Fantasía del primitivo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Fantasy of the Primitive One

The cherubs of illustrious countenance were vibrating their versatile swords of flame.
     The stars of enthusiastic fire were animating the portent of the diaphanous night, they were erecting the cortège of virtues and imitating its canticle of hope.
     I was discovering in front of my steps the amaranth of the troubadours’ duel, the simple rose of carmine and the ritual reed, the wreath of the Florentine poet in the purgatory of dawn.
     I saw myself surrounded by my dreams and memories of Earth. Following the thread of a faded river, a solemn griffin was guiding a vessel, coffin of the virgin of the nimbus, sacrificed in an eclipse. From her sepulcher she had flown again over humanity, in wings of terror, the protest of her faith.
     I received the grace of uncovering the secret of prodigies hidden to the profane mind of man. Turned into a celestial form, the virgin of the nimbus was encouraging the paladins of the empyreal to the rescue of the conflicts of the faithful and she herself had calmed Roldan’s aspect and ennobled his final hour.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

Mi maestro y amigo Josu Landa / Dolores Dorantes

My teacher and friend Josu Landa (teacher in life, and during my time with a fellowship from the Fondo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes), has come to live in this marvelous and splendid border. For me it’s a gift to be living close to someone who shares, not only my birthday and The Diva’s cares, but also survival. Of Basque origins, Venezuelan by birth, professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México who published a book about Marxism during his literary beginnings. Political prisoner during the dictatorship before Chávez. Not only does Josu know Marx, but he also lived an opposition’s organization and struggle in his country: Venezuela, from which he barely survived, thanks to a priest who intervened on his behalf so they wouldn’t blow his head off. I enjoy being a witness to the passion with which Josu cooks and lives: hederra. This Friday his seminar “Crísis y frontera” began. Josu is a philosopher by blood, one who after having lived in the cavern perceives that something else exists beyond that “underground” and he goes out to meet it: the clarity of consciousness, of knowledge, of astuteness and of coherence. But not just that, Josu makes a commitment to go back to the cavern and try to show that other reality to those who are still living confused amid the shadows of a place that seems to have no exit. At the start of the seminar, Josu made the comparison between a burrito vendor in downtown Juárez and one of the ancient Greek philosophers, “as far as their human experience they’re exactly the same.” The purpose of this seminar, which I’m enjoying enormously, is the production of a social transformation based on philosophical theories such as Stoicism, Epicureanism and Cynicism; to integrate them into the daily life of those of us who attend the seminar, in other words, not just to acquire information. To have knowledge only at an intellectual level is like being an anticapitalist who drinks Coca Cola or someone who goes to marches demanding justice for the city while dedicating himself to robbing homes. The purpose is to apply these philosophical theories to the life of a world in decadence. Decadence, not crisis, we concluded in the most recent session: a crisis can’t prolong itself from the 1970s up until today. It would be like the holocaust, which some think was only lived by Jews, when in reality all over the world we have been moving from one holocaust to another. To assume the responsibility that we live in a moment of decadence, not just in Juárez: a global decadence. To put aside the drama for the next life and take responsibility for the part that corresponds to us, that’s a good start. Because as Josu said: “If capitalism is sooo good, then why are we always living so unsatisfied all the time?” On another note, nobly and simply, Josu is teaching me a bit of Eutskera... I feel so good that, literally, I think that finally ni etxera noa, that might be my next tattoo.




{ Dolores Dorantes, Tabla sin asidero, February 2011 }

El olfato narrativo / Silvio Orta Cabrera

The Narrative Instinct

From Cumaná. – I assure you, Rodolfo Izaguirre, that even though the occurrences narrated by Rubi Guerra in La forma del amor y otros cuentos happen in the recent past or in others of this region’s life, that’s not the most important factor regarding the substance of each short story within the collection of eight that won the 2009 Premio Salvador Garmendia.

This is spoken with certainty because “Past events exist (...) only in memory, which is a form of imagination,” according to the phrase by Ursula K. Le Guin, the American fiction writer, engraved on the doors of the book beside one by Francisco de Quevedo, regarding Virtue, once feared, lies “in vanity and in dream buried.”

