The Virtues
I remember the wedding festivities in the transparent night. A nomadic artist was brushing the metallic chords of an instrument of his invention with a feather. The sound was seconding the effluvium of the jasmines. I was dreaming of a caliph’s immediate arrival.
The cortège of the virgins dissipated the troubles of my pensive childhood in an instant. Their musical names, of Italian origin, circulated amid praises. No mortal save Dante could have referred a case of such happiness. I was sighing and smiling at once.
The party was following the mourning of war and demonstrating an immune vitality. The neighbors had sacrificed themselves haughtily and were honoring the example of their martyrs. I barely noticed the vestige of the conflict in the city’s mountains, on the day I was to retire forever. The breeze was straightening out the red glow and the ship of absence within the same path.
The cortège of the virgins, with timid smiles, has disappeared from the world. I have divined their voices, gathered in a canticle, while losing myself voluntarily in hope’s limbo. A river of silver divides a prairie of eternity at a slant and a deer, the one belonging to Saint Hubert, displays the sorrow of Good Friday. I recreate myself in the episode of my childhood and in the illusion of voices and trust I will die within view of the diamantine eyes.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.24.2010
La pía / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Pious Girl
Fear binds my faculties if I think of aridity, oblivion, the magical silence of the fulminated country.
A slight form was being drawn in the air. It had fallen from a cortège of heroines, imperfect saints, withdrawn in a fatal sky, unequal with the privilege of the nimbus.
I then came to reconstitute the misadventure of a fervent girl, removed from the century. She died a victim of jealousy, precipitated from a balcony, and I gathered her up off the ground. I have sustained the truth of her innocence.
A grace, a good beyond the world’s advantages, repays my courage. Her crystalline image succors me during trances of bitterness, divining, from the balcony of her tragedy, dawn’s astounded colors.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Fear binds my faculties if I think of aridity, oblivion, the magical silence of the fulminated country.
A slight form was being drawn in the air. It had fallen from a cortège of heroines, imperfect saints, withdrawn in a fatal sky, unequal with the privilege of the nimbus.
I then came to reconstitute the misadventure of a fervent girl, removed from the century. She died a victim of jealousy, precipitated from a balcony, and I gathered her up off the ground. I have sustained the truth of her innocence.
A grace, a good beyond the world’s advantages, repays my courage. Her crystalline image succors me during trances of bitterness, divining, from the balcony of her tragedy, dawn’s astounded colors.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.22.2010
El año desierto / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Deserted Year
I slowly climbed the stone staircase and was resting alone in a grave chair, of secular authority. The roof dominated a cold, dying circle and I was keeping myself from glancing about.
An unhappy memory was forcing me to remain with my head hung low and retracting me from contemplating the wonder of the building, refuge of my despair. It had surged in a single night, according to a fable by the humble ones, the work of a reprobate art. The metals, nature’s most energetic elements, obeyed every detail of the will of a contriver or demiurge with an immovable face and a sealed mouth and they flowered magically from his fingers.
I was entertaining grief by reading the pages of Boethius and meditating on the reversal of his fortune. A tale credited him with the invention of steel artifices, removed from axles and wheels and proportioned to imitate the course of the planets. They received perennial movement from the hands of an invisible being.
I was demanding supernatural favors. The nostalgic maiden had disappeared from the roads of the earth and had flown with transparent wings under the faded sky. I was inviting her from my lassitude and grief to return from an infinite absence. An aerial form agreed to appear, to calm my moaning sensibility. I barely recall the tint of her hair, fire of a volatile oriflamme.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I slowly climbed the stone staircase and was resting alone in a grave chair, of secular authority. The roof dominated a cold, dying circle and I was keeping myself from glancing about.
An unhappy memory was forcing me to remain with my head hung low and retracting me from contemplating the wonder of the building, refuge of my despair. It had surged in a single night, according to a fable by the humble ones, the work of a reprobate art. The metals, nature’s most energetic elements, obeyed every detail of the will of a contriver or demiurge with an immovable face and a sealed mouth and they flowered magically from his fingers.
