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 }