Relief
I had grown up under the charge of my older brother.
I never left my house to have fun with the boys my age in the neighboring plaza.
The neighborhood windows would remain shut and no maiden would appear to watch the silent park. The branches of the centenary trees would reach the ground, relaxed by the water. I would remember, on a day of nostalgia, the fluvial willows where the sons of Zion would hang the psaltery.
The boys would get sick from rushing and scattering through the infected weeds. Their voices would barely circulate in the clumsy air.
I knew nothing about my family’s traditions and how it had been extinguished in my unfortunate house. I was left plunged in uncertainty after the death of my brother. He lived in a sullen and taciturn manner, lost in the vice of alcohol, and he never allowed himself any effusion with me. He would dress in frayed black cloth. He was, simultaneously, somber and kind.
He came in from the street and locked himself, to die, in the room where he tended to reserve himself. He left me a piece of paper on top of an invalid piano.
I conceived an intimate and relentless pain and I would spend hours on end at night deciphering his incoherent expression by the glow of a street light in the plaza, circled by a halo of humidity.
The effort of trying to pierce his thought and the memory of his generosity eventually drained me and animated the desire to follow him.
I felt, for the first time, the affection for life when the pulverulent letter dissolved in my hands.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
8.28.2010
El cortesano / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Courtier
The princess of China was telling me that afternoon the verses of a poet with an orgiastic life. He had died, not too long before, falling from a raft into the waters of a navigable river.
The verses were decanting the repose of a saurian among the water lilies of a swamp and that same setting decorated a folding screen’s red cloth.
I had usurped, for the purpose of listening to her, an ivory chair where the most learned and ceremonious adviser tended to accommodate himself.
The parrot with a placid voice, poised on a wicker hoop, bristles his sonorous chest within sight of a cloud precipitated over the wooden palace. I abominated the inopportune bird.
I announced from the terrace the advance of a throng of horsemen and the vibration of their spears amid a dust cloud.
The princess began to jabber, fear printed on her nacre face, and she was able to tell me about the cruelty of those victors and how they would abolish their victims’ eyes, setting them in the beaks of schooled cranes.
I heard no news of the princess in the course of the fire provoked and engineered by the horsemen. She resolved to succumb in the company of her own.
The enemies were vociferating, inebriated by a liquor extracted from rice, and I stole away from their vigilance.
I hid in the neighboring pagoda, untouched by the looting, and adopted the life and the habit of the bonze. I smile when I see myself wrapped in my long robe, yellow and with pompous sleeves. I remain on a plateau of my temple, festooned with flowers.
I have managed to subtract myself from the distrust of the horsemen and insinuate myself with them.
At some point I explore the seat of the palace transformed into ashes, from where the princess returned to the sky, original dwelling of her elders.
I have chosen, for my devotion and seclusion, each of the spots where I reconstitute her presence and divine the vestige of her silver buskin.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
Translator’s note: This poem was first published in the only issue of the magazine válvula in Caracas in January 1928.
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The princess of China was telling me that afternoon the verses of a poet with an orgiastic life. He had died, not too long before, falling from a raft into the waters of a navigable river.
The verses were decanting the repose of a saurian among the water lilies of a swamp and that same setting decorated a folding screen’s red cloth.
I had usurped, for the purpose of listening to her, an ivory chair where the most learned and ceremonious adviser tended to accommodate himself.
The parrot with a placid voice, poised on a wicker hoop, bristles his sonorous chest within sight of a cloud precipitated over the wooden palace. I abominated the inopportune bird.
I announced from the terrace the advance of a throng of horsemen and the vibration of their spears amid a dust cloud.
The princess began to jabber, fear printed on her nacre face, and she was able to tell me about the cruelty of those victors and how they would abolish their victims’ eyes, setting them in the beaks of schooled cranes.
I heard no news of the princess in the course of the fire provoked and engineered by the horsemen. She resolved to succumb in the company of her own.
The enemies were vociferating, inebriated by a liquor extracted from rice, and I stole away from their vigilance.
