Be: 18
How grave the white
where I write and record
and copy a flower
that fears yellow and happiness.
{Luis Alberto Crespo, Sé, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009}
12.16.2010
12.15.2010
Sé: 53 / Luis Alberto Crespo
Be: 53
Poetry:
I don’t know what my book can do
for you
it doesn’t even help
pay for my kids’ guitar
it doesn’t make you smile at me
and raise your hand
it’s raining
from the eyes down
on the fifth floor
I await the news from hatred
the enemies of Mozart
I’ve crossed this out again
it needs more idleness
fewer debts to pay
no it’s not what I want you to read
but rather when I make a mistake
when I diminish myself
is my best book.
{Luis Alberto Crespo, Sé, Caracas: Monte Ávila editores, 2009}
Poetry:
I don’t know what my book can do
for you
it doesn’t even help
pay for my kids’ guitar
it doesn’t make you smile at me
and raise your hand
it’s raining
from the eyes down
on the fifth floor
I await the news from hatred
the enemies of Mozart
I’ve crossed this out again
it needs more idleness
fewer debts to pay
no it’s not what I want you to read
but rather when I make a mistake
when I diminish myself
is my best book.
{Luis Alberto Crespo, Sé, Caracas: Monte Ávila editores, 2009}
12.14.2010
Sé: 62 / Luis Alberto Crespo
Be: 62
Adriano, Eugenio:
those who departed stayed in the background over there
they’ve preferred thinness to their presence
their voice a movement of their arms
one of them waves his dry shirt
the unfindable country distances them
and a leaf the entire wind takes them away
in the torpor from whence they’ll never return
there’s a bird on the floor with ants for eyes
when you lean your head and think of them.
{Luis Alberto Crespo, Sé, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009}
Adriano, Eugenio:
those who departed stayed in the background over there
they’ve preferred thinness to their presence
their voice a movement of their arms
one of them waves his dry shirt
the unfindable country distances them
and a leaf the entire wind takes them away
in the torpor from whence they’ll never return
there’s a bird on the floor with ants for eyes
when you lean your head and think of them.
{Luis Alberto Crespo, Sé, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009}
12.12.2010
El rebelde / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Rebel
The Italian engraver works with the arquebus beside him. He deals with the magnates of his century hand in hand and without dissimulation, assuming a superior majesty.
His passions are not crowned with flowers, adjusting themselves to the image of Plato, quite celebrated in those days, and instead are exalted and stirred in the manner of the epic army of the Amazons.
The courtesans of a battling king salute him with a gesture of astonishment and stand aside for him along the street. He pours the gifts of his secure art and his independent numen onto the floor and at the foot of the throne. The jewels give off a convulsive light in the dark and reproduce the sea’s capricious vegetation and the chimeras of terror.
He thinks he is invulnerable and vents his arrogant nature in adventures and quarrels. In this manner he distances the insinuations of love and human affections so as to continue deserving the succor of the salamander and of the flying republic of the sylphs.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The Italian engraver works with the arquebus beside him. He deals with the magnates of his century hand in hand and without dissimulation, assuming a superior majesty.
His passions are not crowned with flowers, adjusting themselves to the image of Plato, quite celebrated in those days, and instead are exalted and stirred in the manner of the epic army of the Amazons.
The courtesans of a battling king salute him with a gesture of astonishment and stand aside for him along the street. He pours the gifts of his secure art and his independent numen onto the floor and at the foot of the throne. The jewels give off a convulsive light in the dark and reproduce the sea’s capricious vegetation and the chimeras of terror.
He thinks he is invulnerable and vents his arrogant nature in adventures and quarrels. In this manner he distances the insinuations of love and human affections so as to continue deserving the succor of the salamander and of the flying republic of the sylphs.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.11.2010
La tarea del testigo, la tarea de Rubi Guerra / Luis Alberto Crespo
La tarea del testigo, the Task of Rubi Guerra
“I want to exist amid empty darkness,” exclaimed a man reached by the lightning bolts of insomnia; a man in black and white, like all the downcast, whose country was a library written in Latin and Greek, amidst the smell of Arabian orange blossom and marine incense that the walled-in window stole from the glare of the sun on the Gulf of Cariaco. I went to his ossuary, placed on a hill. I barely read his name there, erased by the mold and the flaking hinge that stands on what was once his body.
Before deciding on death and erasing himself with veronal, he was certain he would be spoken of long after the rule of Juan Vicente Gómez, much longer, beyond 1945. And he wasn’t lying: today José Antonio Ramos Sucre transits the praise of critics, frequents editions and translations and is inevitably compared to Borges or with the Borgesian.
