La inspiración / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Inspiration

I was struggling up a river’s course. I never let go of the oars on the quick boat, made of bark. I had pulled it off an independent tree, a family of the larks and a disseminator of its virginal flowers in the august jungle, reflected in the ether mirror.
     On the front of the boat I drew the easy image of love and redeemed its eyes from the captivity of blinds. I had used when penetrating the fragrant crust a steel style.
     I stumbled on open plains, where a pack of burning horses was fuming and running, victors in a lion assault.
     It would speed forward to the presence of the ocean and would come back when it felt the frenetic sound of trumpets. The beauty of the gait and race presented me at each instant with a new and singular motive of admiration. I was thinking of a few rhetoricians of gentility, divided and hostile when it came to qualifying merits in the horses of a frieze, livened by the chisel of Fidias.
     The frenetic sound of the trumpets resounded in the diaphanous sky and was announcing the sovereign of the chimeric country. She came at the head of an escort of huntsmen and ancient grand men, equals in a courteous order from the earliest days of youth. She had left an ineffable world, just as Beatriz and with the same raiment of flames, brandishing the steel of Clorinda. She invited me to the step of her car and imposed a signal of her authority on my forehead, through which I was visited by thoughts and feelings of an unlimited greatness.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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