I hid in the neighboring pagoda, untouched by the looting, and adopted the life and the habit of the bonze. I smile when I see myself wrapped in my long robe, yellow and with pompous sleeves. I remain on a plateau of my temple, festooned with flowers.
I have managed to subtract myself from the distrust of the horsemen and insinuate myself with them.
At some point I explore the seat of the palace transformed into ashes, from where the princess returned to the sky, original dwelling of her elders.
I have chosen, for my devotion and seclusion, each of the spots where I reconstitute her presence and divine the vestige of her silver buskin.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
Translator’s note: This poem was first published in the only issue of the magazine válvula in Caracas in January 1928.
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
8.27.2010
El jardín de los pasillos que se bifurcan / Gabriel Payares
The Garden of Forking Hallways
There are those who think that nothing is written without being about the author himself. No matter the genre chosen, the topics favored or the unquestionable marks of style, all acts of writing contain an individual battle for deciphering one’s own labyrinths, for making out of the ink on paper a very personal Ariadne’s thread, at once escape and minotaur. This labyrinthine image, a somewhat cliché borrowing from Greek mythology, accompanies the present reading of Pasillos de mi memoria ajena (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2007), the first publication by the young writer Mario Morenza, and it serves as a point of departure for certain reflections that are evident in the work.
One would have to begin by stating the obvious: Morenza seems to be conscious of the labyrinth he offers us, of his proposal for a complex and rigorous writing, which he sometimes catalogs as a diary, other times as a novel, but which he structures like a compendium of tales, or perhaps even like a personal collage: a sort of written Frankenstein built out of the textual snippets he was able to find dispersed in notebooks and journals. As with every labyrinth, Morenza’s tends toward dispersion, undoubtedly imitating the capricious prancing of memory, which leaps from one remembrance to another without any apparent fixed and coherent path; and at the same time he submits the very language that constructs it to a chain of mutations, of alterations in register and of apparent entrances and exits from the terrain of fiction, as though the text were trying to destabilize itself and become something new, something whose forms demand, as a first step, the demolition of all linear trajectories. Morenza’s hallways, present in the title of the work itself, are the routes of entry and escape from that personal chaos we tend to call memory, they are a possible direction amidst deviation: family, friends, one’s own personality, the Escuela de Letras at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the very writing of the book that is being read; Morenza uses himself openly as prime material, in what could be considered a narcissistic gesture by the author, whose work erects for him a golden seat of honor in his own world, or also as a sacrificial outburst: the author presents his own life as a holocaust for fiction.
In this manner, the work’s hallways lead once and again to the author: they are perhaps an attempt to provide himself with an order, to create a map of the labyrinth in which he lives, in hopes of guiding himself toward an exit. This is why the photographs, charts and drawings that illustrate various sections throughout the book turn out to be a series of elements of intimate accompaniment, that contribute for the purpose of drawing a portrait of Morenza himself, in the same way in which a child’s free drawings in a notepad might; but at the same time they constitute elements of collectible meaning, dispersed in the labyrinth as though a family album lay beneath the tale. Because underneath it all there is a curatorial gesture in this deployment of personal forces, and Morenza himself makes note of it in the text that serves as an introduction, “I Can Speak”: “I want to protect my memory from the world so that it won’t continue to be, in this sublime moment, the same or more remote than what it’s already been. No one will interrupt me while I speak to myself.” (6)
This overwhelming introspection involves a risk similar to that of an intimate diary or a confession: the author must choose from among multiple scenarios –hallways– of his life what to tell and what to hide, and in what specific sequence narrate what he chooses. He clearly runs the risk of granting the most superfluous anecdotes an false air of transcendence, or of betraying life –as if the latter were of any concern to the reader– and of attributing to himself an agreed upon, treacherous and convincing memory. But, isn’t this exactly what one does when writing? Isn’t the narrator’s voice always treachery, as it recalls events it never witnessed and never will?
