declamation that is the vice of expression, defective rhetoric.
Some poets sustain that we must twist the neck of eloquence, and it suits us to object that such severity should only be used with declamation, because that fortunate gift serves enthusiastic and lyric poetry quite well. Besides, we must distinguish between old-fashioned, egotistical poets and communicative poets, apostolate and ready for combat, bards with prophetic breath and impassioned sympathy who exercise a national or humanitarian function. The latter can never dispense with eloquence and will inevitably express themselves in images, a medium that can enunciate the most arduous philosophy and communicate emotion electrically. The image is the concrete and graphic manner of expressing oneself, and it declares a fine emotiveness and emanates from the sharp organization of the corporeal senses. A few dialecticians, enamored of the universal and featureless idea, reprove this manner of expression, considering it to be of humble sensory origin, and advocating for the supremacy of intelligence, by which they insist on the different faculties of the human mind, most likely a totality without parts.
The image is always close to the symbol or it gets confused with it, and, beyond being graphic, it leaves a trail of a certain vagueness and sanctity that is typical of the best poetry, closer to music than to sculpture.
The image, an expression of the particular, is suitable especially with poetry, because art is individualizing.
The image is a concrete and sympathetic medium of expression, apt for emphasizing the sublime and independent ideas of metaphysics and the contingent notions of experience, and it simultaneously communicates the affections. But it never stops being a medium of expression, and whoever uses it as an end becomes a vicious rhetorician, a declaimer.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.11.2009
La juventud del rapsoda / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Youth of the Rhapsodist
I lived happily amidst a rustic people. Their origins were lost in an unformed antiquity.
They were delirious from jubilance at the full moon instant. The ancestors had insisted on the horror of the early world, before the satellite’s birth.
A young woman presided over the children occupied in the task of the vintage. She had pulled away from dawn’s retinue, on a horse with a blonde mane. She held on to them by means of an unlikely story and she purposely differed from its denouement.
She would choose the hyacinth to decorate her black hair, with its blue reflection. I would also adore the sick flower of a kiss from Eurydice at a moment of her desperation.
I forced myself to conjecture and discover her name and origin when I became aware of her penchant for the austere flower. The young woman enjoyed the privilege of returning from the dead, for the purpose of attending the liturgical honors of the wine. She disappeared in the act of evading my insinuating questions.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I lived happily amidst a rustic people. Their origins were lost in an unformed antiquity.
They were delirious from jubilance at the full moon instant. The ancestors had insisted on the horror of the early world, before the satellite’s birth.
A young woman presided over the children occupied in the task of the vintage. She had pulled away from dawn’s retinue, on a horse with a blonde mane. She held on to them by means of an unlikely story and she purposely differed from its denouement.
She would choose the hyacinth to decorate her black hair, with its blue reflection. I would also adore the sick flower of a kiss from Eurydice at a moment of her desperation.
I forced myself to conjecture and discover her name and origin when I became aware of her penchant for the austere flower. The young woman enjoyed the privilege of returning from the dead, for the purpose of attending the liturgical honors of the wine. She disappeared in the act of evading my insinuating questions.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.10.2009
El disidente / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Dissident
San Francisco De Sales advised channeling invectives at the demon, to drive him away from our presence. I had read in another ascetic writer about the healthy habit of throwing oneself face down on the naked earth.
The crowd of the possessed had disturbed the attention of Bodin, the honest French jurist, and motivated extensive works from his pen.
The tortures spread terror and grieved the spirit. The cases of alienation multiplied and the father of a hanged man declared himself equal to Jesus Christ and went out at night to complain with a sepulchral voice.
I never reconciled myself with the gloomy art of the bewitched and I was able to wait at close range for the end of the bonfires of repression.
Amid the constant threat, I wanted to expiate my ignored faults and throw off the satellites of a skittish power. I remembered the ceremony of the Israelites with the emissary goat and I used it with a nocturnal bird.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
San Francisco De Sales advised channeling invectives at the demon, to drive him away from our presence. I had read in another ascetic writer about the healthy habit of throwing oneself face down on the naked earth.
The crowd of the possessed had disturbed the attention of Bodin, the honest French jurist, and motivated extensive works from his pen.
The tortures spread terror and grieved the spirit. The cases of alienation multiplied and the father of a hanged man declared himself equal to Jesus Christ and went out at night to complain with a sepulchral voice.
I never reconciled myself with the gloomy art of the bewitched and I was able to wait at close range for the end of the bonfires of repression.