Suddenly, no more than a few months ago, Rubi Guerra, one of our most prominent fiction writers, finished a novella in which the great man from Cumaná is a thinly disguised character. Titled La tarea del testigo, published by Fondo Editorial El perro y la rana, which is part of the Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura and the winner of the Concurso de Novela Corta “Rufino Blanco Fombona.” It’s about “a false Ramos Sucre,” he warns me in the kind flourish he’s signed in the dedication. Except his misfortune reveals him, his calvary and the apocryphal letters he writes, while snow falls over Europe, to the “dear Alberto” of his high esteem from the sanatoriums of Hamburg, Merano and Geneva, like the one in which he suffers and blames himself for the abandonment of Cruz Salmerón Acosta, devoured by leprosy in the tense land of Araya and barely disguised behind the name “Alejandro.”
It’s always nighttime in this novel, even when it dawns, like the sleepless glance of the poet of La torre de Timón, Las formas del fuego and El cielo de esmalte, to whom Rubi Guerra attributes a novelist’s gifts without distracting himself as he demonstrates it, nor consigning proof, just as he doesn’t warn us when the intrusion of misplacement or hallucination occurs and much less if life resumes its certainty. The novel’s structure pays no mind to the machinery of narrative planes: to the epistolary prose of the desperate man, Guerra brings his own, that of fiction, closer by which both to a certain degree are blended and attribute to themselves a similar resemblance in unreality: the character’s altered biography serves him as a pretext to free himself from verifications and thus to enjoy the genre’s resources, without neglecting the testimonial intonation, the admiring action of gratitude toward the prisoner of interminable night.
A novelized Ramos Sucre is proposed to us by this novel (which is accompanied by several short narrative texts as a test of dexterity and thematic versatility), whose inhabitant of waking dreams and nightmares is a true and feigned participant of an adventure belonging to Gothic literature, though always equaling himself, dressed as a Consul and as a hospital patient, the unblinking glance of one who never sleeps and hopes to achieve it by suicide. To his house –a real and metaphoric house– we are led by Rubi Guerra in the final pages: “I’m surprised by how his body has shrunk, disappearing into the sheets in a gesture of infinite discretion (...) You open your eyes once more and look at me with serenity, with strangeness, maybe with affection, as if from the other side of a very long bridge.” Years before, Ramos Sucre had lived that prelude. His Preludio: “I want to exist amid empty darkness, because the world damages my senses cruelly and life afflicts me, impertinent lover whispering bitter stories.”
The snow, the wolves and death in the arms of the white beauty of the Dantesque beloved amid the symbolic landscape and the burning hill of the ancient man from Cumaná cover the writing of the poem, that task of the poet, of the witness.
Translator’s note: Luis Alberto Crespo has just been awarded the 2010 Premio Nacional de Literatura.
{ Luis Alberto Crespo, La lectura común, Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2010 }
“I want to exist amid empty darkness,” exclaimed a man reached by the lightning bolts of insomnia; a man in black and white, like all the downcast, whose country was a library written in Latin and Greek, amidst the smell of Arabian orange blossom and marine incense that the walled-in window stole from the glare of the sun on the Gulf of Cariaco. I went to his ossuary, placed on a hill. I barely read his name there, erased by the mold and the flaking hinge that stands on what was once his body.
Before deciding on death and erasing himself with veronal, he was certain he would be spoken of long after the rule of Juan Vicente Gómez, much longer, beyond 1945. And he wasn’t lying: today José Antonio Ramos Sucre transits the praise of critics, frequents editions and translations and is inevitably compared to Borges or with the Borgesian.
Suddenly, no more than a few months ago, Rubi Guerra, one of our most prominent fiction writers, finished a novella in which the great man from Cumaná is a thinly disguised character. Titled La tarea del testigo, published by Fondo Editorial El perro y la rana, which is part of the Ministerio del Poder Popular para la Cultura and the winner of the Concurso de Novela Corta “Rufino Blanco Fombona.” It’s about “a false Ramos Sucre,” he warns me in the kind flourish he’s signed in the dedication. Except his misfortune reveals him, his calvary and the apocryphal letters he writes, while snow falls over Europe, to the “dear Alberto” of his high esteem from the sanatoriums of Hamburg, Merano and Geneva, like the one in which he suffers and blames himself for the abandonment of Cruz Salmerón Acosta, devoured by leprosy in the tense land of Araya and barely disguised behind the name “Alejandro.”
It’s always nighttime in this novel, even when it dawns, like the sleepless glance of the poet of La torre de Timón, Las formas del fuego and El cielo de esmalte, to whom Rubi Guerra attributes a novelist’s gifts without distracting himself as he demonstrates it, nor consigning proof, just as he doesn’t warn us when the intrusion of misplacement or hallucination occurs and much less if life resumes its certainty. The novel’s structure pays no mind to the machinery of narrative planes: to the epistolary prose of the desperate man, Guerra brings his own, that of fiction, closer by which both to a certain degree are blended and attribute to themselves a similar resemblance in unreality: the character’s altered biography serves him as a pretext to free himself from verifications and thus to enjoy the genre’s resources, without neglecting the testimonial intonation, the admiring action of gratitude toward the prisoner of interminable night.