In any case, Morenza assumes this risk and allows himself to be misplaced in this new memory of his, a memory that is both his own and someone else’s. This what probably stands out the most in this book, and offers a certain consolation to the reader who faces the 270 pages of a text that wanders among various genres and which can occasionally discourage its reading, with its close-ups that are too prolonged: the daring versatility of the whole, that often allows its fragments to be taken separately as a type of mosaic or meccano. “Vitrum” and “Demons in the Backyard,” in fact, two of the best tales in the work, are texts that can be appreciated on their own, and whose inclusion in Pasillos de mi memoria ajena provides, more than meaning or clues or alignments, a series of enigmas and questions whose answer we must seek out in the previous blocks, taken from the author’s own life. A game of unfoldings that will culminate in the dialogue between a Mario 8236 and a Mario 8237, versions perhaps of clone travels across the labyrinth of a memory that is now foreign.
One could, finally, say that Morenza wagers for making the life a tale, or for erasing as much as possible the border between the two; traces of bravery and of a certain writerly pride that is surely surprising when found in a young writer, even more so when this is his first book.
Gabriel Payares
Illustration: “Relativity,” Escher
{ Gabriel Payares, 500 ejemplares, 1 August 2010 }
I have become a conjurer of seasons.
I hold in my hands that fraction of a second.
I ignore what came before and after.
Mario Morenza
Pasillos de mi memoria ajena
I hold in my hands that fraction of a second.
I ignore what came before and after.
Mario Morenza
Pasillos de mi memoria ajena
There are those who think that nothing is written without being about the author himself. No matter the genre chosen, the topics favored or the unquestionable marks of style, all acts of writing contain an individual battle for deciphering one’s own labyrinths, for making out of the ink on paper a very personal Ariadne’s thread, at once escape and minotaur. This labyrinthine image, a somewhat cliché borrowing from Greek mythology, accompanies the present reading of Pasillos de mi memoria ajena (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2007), the first publication by the young writer Mario Morenza, and it serves as a point of departure for certain reflections that are evident in the work.
One would have to begin by stating the obvious: Morenza seems to be conscious of the labyrinth he offers us, of his proposal for a complex and rigorous writing, which he sometimes catalogs as a diary, other times as a novel, but which he structures like a compendium of tales, or perhaps even like a personal collage: a sort of written Frankenstein built out of the textual snippets he was able to find dispersed in notebooks and journals. As with every labyrinth, Morenza’s tends toward dispersion, undoubtedly imitating the capricious prancing of memory, which leaps from one remembrance to another without any apparent fixed and coherent path; and at the same time he submits the very language that constructs it to a chain of mutations, of alterations in register and of apparent entrances and exits from the terrain of fiction, as though the text were trying to destabilize itself and become something new, something whose forms demand, as a first step, the demolition of all linear trajectories. Morenza’s hallways, present in the title of the work itself, are the routes of entry and escape from that personal chaos we tend to call memory, they are a possible direction amidst deviation: family, friends, one’s own personality, the Escuela de Letras at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, the very writing of the book that is being read; Morenza uses himself openly as prime material, in what could be considered a narcissistic gesture by the author, whose work erects for him a golden seat of honor in his own world, or also as a sacrificial outburst: the author presents his own life as a holocaust for fiction.
In this manner, the work’s hallways lead once and again to the author: they are perhaps an attempt to provide himself with an order, to create a map of the labyrinth in which he lives, in hopes of guiding himself toward an exit. This is why the photographs, charts and drawings that illustrate various sections throughout the book turn out to be a series of elements of intimate accompaniment, that contribute for the purpose of drawing a portrait of Morenza himself, in the same way in which a child’s free drawings in a notepad might; but at the same time they constitute elements of collectible meaning, dispersed in the labyrinth as though a family album lay beneath the tale. Because underneath it all there is a curatorial gesture in this deployment of personal forces, and Morenza himself makes note of it in the text that serves as an introduction, “I Can Speak”: “I want to protect my memory from the world so that it won’t continue to be, in this sublime moment, the same or more remote than what it’s already been. No one will interrupt me while I speak to myself.” (6)
This overwhelming introspection involves a risk similar to that of an intimate diary or a confession: the author must choose from among multiple scenarios –hallways– of his life what to tell and what to hide, and in what specific sequence narrate what he chooses. He clearly runs the risk of granting the most superfluous anecdotes an false air of transcendence, or of betraying life –as if the latter were of any concern to the reader– and of attributing to himself an agreed upon, treacherous and convincing memory. But, isn’t this exactly what one does when writing? Isn’t the narrator’s voice always treachery, as it recalls events it never witnessed and never will?