Amid the constant threat, I wanted to expiate my ignored faults and throw off the satellites of a skittish power. I remembered the ceremony of the Israelites with the emissary goat and I used it with a nocturnal bird.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.09.2009
La tarea del testigo / Carolina Lozada
La tarea del testigo
To write about familiar characters that are misunderstood in their time implies an arduous task of searching and reconstruction. An act that involves entering other times, other contexts, other bodies and glances. Rubi Guerra understands it thus and assumes it in this manner in La tarea del testigo (Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2007). A novel that narrates the journey towards Geneva, the illness, the transit through European sanatoriums and the final days of a suggested José Antonio Ramos Sucre, whom the author has the reserve of naming only with two initials: J.A. In his narrative, Guerra appeals to a wide repertoire of styles: what we read of the struggles of that voyage, made difficult by insomnia and ailments, is told in letters, in oneiric tales and in descriptions taken from film stories (especially from M, by Fritz Lang, and The Cabinet of Dr. Calgiari, by Robert Wiene).
Winner of the Concurso de Novela Corta Rufino Blanco Fombona (2006), Guerra’s book conjugates the brevity of its 92 pages with the depth of German expressionism, whose worlds distorted by nightmare serve as a context for the story. The oneiric disequilibrium is very useful in the description of this sick and tormented man’s sojourn in foreign lands. In this manner, we can justify the almost supernatural nature of the adventures of the Consul J.A., sometimes alone, at others accompanied by a Czechoslovakian character, Konrad Reisz, one of the patients who share with J.A. his stay in the clinic at Merano. Together they encounter events with a filmic tone, such as acts if espionage and persecutions. The presence of Reisz allows us to glimpse a possible reinvention through another Czech: Kafka.
All these elements let us to appreciate how the author wagers for a technique in which the varied allusions to literature and film enrich the signifying of the text. For this reason, Rubi Guerra’s novel is at once fiction and metafiction. The skilled handling of these resources makes La tarea del testigo [The Task of the Witness] a complex, and at the same time subtle, work written with equal amounts of care, sobriety, precision and looseness. Its highest point is found at the end, when death definitively wins the battle against J.A. There the pages refer to the decisive encounter between narrator (the witness of the title) and narrated man, convalescing in a bed, within the darkness of his June days: “I’m surprised by how his body has shrunk: he disappears into the sheets in a gesture of infinite discretion. I search for something to say –a definitive word that will summon the sense of beauty, of life or anything else– and nothing occurs to me. You open your eyes once more and look at me with serenity, with strangeness, maybe with affection, as though on the other end of a very distant bridge.” (p. 86)
The conversation takes place like a confrontation created in a retrospective manner, from the narrator’s present, when one already knows the destiny of J.A.’s work and what his role was in the political history of his country. That moment represents the vital confession of the bond that exists between the author and what he imagines. These final pages of La tarea del testigo manage to anchor the reader in the middle of that bridge between two times and two distances, between those two voices: the character who is agonizing and the future witness of a distant convalescence.
{ Carolina Lozada, ReLectura, December 2008 }
To write about familiar characters that are misunderstood in their time implies an arduous task of searching and reconstruction. An act that involves entering other times, other contexts, other bodies and glances. Rubi Guerra understands it thus and assumes it in this manner in La tarea del testigo (Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2007). A novel that narrates the journey towards Geneva, the illness, the transit through European sanatoriums and the final days of a suggested José Antonio Ramos Sucre, whom the author has the reserve of naming only with two initials: J.A. In his narrative, Guerra appeals to a wide repertoire of styles: what we read of the struggles of that voyage, made difficult by insomnia and ailments, is told in letters, in oneiric tales and in descriptions taken from film stories (especially from M, by Fritz Lang, and The Cabinet of Dr. Calgiari, by Robert Wiene).
Winner of the Concurso de Novela Corta Rufino Blanco Fombona (2006), Guerra’s book conjugates the brevity of its 92 pages with the depth of German expressionism, whose worlds distorted by nightmare serve as a context for the story. The oneiric disequilibrium is very useful in the description of this sick and tormented man’s sojourn in foreign lands. In this manner, we can justify the almost supernatural nature of the adventures of the Consul J.A., sometimes alone, at others accompanied by a Czechoslovakian character, Konrad Reisz, one of the patients who share with J.A. his stay in the clinic at Merano. Together they encounter events with a filmic tone, such as acts if espionage and persecutions. The presence of Reisz allows us to glimpse a possible reinvention through another Czech: Kafka.