A novelized Ramos Sucre is proposed to us by this novel (which is accompanied by several short narrative texts as a test of dexterity and thematic versatility), whose inhabitant of waking dreams and nightmares is a true and feigned participant of an adventure belonging to Gothic literature, though always equaling himself, dressed as a Consul and as a hospital patient, the unblinking glance of one who never sleeps and hopes to achieve it by suicide. To his house –a real and metaphoric house– we are led by Rubi Guerra in the final pages: “I’m surprised by how his body has shrunk, disappearing into the sheets in a gesture of infinite discretion (...) You open your eyes once more and look at me with serenity, with strangeness, maybe with affection, as if from the other side of a very long bridge.” Years before, Ramos Sucre had lived that prelude. His Preludio: “I want to exist amid empty darkness, because the world damages my senses cruelly and life afflicts me, impertinent lover whispering bitter stories.”
The snow, the wolves and death in the arms of the white beauty of the Dantesque beloved amid the symbolic landscape and the burning hill of the ancient man from Cumaná cover the writing of the poem, that task of the poet, of the witness.
Translator’s note: Luis Alberto Crespo has just been awarded the 2010 Premio Nacional de Literatura.
{ Luis Alberto Crespo, La lectura común, Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2010 }
12.08.2010
El desesperado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Desperate One
I was soaking the pillow with tears in the secret of the night. I was distinguishing the lost rumors in the firm darkness.
I had fallen, a month earlier, gravely wounded in a compromised dispute.
The idolized woman refused to alleviate, with her presence, the inhuman pains.
I decided to rise from the bed, so as to conclude at once this intolerable life and I headed towards the window with sturdy balustrades, raised vertiginously above a rugged field.
I was hoping to watch, in the crisis of agony, the sparkle of morning over the serene heights of the mountain.
I provoked the tearing of the sutures when I forced my hesitant steps and fainted when the sudden flow of blood surged.
I came to my senses by the effect of the servants’ diligence.
I have felt the stupor and happiness of death. A delicious aura, traveler from other worlds, was solacing my forehead and inviting the canto of the daybreak swans.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I was soaking the pillow with tears in the secret of the night. I was distinguishing the lost rumors in the firm darkness.
I had fallen, a month earlier, gravely wounded in a compromised dispute.
The idolized woman refused to alleviate, with her presence, the inhuman pains.
I decided to rise from the bed, so as to conclude at once this intolerable life and I headed towards the window with sturdy balustrades, raised vertiginously above a rugged field.
I was hoping to watch, in the crisis of agony, the sparkle of morning over the serene heights of the mountain.
I provoked the tearing of the sutures when I forced my hesitant steps and fainted when the sudden flow of blood surged.
I came to my senses by the effect of the servants’ diligence.
I have felt the stupor and happiness of death. A delicious aura, traveler from other worlds, was solacing my forehead and inviting the canto of the daybreak swans.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.05.2010
Los gallos de la noche de Elsinor / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Roosters of the Elsinore Night
The mist from the canal was rising to envelop the wilted gardens. The lanterns, with damp glass, gave off a fatuous light during the day, of alchemy.
The wan girl had cultivated my attention when she leaned out the window for the purpose of discovering the hour in the plaza clock. Time and inclemency had tarnished the sphere and darkened the Roman numeral, more suited for a memorial stone.
We spoke in the shadows of her parents and guardians. She would present herself faithfully at the window to inquire the hour itself in the decrepit clock and would scrupulously announce it with its trail of minutes and seconds.
She promised to accompany me through life, fleeing with me, in favor of the dead of night, on my horse’s hindquarters.
I facilitated an exit to the street for her, breaking the window’s archaic bars. She appeared wrapped in the plaintive linen of Eurydice.
My horse carried us off in a blind run, threw me onto the earth and dragged me a long distance on the ground. My foot had been caught in the stirrup’s belt.
He slowed down and returned to his natural meekness, when the proclamation of the roosters removed from my company the vain simulacrum of the woman.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The mist from the canal was rising to envelop the wilted gardens. The lanterns, with damp glass, gave off a fatuous light during the day, of alchemy.
The wan girl had cultivated my attention when she leaned out the window for the purpose of discovering the hour in the plaza clock. Time and inclemency had tarnished the sphere and darkened the Roman numeral, more suited for a memorial stone.
We spoke in the shadows of her parents and guardians. She would present herself faithfully at the window to inquire the hour itself in the decrepit clock and would scrupulously announce it with its trail of minutes and seconds.
