El ensueño del cazador / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Hunter’s Dream

I had become a citizen of a remote country, where the auras of the skies ran free. I recall the contentment of the inhabitants and their customs and their innocent diversions. They lived in tall and frank mansions. They would entertain themselves amidst the countryside, at the foot of dispersed trees, of ascendant height. They would run to the encounter with dawn in flowery ships.
     They called themselves docile to the council of their divinities, agents of nature and they felt at each step the effects of their invisible presence. They had to abominate the dictates of pride and invoke them, humble and scrupulous, on the occasion of a birth.
     They were pointing out the daughter of the magnates, forgotten from the ritual invocation, and her lover, the rebellious hunter.
     The young man had imitated the customs of the neighboring country. He renounced traditional employment in favor of the randomness of hunting and was challenging, confident in himself, the viciousness of the bison and the wolf.
     He forgot the graces of his beloved and the temptations of youth, thanks to an extravagant dream, ghost of a warm night. He was pursuing an arrogant animal, with a rough hump, with a choleric growl, and leaping with laughs and clamors over the repose of an immaculate fountain. A woman was emerging from the heart of the waters, barely distinguishing herself from the limpid air.
     The hunter awoke when he fixed his attention on the tenuous image.
     He withdrew from mankind to dedicate himself, without hindrance, to an extravagant meditation.
     He was anxiously tracing the marks of an unprecedented beauty.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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