These aren’t there as mere adornments for the hallway, but rather significantly. The author plays fair and gives clues. To explain them, the commentator feels the need to depend on intertextuality, to crucify himself for the truth with Kristeva and Bakhtin. But now he wants –as always– to stay within pure impressionism, in the register of amazement, joy, fury, emotions and commotions enjoyed and suffered with Guerra’s book.

A recording wouldn’t have been bad, so I might be seen on YouTube the minute during reading when the savagery of war highlights a human trait that I resist understanding even in an extreme situation.

For example, in the short story “La guerra,” the instant in 1817 when the hour arrives for the doctor and the two fugitive patriot soldiers to depart from the rural house, inhabited only by a grandmother and her young granddaughter, since the men were taken away by one of the bands. After dinner, they sleep in the manger and afterward, at that hour, occurs the event that unleashes the crisis the author has insinuated with masterful technique.

I would be seen stunned. The book to one side grazing the floor, more and more wild eyed while from the very center of the earth the infernal ascends through my arm never before felt in such a manner.

Why? What is different now? I think that in the subtle modeling of insinuation stands out the recourse to olfactory sensations and how the warrior animal interprets them.

The author of La forma del amor y otros cuentos senses the spaces in all those stories and recreates so much, with the instinct of each one of the beings that he fictionalizes.

So we sense universal human diversity and in this short story the effluvium of hatred.

Besides, when the doctor of the battalion defeated near Clarines rides “through an ancient dead lake covered with crusted salt,” the shots of a film throb in slow quietude.

In his love of form, Rubi Guerra developed a quality innate in David Suárez, our greatest screenwriter, by which the word designs and moves what others would hope to move with the resources of cinema.

That’s what you’ll see, better than I do, in this mature book.




{ Silvio Orta Cabrera, El Tiempo, 18 February 2011 }

El arribo forzoso / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Forced Arrival

The frigate divides the sea of whales and suspends the foray into the archipelago of birds. The natives inhabit wooden sheds and live as fishermen, beneath a sky of soot.
     The myth resumes the origin of the moderate society.
     The crow of adventure, an equal to the wolf in the feast of battle, steers the ship of the ancestral pirate, in an impious age, and stops the flight at the naked mountain, on the summit of glass.
     I propose to travel across the basalt island, to perceive the canvas of snow.
     The waves of funereal rhythm sway a few Spanish vessels in the shady inlet. I turn my memory to the Biscayan mariners, augurers of half the globe in an unlearned century, and I distinguish them astonished in front of the aurora borealis, a dance of lights, a break from court in the humid solitude.
     I visit the episcopal city and suffer the influence of the sudden woman on a grey street, where the elevated sign of the ogive prevails.
     I have described her effigy to the minister of souls, when I stayed at his home that same day. An earthen lamp, supplied with fish oil and drawn according to a secular art, was illuminating the interview.
     He marked in the fortuitous find a present from grace. The face harmonized with that of a queen from an archaic past, devotee of the Via Crucis. The eyes inspired a longing for an invisible world and she wore, in reality, the habit of a recumbent statue, on an iron tomb, in the country of the rain.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

El nómade / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Nomad

I belonged to a race of impious men. Our horses’ pasture was vegetating on the site of extinct villages, leveled to the ground. We had sterilized a fluvial territory and enjoyed bringing terror to the palace of the kings dressed in skirts, entertained with sedentary games of foresight and calculation.
     I had wandered off to rest, far from my own, in the rubble of a summer home, obscured in a garden.
     A villager perfidiously brought me the most spirited wine, originated from a palm tree.
     I felt a hilarious intoxication and I executed, laughing and vociferating, the most audacious acts of the funambulist.
     A pilgrim, with a consumed face, happened to pass in front of me by chance. He spoke his name amid fearful babbling. It meant Ornament of Doctrine in his liturgical language.
     The old man’s paucity ended up making me lose my head. I grabbed him and submerged him repeatedly in a river covered with slime. The filth was clinging to the simple linen of his clothes. I treated him this way until his final breath.
     He was releasing a stream of mud from his mouth.
     I regained discernment when I heard his threat proffered at the limits of agony.
     He was announcing to me, quite soon, the vengeance of his bronze idol.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

La sala de los muebles de laca / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Room with the Lacquer Furniture