I was entertaining grief by reading the pages of Boethius and meditating on the reversal of his fortune. A tale credited him with the invention of steel artifices, removed from axles and wheels and proportioned to imitate the course of the planets. They received perennial movement from the hands of an invisible being.
I was demanding supernatural favors. The nostalgic maiden had disappeared from the roads of the earth and had flown with transparent wings under the faded sky. I was inviting her from my lassitude and grief to return from an infinite absence. An aerial form agreed to appear, to calm my moaning sensibility. I barely recall the tint of her hair, fire of a volatile oriflamme.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.20.2010
El pájaro de la esperanza / Luis Enrique Belmonte
The Bird of Hope
They marked the door with knife stabs,
belched out our names,
spit on the mailboxes,
threw sulfur in the garden.
But we,
we wove the blankets.
We were singing at a whisper, in the dark.
Pale,
bathed in dust,
we kept
scraping the floor.
Inside there was a bird that shivered
injured, blind, soaked.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
They marked the door with knife stabs,
belched out our names,
spit on the mailboxes,
threw sulfur in the garden.
But we,
we wove the blankets.
We were singing at a whisper, in the dark.
Pale,
bathed in dust,
we kept
scraping the floor.
Inside there was a bird that shivered
injured, blind, soaked.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.18.2010
Pasadizo / Luis Enrique Belmonte
Passageway
The owls arrived.
In the blackest part of night,
when only bodies
hardly illuminate.
***
It was a macabre song
like the chipped tooth in the sink,
like the handcuffed man stumbling,
like the shoe in the ditch.
***
But the bodies kept
lighting the transit.
Bodies entwined,
bodies dreaming,
bodies with a hummingbird inside.
***
A light
in the passageway wandered
by the living who got lost
chasing a strange aroma
and the dead who return
for a piece of bread.
***
The passageway,
the scream of the rooster,
the day’s sting,
the gleam of the new world
in your eyes that open.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
The owls arrived.
In the blackest part of night,
when only bodies
hardly illuminate.
***
It was a macabre song
like the chipped tooth in the sink,
like the handcuffed man stumbling,
like the shoe in the ditch.
***
But the bodies kept
lighting the transit.
Bodies entwined,
bodies dreaming,
bodies with a hummingbird inside.
***
A light
in the passageway wandered
by the living who got lost
chasing a strange aroma
and the dead who return
for a piece of bread.
***
The passageway,
the scream of the rooster,
the day’s sting,
the gleam of the new world
in your eyes that open.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.17.2010
Canción que no se olvida / Luis Enrique Belmonte
Song You Don’t Forget
I don’t want to touch you as though it were the last time.
And it won’t be the last time. I’ve been told
by the foxes that cross secretly along the highway.
Another long voyage will come.
Roads, windows will come,
your signals in telephone booths.
Crabs will emerge from the room
starving for nights and bedsheets.
I’ll keep in my pockets
the crumbs from your bread, the wool from your socks.
And time will weave blankets for the encounter.
And the song you don’t forget will be heard.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
I don’t want to touch you as though it were the last time.
And it won’t be the last time. I’ve been told
by the foxes that cross secretly along the highway.
Another long voyage will come.
Roads, windows will come,
your signals in telephone booths.
Crabs will emerge from the room
starving for nights and bedsheets.
I’ll keep in my pockets
the crumbs from your bread, the wool from your socks.
And time will weave blankets for the encounter.
And the song you don’t forget will be heard.
Vendrá otra larga travesía (2006)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.16.2010
Paso en falso / Luis Enrique Belmonte
False Step
The tenants are arriving
with their bitten bread under their arm.
Someone calls me from the roof.
I go up a stair that creaks like toast.
A weak light drains under the doors:
there are anonymous crimes plotted with patience,
to the beat of a sewing machine.