In any case, Morenza assumes this risk and allows himself to be misplaced in this new memory of his, a memory that is both his own and someone else’s. This what probably stands out the most in this book, and offers a certain consolation to the reader who faces the 270 pages of a text that wanders among various genres and which can occasionally discourage its reading, with its close-ups that are too prolonged: the daring versatility of the whole, that often allows its fragments to be taken separately as a type of mosaic or meccano. “Vitrum” and “Demons in the Backyard,” in fact, two of the best tales in the work, are texts that can be appreciated on their own, and whose inclusion in Pasillos de mi memoria ajena provides, more than meaning or clues or alignments, a series of enigmas and questions whose answer we must seek out in the previous blocks, taken from the author’s own life. A game of unfoldings that will culminate in the dialogue between a Mario 8236 and a Mario 8237, versions perhaps of clone travels across the labyrinth of a memory that is now foreign.
One could, finally, say that Morenza wagers for making the life a tale, or for erasing as much as possible the border between the two; traces of bravery and of a certain writerly pride that is surely surprising when found in a young writer, even more so when this is his first book.
Gabriel Payares
Illustration: “Relativity,” Escher
{ Gabriel Payares, 500 ejemplares, 1 August 2010 }
8.25.2010
El superviviente / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Survivor
The funeral river originates in a swamp of hell, where the errant shadows moan. It describes languid circuits before emerging on the countenance of the Earth. Its lymph flows through a path of tenuous willows and inundates them. Ovid does not transit, during his confinement, a sadder shore.
I was following the steps of the sibyl of unscathed chastity. She was hiding her face in the magic veil where Prosperina draws, centuries earlier, the forms of the beings. I was carrying at my side a mythological flower and was offering it in secret to the present sign of the zodiac.
The sibyl got lost in the river’s grotto, moving up the murky course. She was making off within sight of the new humanity, subtracted, a thousand years, to the report of the sparkling Olympus.
The escape of the sibyl inspired in me the wisdom of surveying the work of Virgil in order to reconcile her volatile premonitions and fully understand them. I discern the semblance of the Roman bard in the portico of the caliginous world.
The assault of a boreal race announces the millennium of the eclipse. I insinuate myself in the throng of the victors and reprimand the uncivil excess and joviality. My intrepidity at the threshold of death and the assistance of Virgil confer upon me the privilege of an immune life.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The funeral river originates in a swamp of hell, where the errant shadows moan. It describes languid circuits before emerging on the countenance of the Earth. Its lymph flows through a path of tenuous willows and inundates them. Ovid does not transit, during his confinement, a sadder shore.
I was following the steps of the sibyl of unscathed chastity. She was hiding her face in the magic veil where Prosperina draws, centuries earlier, the forms of the beings. I was carrying at my side a mythological flower and was offering it in secret to the present sign of the zodiac.
The sibyl got lost in the river’s grotto, moving up the murky course. She was making off within sight of the new humanity, subtracted, a thousand years, to the report of the sparkling Olympus.
The escape of the sibyl inspired in me the wisdom of surveying the work of Virgil in order to reconcile her volatile premonitions and fully understand them. I discern the semblance of the Roman bard in the portico of the caliginous world.
The assault of a boreal race announces the millennium of the eclipse. I insinuate myself in the throng of the victors and reprimand the uncivil excess and joviality. My intrepidity at the threshold of death and the assistance of Virgil confer upon me the privilege of an immune life.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
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