The hetaira placed her feet on an ivory foot-stool and began to pluck a lute with twenty double strings. She was altering the length of those strings at will by means of movable frets.
     She was anxious about the fate of a painter of ducks, lost in the crowds of Canton or in its dives. The disloyal players had mined the ground of the suburbs with the patience of moles.
     The hetaira found herself subjugated by a girl aspiring to the love of the absent man. She was imploring in vain for help from a plaster image, armed with a mandarin’s scepter and diviner of happiness.
     The rival was able to detain the fugitive in the most dangerous of places, in the chamber of the opium smokers. He stood out at that moment among the hallucinating and furious ones.
     The perspicacious rival was congratulating herself for having plunged the painter in misfortune. She was announcing the final success of her maneuver when she burned in the fire, without producing any ash, a stone of fecund virtue.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

El rito / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Rite

They had brought me there blindfolded. Sinuous flames were running across the ground of the sanctuary at certain moments in the sepulchral night, climbing the columns and beautifying the exquisite acanthus flower.
     The caryatids with serene faces, were sustaining the emblematic scales and extinguished lamps in their hands.
     I propose to myself to dedicate a remembrance to my companion during those days of solitude. He was polite and prudent and possessed nature’s most esteemed gifts. He would constantly postpone the answer to my anxious questions. I was older than him by a few years.
     He died at the hands of a delirious mob, enemy of his piety. He had left me in ignorance of his origin and service.
     I came close to abandoning myself to desperation. I regained my composure by invoking his name, for a week, at the edge of the sea and in the presence of the dying sun.
     I was retaining a fistful of his ashes in my left hand and would call on him three times consecutively.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

La isla de las madréporas / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Island of the Madrepores

The savages look at a grimace on the face of the moon. They fill with fear and impute the nocturnal ogre with some offense inflicted upon the maligned star.
     They felt its rotund steps during sleep. It must have leaned at that moment its dissimilar height on a lance pulled from the forest.
     The most dashing of the young men disposes to go out in demand of the whale. The companions celebrate his hunter’s exploits, his impassivity in scaling mountains and bring forth his genealogy of carnivorous vulture.
     A lament from the forest was advising against the young commander’s enterprise and it sounded more strongly when he departed in his ship of Spartan sails.
     The companions were following him crestfallen and would frequently make mistakes in the maneuvering.
     The young hunter, the hope of a natural society, sights an appalling fish and he follows it passionately. The companions complain about the unsuccessful hunt and propose a return.
     The young leader loses control of himself and directly solicits his own ruin. He is tangled in the harpoon’s rope and launches it consuming his arm’s effort.
     The wounded fish drags him into the abyss of the waters and a whirlwind of seagulls marks, for days on end, the place of the incident.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

Acíbar / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Bitterness

I transferred him on my shoulders to the nocturnal pit, to the abyss of mechanical nature, to recover from his inclement pain.
     The twilight was simulating the day of an original past in which the forms of imperishable life were born, from the air and the earth.
     A flower with a silk corolla, jewel of its final dance, succumbs in a crystal cup with a slender figure. He was reflecting the vicissitudes of the illness and the ravages of the cunning fever.
     I adopted, as a consequence of his death, a laconic severity and was jealously suppressing the release of continuous remorse.
     I was seated, close to midnight, at an artistic table, in a luxurious tavern. I was drinking beer in a pine mug from Germany.
     An inopportune man reminded me of the extinct one’s fate and placed before my eyes the ruin and lassitude of his fiancée.
     At that moment I released the subjugated grief. The image of his unhappy beloved pulled from my being a recondite sob and my head fell heavily onto the marble of the ebony table.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

Las mensajeras del alba / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Messengers of Dawn

The two sisters have come to the window. They continue talking in cordial terms. They emit a serene aura.
     I have seen the blonder one in the course of a daydream. The maiden was disappearing in the recess of an unreal jungle, followed by an elk. She was absorbed in the contemplation of an illuminated chalice flower.
     I have seen the second one sitting amid cushions and dressed in glossy silk on a Flamenco painter’s canvas. The wary bourgeois sustains in her lap an engraved jewel box and weighs a diamond adornment in her hand.
     The two sisters have come to the window, above the grey canal of a heretical city, resistant to the orders of my taciturn sovereign.
     The presence of the septentrional beauties assaults and spoils my loyalty.
     I change my countenance and accelerate my steps when I hear an assassin’s false congratulation.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