My girlfriend, on the roof, shakes her lace.
My girlfriend invites me to stroll along the cornices.
At this hour I assume all betrayals, all the pages
vainly pecked, all the tightrope walker’s risks.
One false step will make of me
the chill that jolts the sleepers.
One false step will make of me a procession of souls
that will drink –without anyone noticing–
the water from the forgotten cups
on the little night tables.
Paso en falso (2004)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
The tenants are arriving
with their bitten bread under their arm.
Someone calls me from the roof.
I go up a stair that creaks like toast.
A weak light drains under the doors:
there are anonymous crimes plotted with patience,
to the beat of a sewing machine.
My girlfriend, on the roof, shakes her lace.
My girlfriend invites me to stroll along the cornices.
At this hour I assume all betrayals, all the pages
vainly pecked, all the tightrope walker’s risks.
One false step will make of me
the chill that jolts the sleepers.
One false step will make of me a procession of souls
that will drink –without anyone noticing–
the water from the forgotten cups
on the little night tables.
Paso en falso (2004)
{ Luis Enrique Belmonte, Pasadizo. Poesía reunida 1994-2006, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.14.2010
La poética de Juan Calzadilla / Augusto Aristigueta
The Poetics of Juan Calzadilla
Reflections on art by the poet and painter
–How would you characterize the crisis of art in the world today?
–Generally, the crisis of art is part of or should be inscribed as part of the global crisis of capitalism in its perverse tendency of making everything susceptible to consumption, merchandise and spectacle. It’s a structural crisis that presents itself as being affected by the intervention of the market and the web of globalized distribution of its products, draining into an ostentatious, exquisite collectionism, that places commercial value before the aesthetic function that art once served, at the beginning of modernity.
–Do you think this crisis could be related to the abandonment of the practice of criticism?
–You could also say the opposite, that the abandonment of criticism has been a consequence of the banalization of art, and that it’s nothing more than, as it’s been said, consumerism and the conversion of the products of sensibility into merchandise. Because, really, criticism continues to exist, abundantly even, for that portion of the production of art governed by the laws of the market and the spectacle. What would be lacking is the stimulation of the serious and responsible aspect of the commitment to art, on the part of an illuminating criticism oriented toward facilitating the understanding of the aesthetic object and encouraging disinterested research and the satisfaction of aesthetic enjoyment through the social function that art should perform.
–What paths do you perceive poetry has taken in our time?
–Floriano Martins talks about a supersaturation of the poetic model inherited from the avant-gardes of the 20th century that has ended up emptying the forms of thought and reflexivity. The image has receded, he says. It’s no longer capable of convening, like a surrealist would say, any liberating magical power. I would add that the cultivation of an abstract or neo-romantic poetry has been generalized under the belief that the poem is an autonomous form for which words act as objects, in detriment of communication and to exalt not exactly form but rather the lack of meaning; a visual objectness constructed with intermovable words. This isn’t independent from what’s happening at the level of language, in a general sense; the media, for example (and even more so in countries like Venezuela, where an extremely primitive mimetic instinct has developed), exercise a fascinating and evil power and they have an influence not so much that people don’t write well but that they absolutely don’t write or read, allowing for whoever dares to do it to have no interest at all in his formation. Since, on the other hand, there are no high expectations among readers. This has affected poetry to the utmost degree.
–How do you perceive the contributions your book Libro de las poéticas could make to new poetry today?
–When I gathered the texts, in the manner of fragments, that make up this little manual (now revised and expanded), I didn’t have the slightest intention of elaborating a theoretical treatise on poetry. It emerged in a very casual way, I’d almost say at random, as the result of putting together with fragments a type of idea depository or puzzle, as I went about extracting those fragments from previously published books, from notebooks, notepads and agendas, where they were crouching, without any thematic or formal order, just as they appear published in this book. So the support I could provide for new poetry is very far from my first purpose which was to play.