She promised to accompany me through life, fleeing with me, in favor of the dead of night, on my horse’s hindquarters.
I facilitated an exit to the street for her, breaking the window’s archaic bars. She appeared wrapped in the plaintive linen of Eurydice.
My horse carried us off in a blind run, threw me onto the earth and dragged me a long distance on the ground. My foot had been caught in the stirrup’s belt.
He slowed down and returned to his natural meekness, when the proclamation of the roosters removed from my company the vain simulacrum of the woman.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.02.2010
El retrato / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Portrait
I was tracing the figure of the decorative and fabulous animals on the wall, inspiring myself with a book of chivalry and the prints of a samurai artist.
A folding screen, from the Far East, displayed the image of the crane poised on the turtle.
The folding screen and a bunch of blue flowers had been given to me in the house of the courtesans, plush with lacquer furniture. My favorite girl would hang affectionately from my arm, telling me endearing words in her impassable language. She had painted herself, with a tiny pencil, some long thin eyebrows, which highlighted the snow-like smoothness of her epidermis. At that moment she showed me a stiletto hidden in her hair and destined for her voluntary death on the eve of old age. Her companions were reposing on some tapestries and would alternate advice and predictions with each other, calling themselves captives of fatality. They smoked in silver and porcelain pipes or plucked the lute with an indifferent gesture.
I continue to paint the mythological beasts and suddenly begin to draw the features of a weeping mask. The physiognomy of the unforgettable courtesan, such as it must have been on the day of her sacrifice, gradually appears thanks to my involuntary pencil.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I was tracing the figure of the decorative and fabulous animals on the wall, inspiring myself with a book of chivalry and the prints of a samurai artist.
A folding screen, from the Far East, displayed the image of the crane poised on the turtle.
The folding screen and a bunch of blue flowers had been given to me in the house of the courtesans, plush with lacquer furniture. My favorite girl would hang affectionately from my arm, telling me endearing words in her impassable language. She had painted herself, with a tiny pencil, some long thin eyebrows, which highlighted the snow-like smoothness of her epidermis. At that moment she showed me a stiletto hidden in her hair and destined for her voluntary death on the eve of old age. Her companions were reposing on some tapestries and would alternate advice and predictions with each other, calling themselves captives of fatality. They smoked in silver and porcelain pipes or plucked the lute with an indifferent gesture.
I continue to paint the mythological beasts and suddenly begin to draw the features of a weeping mask. The physiognomy of the unforgettable courtesan, such as it must have been on the day of her sacrifice, gradually appears thanks to my involuntary pencil.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
12.01.2010
Micenas / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Mycenae
I have reached the portico after crossing the avenue of statues. The sculptor had conceived and erected them in memory of calamities and portents. He had heard Cassandra’s shapeless and faltering voices.
I advanced resolutely through the obstructed galleries without finding any vestige of a human being. I would lean down to the pavement to pick up the trampled torches, emblems of death.
I ignored the dangers inherent to visiting that place. My companions had remained silent when I questioned them in a pressing manner. They would fix a preoccupied glance on the floor.
The rainwater had stained the walls flowing from the holes in the roof. A few shields, similar to those hanging, as ornaments, on ships’ prows, had broken when they fell to the floor.
Without realizing it I have entered the chamber with the most lugubrious reputation. I doubted I had arrived at the end of my life.
A dragon had stretched out on its side in front of a lucid disk.
I precipitously retraced my steps and found amidst the ruins the host of my solicitous acquaintances.
I have pondered, over the years and amid anxiety and fear, my unexpected salvation.
I adhere, once in a while, to a sensible conjecture.
The dragon had become fascinated by his own reflection in a metallic mirror.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I have reached the portico after crossing the avenue of statues. The sculptor had conceived and erected them in memory of calamities and portents. He had heard Cassandra’s shapeless and faltering voices.
I advanced resolutely through the obstructed galleries without finding any vestige of a human being. I would lean down to the pavement to pick up the trampled torches, emblems of death.
I ignored the dangers inherent to visiting that place. My companions had remained silent when I questioned them in a pressing manner. They would fix a preoccupied glance on the floor.
The rainwater had stained the walls flowing from the holes in the roof. A few shields, similar to those hanging, as ornaments, on ships’ prows, had broken when they fell to the floor.
Without realizing it I have entered the chamber with the most lugubrious reputation. I doubted I had arrived at the end of my life.
A dragon had stretched out on its side in front of a lucid disk.
I precipitously retraced my steps and found amidst the ruins the host of my solicitous acquaintances.
I have pondered, over the years and amid anxiety and fear, my unexpected salvation.
I adhere, once in a while, to a sensible conjecture.
The dragon had become fascinated by his own reflection in a metallic mirror.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
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