All these elements let us to appreciate how the author wagers for a technique in which the varied allusions to literature and film enrich the signifying of the text. For this reason, Rubi Guerra’s novel is at once fiction and metafiction. The skilled handling of these resources makes La tarea del testigo [The Task of the Witness] a complex, and at the same time subtle, work written with equal amounts of care, sobriety, precision and looseness. Its highest point is found at the end, when death definitively wins the battle against J.A. There the pages refer to the decisive encounter between narrator (the witness of the title) and narrated man, convalescing in a bed, within the darkness of his June days: “I’m surprised by how his body has shrunk: he disappears into the sheets in a gesture of infinite discretion. I search for something to say –a definitive word that will summon the sense of beauty, of life or anything else– and nothing occurs to me. You open your eyes once more and look at me with serenity, with strangeness, maybe with affection, as though on the other end of a very distant bridge.” (p. 86)
The conversation takes place like a confrontation created in a retrospective manner, from the narrator’s present, when one already knows the destiny of J.A.’s work and what his role was in the political history of his country. That moment represents the vital confession of the bond that exists between the author and what he imagines. These final pages of La tarea del testigo manage to anchor the reader in the middle of that bridge between two times and two distances, between those two voices: the character who is agonizing and the future witness of a distant convalescence.
{ Carolina Lozada, ReLectura, December 2008 }
11.08.2009
Sutileza / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Subtlety
I was listening to the speech of an intelligent and sensible woman. She had sat on a regal armchair, with a single leg. She adapted her arms to the chair and supported a face of imperturbable beauty on the back of her clasped hands. I reminded her of the similar posture used by Archimedes in a printed illustration.
The woman preferred the comparison to Margarita de Navarra, in the act of imagining her free stories. Her words created the atmosphere of a courtesan drama, in which a polished gentleman fears the ingenuity of a festive lady and at the same time celebrates her in a few frivolous verses.
I took advantage of that instant to underline a significant passage in which the queen feels in a visible manner the thoughts of Boccaccio and his Ciceronian style. I used in my service the eloquence of Fiammetta and his insinuating gesture and I suffered an indignant protest from my kind lady.
At that moment I have arrived at a favorite superstition of the ancients. I have opened at random one of the books of my devotion and have found an example of my luck in the paraphrasis of a sonnet by Shakespeare.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I was listening to the speech of an intelligent and sensible woman. She had sat on a regal armchair, with a single leg. She adapted her arms to the chair and supported a face of imperturbable beauty on the back of her clasped hands. I reminded her of the similar posture used by Archimedes in a printed illustration.
The woman preferred the comparison to Margarita de Navarra, in the act of imagining her free stories. Her words created the atmosphere of a courtesan drama, in which a polished gentleman fears the ingenuity of a festive lady and at the same time celebrates her in a few frivolous verses.
I took advantage of that instant to underline a significant passage in which the queen feels in a visible manner the thoughts of Boccaccio and his Ciceronian style. I used in my service the eloquence of Fiammetta and his insinuating gesture and I suffered an indignant protest from my kind lady.
At that moment I have arrived at a favorite superstition of the ancients. I have opened at random one of the books of my devotion and have found an example of my luck in the paraphrasis of a sonnet by Shakespeare.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.06.2009
Sueño / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Dream
My life had ceased in the unlit dwelling, a desert retreat, at the end of the suburbs. The weak, dusty splendor of the stars, higher than before, barely sketched the outline of the city, plunged into a shadow of horrible dye. I had died in the middle of the night, in a sudden trance, at the very hour designated by the premonition. I was then traveling in an unavoidable direction, among tenuous figures, abandoned to the undulations of a joyous air, indifferent to the far off rumors of the earth. I was arriving at a silent coast, abruptly, without noticing how fast time moved. I was poised on the white sandy ground, marginalized by steep hills, peaks lost in the infinite heights. Facing me, an immobile and crystalline sea was eternally silent. A dead light, of aurora borealis, born beneath the horizon, illuminated with fixed intensity the serene, starless sky. That region was beyond the universe and I was animating it with my desperate, confined voice.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
My life had ceased in the unlit dwelling, a desert retreat, at the end of the suburbs. The weak, dusty splendor of the stars, higher than before, barely sketched the outline of the city, plunged into a shadow of horrible dye. I had died in the middle of the night, in a sudden trance, at the very hour designated by the premonition. I was then traveling in an unavoidable direction, among tenuous figures, abandoned to the undulations of a joyous air, indifferent to the far off rumors of the earth. I was arriving at a silent coast, abruptly, without noticing how fast time moved. I was poised on the white sandy ground, marginalized by steep hills, peaks lost in the infinite heights. Facing me, an immobile and crystalline sea was eternally silent. A dead light, of aurora borealis, born beneath the horizon, illuminated with fixed intensity the serene, starless sky. That region was beyond the universe and I was animating it with my desperate, confined voice.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.02.2009
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 }
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 }
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