Translator’s note: Juan Calzadilla’s Libro de las poéticas (Caracas: Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana, 2006) has just been published in a revised and expanded edition by Fondo Editorial Fundarte in Caracas.
{Augusto Aristigueta, Letras, Ciudad CCS, 13 November 2010}
Reflections on art by the poet and painter
–How would you characterize the crisis of art in the world today?
–Generally, the crisis of art is part of or should be inscribed as part of the global crisis of capitalism in its perverse tendency of making everything susceptible to consumption, merchandise and spectacle. It’s a structural crisis that presents itself as being affected by the intervention of the market and the web of globalized distribution of its products, draining into an ostentatious, exquisite collectionism, that places commercial value before the aesthetic function that art once served, at the beginning of modernity.
–Do you think this crisis could be related to the abandonment of the practice of criticism?
–You could also say the opposite, that the abandonment of criticism has been a consequence of the banalization of art, and that it’s nothing more than, as it’s been said, consumerism and the conversion of the products of sensibility into merchandise. Because, really, criticism continues to exist, abundantly even, for that portion of the production of art governed by the laws of the market and the spectacle. What would be lacking is the stimulation of the serious and responsible aspect of the commitment to art, on the part of an illuminating criticism oriented toward facilitating the understanding of the aesthetic object and encouraging disinterested research and the satisfaction of aesthetic enjoyment through the social function that art should perform.
–What paths do you perceive poetry has taken in our time?
–Floriano Martins talks about a supersaturation of the poetic model inherited from the avant-gardes of the 20th century that has ended up emptying the forms of thought and reflexivity. The image has receded, he says. It’s no longer capable of convening, like a surrealist would say, any liberating magical power. I would add that the cultivation of an abstract or neo-romantic poetry has been generalized under the belief that the poem is an autonomous form for which words act as objects, in detriment of communication and to exalt not exactly form but rather the lack of meaning; a visual objectness constructed with intermovable words. This isn’t independent from what’s happening at the level of language, in a general sense; the media, for example (and even more so in countries like Venezuela, where an extremely primitive mimetic instinct has developed), exercise a fascinating and evil power and they have an influence not so much that people don’t write well but that they absolutely don’t write or read, allowing for whoever dares to do it to have no interest at all in his formation. Since, on the other hand, there are no high expectations among readers. This has affected poetry to the utmost degree.
–How do you perceive the contributions your book Libro de las poéticas could make to new poetry today?
–When I gathered the texts, in the manner of fragments, that make up this little manual (now revised and expanded), I didn’t have the slightest intention of elaborating a theoretical treatise on poetry. It emerged in a very casual way, I’d almost say at random, as the result of putting together with fragments a type of idea depository or puzzle, as I went about extracting those fragments from previously published books, from notebooks, notepads and agendas, where they were crouching, without any thematic or formal order, just as they appear published in this book. So the support I could provide for new poetry is very far from my first purpose which was to play.
Translator’s note: Juan Calzadilla’s Libro de las poéticas (Caracas: Fundación Editorial el perro y la rana, 2006) has just been published in a revised and expanded edition by Fondo Editorial Fundarte in Caracas.
{Augusto Aristigueta, Letras, Ciudad CCS, 13 November 2010}
11.12.2010
Y lo cubría con sus máscaras funerarias / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
And covered him with its funereal masks
A soundless voice was calling him.
Inexorable.
He would then return to the secret
abyss of his room.
He would lay the length of his body abed.
He would watch cabbalistic premonitions
cross the dense shadows.
Luminous and convulsive spiders
were crawling the air threads.
An oppressive silence was complaining.
The movement of the stars
was trembling in his temples.
He couldn’t sleep.
A mute desperation would possess him.
Strange visions were ceaselessly hounding him.
Pale, the color of death,
he would lean out the window, uncombed.