Requiem para un poder insomne / Jesús Sanoja Hernández

Requiem for an Insomniac Power

Shortly after the decade of the 1950s opened and not long before it closed, we saw the emergence of two fundamental poetry collections, as much for the rigor of their language as for their spirit of modernity. Elena y los elementos, by Juan Sánchez Peláez, and Los cuadernos del destierro, by Rafael Cadenas, were affiliated, perhaps for distancing themselves from the poetic modes of the time, with the genealogy of Ramos Sucre. But in fact Sánchez Peláez was coming from his Chilean experiences and his devotion to surrealism and Cadenas from a vast reflection on the poetic task, a voracious reader like the man from La torre de Timón, and what was singular in them, as with the latter, consisted in having jumped the barricade.

Since 1945, the poet Carlos Augusto León, an old disciple of Ramos Sucre, had highlighted, in his essay Las piedras mágicas, the importance of his work, and even Mario Briceño Iragorry, in the new edition of Lecturas venezolanas (a volume with a cover that looked like a Mantilla elementary school book and was quite conservative in its selection) had included “Geórgica,” defining Ramos Sucre’s poetry as excessively learned: “He has been classified as nebulous because of the originality of his diction and because of the motives of his writings.”

The decade of the 50s meant a slow but growing revision of the poetics of the Cumaná native, at a time when the popular poet par excellence was his countryman Andrés Eloy Blanco. Articles by José Ramón Medina (who would eventually write the prologue for his Obra completa, volume 73 of Biblioteca Ayacucho) and by the young writers Juan Calzadilla and Juan Angel Mogollón, enthusiastic conversations by others like Adriano González León and Rafael José Muñoz, and lastly, the irruption of the literary group Sardio, where he was esteemed as a master, and critics like Guillermo Sucre, José Balza and Eugenio Montejo soon afterward, consolidated the prestige of Ramos Sucre, at the same time as that of Guillermo Meneses and, later on, Julio Garmendia in fiction.

The belief exists, denied by the testimonies of newspapers in the 20s, that Ramos Sucre lived cloistered in his tower. The truth is Trizas de papel was published, poem by poem, in a newspaper of the era, and the same occurred, though not in its entirety, with La torre de Timón. As for “Granizada,” it appeared successively in Elite. Ramos Sucre likewise collaborated with the magazine that served as a banner for the Generation of 28 (válvula) and, according to a reference by Jóvito Villalba, he was the center of attraction in Plaza Bolívar, when he would leave his office at the Consulate, for the students who imbibed from him knowledge that was inaccessible by any other means. Against popular belief, he even had a few imitators, not always blessed in the poetic adventure.

The month of June (and also July) of 1930 demonstrated that he was read more than was imagined, although not everyone understood the depths of his visions, with the exception of Pedro Sotillo, Fernando Paz Castillo, the strange Gabriel Espinoza and, of course, Enrique Bernardo Núñez, in Panama at the time, who would produce the extraordinary La galera de Tiberio. The insomniac’s suicide, predicted by what was written in his last letters, was reflected –according to Luis Beltrán Guerrero– by the poet of the Viernes group, Otto De Sola, in his “Oda a José Antonio Ramos Sucre”: “That revolver in Geneva was not evil.”

The poetry of Ramos Sucre has been studied a great deal since the 60s. Writers such as Francisco Pérez Perdomo, who composed a prologue for one of his editions, and Angel Rama, who landed in Venezuela in the 70s and who also researched Rufino Blanco-Fombona, have analyzed his inner and outer world, just as José Ramón Medina and Fernando Paz Castillo, and Eugenio Montejo, Elena Vera, Pérez Huggins, Oswaldo Larrazábal, Gustavo Luis Carrera y Pedro Beroes have done.

Tomás Eloy Martínez’s vision is notable and the analytical incursions of Salvador Tenreiro are of the highest order and, more recently, those of Víctor Bravo, who classifies his work “as a poetics of evil and pain,” referring to Leopardi and giving equal weight to “evil and the aesthetics of modernity,” Baudelaire at the vanguard.

