Los secretos de la Odisea / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Secrets of the Odyssey

The king of the Phaeacians hurried Ulysses and refused to cultivate his memory and friendship. He had conceived an extravagant fear when he fixated on his confession to an interview with the deceased. He would imagine through the fable of the pilgrim, the resentment of Tiresias, assaulted and bound.
     The king of the Phaeacians anxiously loved life and youth. He was frightened of old age and the confinement of the sempiternal tomb. After hearing Ulysses’s story and in order to eliminate its melancholy effects, he required a bronze sword, a present from Hermes, lodged in an ivory sheath. He stood up brusquely, animated by a precise idea, and walked, through an avenue of statues, toward the arsenal of his undamaged war ships.
     A few diligent oarsmen were venturing, soon afterward, with the sagacious hero on an empty sea. The appendix of light of the Dioscuri was fluttering in the lateen yards and masts.
     The king of the Phaeacians was wounded in his noblest affect. He had to pay with an inconsolable senescence the fate of a reprobate hospitality. His daughter Nausicaa, the pensive sister of the fountains, had become enchanted by the eloquence of Ulysses and she consumed herself weeping his peremptory separation.
     The maidens she dealt with buried her, dressed in a wedding gown, under a tumulus of stones dampened by the night dew of a fluvial valley.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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