Something like a white and fading light
that would surge from the remotest unknown
of his depths,
had moved through his entire body,
now rose to his face
and covered him with its funereal masks.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El límite infinito, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1997 }
A soundless voice was calling him.
Inexorable.
He would then return to the secret
abyss of his room.
He would lay the length of his body abed.
He would watch cabbalistic premonitions
cross the dense shadows.
Luminous and convulsive spiders
were crawling the air threads.
An oppressive silence was complaining.
The movement of the stars
was trembling in his temples.
He couldn’t sleep.
A mute desperation would possess him.
Strange visions were ceaselessly hounding him.
Pale, the color of death,
he would lean out the window, uncombed.
Something like a white and fading light
that would surge from the remotest unknown
of his depths,
had moved through his entire body,
now rose to his face
and covered him with its funereal masks.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El límite infinito, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1997 }
11.10.2010
Merry England / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Merry England
The moribund man props himself up on the pillow. The sound of his threat is suspended in the air. The restless family looks at each other, questioning themselves with a gesture. The abbot was manifesting his intolerant character in the crisis of agony. I was comparing his tyrannical gesture and his earthly discourse with the docile bearing of Falstaff in the same trance. An innkeeper had told me in compassionate terms about the dazed man’s decease.
The family of the impatient abbot enabled me for the rupture of a perplexity and left in my hands the magisterial thread of a celebrated tangle among politicians of that age, ennobled afterward by the fantasy of dramatists. The family was imputing the abbot’s death to the fading of his guilty projects. He desired his king’s defeat at the very moment a war with the French one was born and he had aroused the anger of several unjust noblemen.
A few rakes discerned the conspiracy amid the dialogue of some dissolute gentlemen and they ran to tell Falstaff about it. In this manner they offered him the chance to return, in his extreme days, to the king’s grace, when he had fallen out with his grandiloquent buffoonery.
The king was grateful for the affection of his partials and confessed the advantage of having submitted, when he was a turbulent youth, to the company of idlers.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The moribund man props himself up on the pillow. The sound of his threat is suspended in the air. The restless family looks at each other, questioning themselves with a gesture. The abbot was manifesting his intolerant character in the crisis of agony. I was comparing his tyrannical gesture and his earthly discourse with the docile bearing of Falstaff in the same trance. An innkeeper had told me in compassionate terms about the dazed man’s decease.
The family of the impatient abbot enabled me for the rupture of a perplexity and left in my hands the magisterial thread of a celebrated tangle among politicians of that age, ennobled afterward by the fantasy of dramatists. The family was imputing the abbot’s death to the fading of his guilty projects. He desired his king’s defeat at the very moment a war with the French one was born and he had aroused the anger of several unjust noblemen.
A few rakes discerned the conspiracy amid the dialogue of some dissolute gentlemen and they ran to tell Falstaff about it. In this manner they offered him the chance to return, in his extreme days, to the king’s grace, when he had fallen out with his grandiloquent buffoonery.
The king was grateful for the affection of his partials and confessed the advantage of having submitted, when he was a turbulent youth, to the company of idlers.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.07.2010
El adolescente / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Adolescent
I was traveling, during a vacation, along the Adriatic coast. I was idling in an unsafe skiff, painted white, like the swan at full sail, enemy of fire in Ovid’s fable.
I was gathering from my dealings with fishermen the story of the heroes of sea and mountain and confronting their ingenuous discourse with a certain egregious passage from Titus Livius, where one intuits the threat of the pirates from Illyria.
I have paid reverence in more than one defenseless coat of arms to the authority of Venice and that of Ragusa, the rival of Slavic lineage.
I was bringing together the memories of pagan antiquity with the emotions of Shakespeare’s cheerful or somber drama and I had abandoned, on more than one occasion the scrutiny of a difficult text to allay the women of my fantasy, frightened by a mischievous imp from A Midsummer Night.
I had emerged from my withdrawal on the island of tedium and had renounced my childish habits and was now stepping upon a castle of uncertain age. No one remembered the name of its owners.
A woman was spying my steps from a circular pane, similar to a rose window, and I distinguished in her face the dignity and diversion of Olivia.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I was traveling, during a vacation, along the Adriatic coast. I was idling in an unsafe skiff, painted white, like the swan at full sail, enemy of fire in Ovid’s fable.
I was gathering from my dealings with fishermen the story of the heroes of sea and mountain and confronting their ingenuous discourse with a certain egregious passage from Titus Livius, where one intuits the threat of the pirates from Illyria.
I have paid reverence in more than one defenseless coat of arms to the authority of Venice and that of Ragusa, the rival of Slavic lineage.
I was bringing together the memories of pagan antiquity with the emotions of Shakespeare’s cheerful or somber drama and I had abandoned, on more than one occasion the scrutiny of a difficult text to allay the women of my fantasy, frightened by a mischievous imp from A Midsummer Night.
I had emerged from my withdrawal on the island of tedium and had renounced my childish habits and was now stepping upon a castle of uncertain age. No one remembered the name of its owners.
A woman was spying my steps from a circular pane, similar to a rose window, and I distinguished in her face the dignity and diversion of Olivia.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.05.2010
El convite / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Invitation
Thais was a courtesan of antiquity. Her name figured in the lost work of Menander. Time respected her youth and I have not found in the residues of the classical era any sign of her death.
I have read of an exploit of her perfidy in a reconstituted document. Were I not to reveal that episode to mankind, I would be failing to live up to the advice of Plutarch’s morals.
Thais drew her lovers into a trap, after mutually reconciling them. They made themselves comfortable in some ivory seats, worthy of a senate of kings. The woman left them amazed and suspended with the generosity of her imagination and set upon them a crown of poppies, while throwing a dried laurel into the fire. This laurel had sufficed to defend the life of a hero during the enterprise of visiting the infernos.
The guests were rendered spellbound and lost in uncertainty.
Thais had abolished their understanding and inspired in them the illusion of always being amidst the preludes of dawn. They would sometimes hear a faint hymn in the pale mist. It was intoned by some hyacinth crowned girls.
The harpies and chimeras were weaving a circular veil and would descend to hang from the branches of an unsociable tree.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Thais was a courtesan of antiquity. Her name figured in the lost work of Menander. Time respected her youth and I have not found in the residues of the classical era any sign of her death.
I have read of an exploit of her perfidy in a reconstituted document. Were I not to reveal that episode to mankind, I would be failing to live up to the advice of Plutarch’s morals.
Thais drew her lovers into a trap, after mutually reconciling them. They made themselves comfortable in some ivory seats, worthy of a senate of kings. The woman left them amazed and suspended with the generosity of her imagination and set upon them a crown of poppies, while throwing a dried laurel into the fire. This laurel had sufficed to defend the life of a hero during the enterprise of visiting the infernos.
The guests were rendered spellbound and lost in uncertainty.
Thais had abolished their understanding and inspired in them the illusion of always being amidst the preludes of dawn. They would sometimes hear a faint hymn in the pale mist. It was intoned by some hyacinth crowned girls.
The harpies and chimeras were weaving a circular veil and would descend to hang from the branches of an unsociable tree.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.04.2010
El jugador / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Player
The stagnant cloud, of black hue, dominates the vista of dregs on the ground and the decorticated mountain.
A character wanders the taciturn area. His horse, of humble nape, blows the dust on the ground.
The character must play even in the scaffold, in accordance with the threat of a lugubrious cartomancy. He has reconciled his fate by means of a false card, where he sees his portrait stamped.
The character rides on horseback to his ruined house, once he distinguishes the jovial mask of the cornice. He places in the hands of a woman the fistfull of shining sequins and surrenders to funereal beauty and the astute discourse.
The woman, of a nomadic and exterminated race, witnesses from a terrace, on the following morning, the foreseen torment and hangs a message from the neck of the national ibis.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The stagnant cloud, of black hue, dominates the vista of dregs on the ground and the decorticated mountain.
A character wanders the taciturn area. His horse, of humble nape, blows the dust on the ground.
The character must play even in the scaffold, in accordance with the threat of a lugubrious cartomancy. He has reconciled his fate by means of a false card, where he sees his portrait stamped.
The character rides on horseback to his ruined house, once he distinguishes the jovial mask of the cornice. He places in the hands of a woman the fistfull of shining sequins and surrenders to funereal beauty and the astute discourse.
The woman, of a nomadic and exterminated race, witnesses from a terrace, on the following morning, the foreseen torment and hangs a message from the neck of the national ibis.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.03.2010
Entre los eslavos / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Among the Slavs
The immemorial church fit under the shade of an oak tree. I admired its golden silver altar, Byzantine beauty. I registered the chorus and the sculpted holm oak furniture.
Some unforgettable exequies were carried out there. The retinue of a few men in mourning was bringing forward a young man’s coffin. They were each carrying lamps.
The council of elders had gathered to decide the reestablishment of an ancient ceremony, in a sign of tribulation.
The most beautiful virgin of the place was riding the deceased’s horse and presiding the funeral. They had been impassioned since childhood.
The party was set to finish outside the village, in the cemetery, and I observed her from afar. The virgin abandoned herself to the trot of her mount and I saw her disappear on an ideal road, of celestial vagueness.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The immemorial church fit under the shade of an oak tree. I admired its golden silver altar, Byzantine beauty. I registered the chorus and the sculpted holm oak furniture.
Some unforgettable exequies were carried out there. The retinue of a few men in mourning was bringing forward a young man’s coffin. They were each carrying lamps.
The council of elders had gathered to decide the reestablishment of an ancient ceremony, in a sign of tribulation.
The most beautiful virgin of the place was riding the deceased’s horse and presiding the funeral. They had been impassioned since childhood.
The party was set to finish outside the village, in the cemetery, and I observed her from afar. The virgin abandoned herself to the trot of her mount and I saw her disappear on an ideal road, of celestial vagueness.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.01.2010
Marginal / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Marginal
A chronicle initiates the episode of an adventurer disillusioned from his forays and wounded by poverty. He had not attained any treasure amid the frights of the encampment. He knew of the case of the destitution of a king and his captivity of nearly three decades with no other company save that of his dwarf.
The adventurer interrupts the critique of the Homeric rhapsodies in the original Greek, the only solace of his decadence, to embrace in vain the endeavor of freeing him. The captive had been an arrogant despot and was accused of having thrown his pack of hounds against a solicitous bishop.
The adventurer was returning from a war with the infidels in the plains of the Danube. Seated on a donkey skin drum, he would occupy the sleeplessness of the alarm nights by gathering from a fugitive Byzantine the news from the vibrant language. He must have recreated the surly character in the vicissitudes of the Iliad and from that very scene one can choose the symbol of the vulture, enemy of the moribund, with the object of signifying the ruin of his hardened will.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
A chronicle initiates the episode of an adventurer disillusioned from his forays and wounded by poverty. He had not attained any treasure amid the frights of the encampment. He knew of the case of the destitution of a king and his captivity of nearly three decades with no other company save that of his dwarf.
The adventurer interrupts the critique of the Homeric rhapsodies in the original Greek, the only solace of his decadence, to embrace in vain the endeavor of freeing him. The captive had been an arrogant despot and was accused of having thrown his pack of hounds against a solicitous bishop.
The adventurer was returning from a war with the infidels in the plains of the Danube. Seated on a donkey skin drum, he would occupy the sleeplessness of the alarm nights by gathering from a fugitive Byzantine the news from the vibrant language. He must have recreated the surly character in the vicissitudes of the Iliad and from that very scene one can choose the symbol of the vulture, enemy of the moribund, with the object of signifying the ruin of his hardened will.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
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