When his remains arrived in La Guaira, I was seeing the light of this world. An existential paradox, that unites my condition of pure and simple mortal, with an immortal dead man. Unfortunately, I have no memory of that day.




{ Jesús Sanoja Hernández, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 6 December 1998 }

Ofir / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Ophir

The squall had separated us from our course, throwing us offshore. We were starting to penetrate in the unfathomable night of the ocean.
     We were hearing the groan of some birds lost in the immensity and I recalled the episode of a gentile fable, in which the hero listens to squawks while crossing an infernal lagoon. The sailors, mute with fright, held to the current’s impetus by rowing and emerged onto a bank of palm trees.
     I saw, in that zone of the sky, the figures of the constellations animate themselves and I looked at the stretching of the scorpion, author of the fall of Phaëton.
     We disembarked at the mouth of a river and headed inland following its shores of damp grass. The natives signified hospitality for us, offering water in some lightweight gourds.
     We climbed a plateau to rest and noticed the drawing of a city amid the transparent atmosphere. We were comparing it to the image painted by light in the heart of a mirror.
     The king, ensconced in a palanquin, was venturing out to roam the countryside, followed by an escort mounted on ostriches. He possessed a wise man’s name and was entertaining himself proposing riddles for the visitors to his kingdom.
     Some birds, with plumage arrayed in the form of a lyre, were descending to earth with a majestic flight. They were emitting from their chest the deep sound of a harp.
     I reflected in front of the sovereign on nature’s enigmas and censured and accused as impostors the irritating men who insist on upholding the existence of the antipodes.
     The king thanked me for my dissertation and took me with him, in his habitual company. He regaled me that same night with a music of gongs and hammer dulcimers, in which the culminating sound of the sistrum would explode, from time to time.
     I left the next day on an elephant, a gift from the king, to contemplate the sunset, the country’s greatest wonder, reason for my journey.
     The sun was sinking at a short distance, lighting the mythological palaces of the sea.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

El secreto del Nilo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Secret of the Nile

Adrian was inconsolable from the loss of his favorite in the muddy river, amid clumsy saurians. He had perished while displaying Apollo’s attributes and insignias.
     The lavish palm trees were once again witnessing the sacrifice of the sun, flooded in the penumbra of the solemn moment, and a pyramid was inexorably overwhelming the horizon.
     Adrian had followed the inspirations of an impious curiosity and the teachings of a presumptuous criticism, when he boldly visited the country of wise myths, immobile spectator of mystery.
     Adrian has reclined on the plinth of a demolished monument, in the vicinity of the inexhaustible river, and discovers an image of his thought in the posture of a sparrowhawk, the same one from the indigenous rite, brutally assaulting a victim’s feathers.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

El remordimiento / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Remorse

The kind man paints a watercolor image of the glimpsed woman. He saw her in the secret of her park, dressed for the ride, amid a team of huntsmen armed with javelins.
     The kind man prints the fleeting vision, marks the thin and transparent figure.
     The horses left at a gallop, trampling the prairie grass polished by rain. The kind man incorporated himself to the cavalcade, from where he draws the scene for the art of his liking.
     He recalls the events and cases of the departure, and above all, the death of his rival, precipitated into an unforeseen pit during the course of the race.
     The kind man was unable to save the horseman’s life and he reaches the point of considering himself guilty. He abandons the paintbrush and with his hands covers the face altered by the suggestions of a somber mind.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

La verdad / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Truth

The swallow knows the calendar, divides the year by the guidance of an innate wisdom. It can dispense with the variable moon’s warning.
     According to natural science, the beauty of the swallow is its body’s constitution for flight, a proportion between the means and the end, between the method and the result, a Socratic idea.
     The swallow covers continents in a single day of travel and has known the measure of the terrestrial orb since long ago, anticipating the infallible dragons of myth.
     A delirious astronomer was pondering on his isle of pines and rocks, a present from a king, about the rings of Saturn and other wonders of space and about the elemental spirit of fire, the restless phosphor. A teleological prejudice had inspired in him the thought of situating the exile of condemned souls within the wheel of the sun.
     He recovered the human feeling of reality amid a warm springtime. The swallows habituated to circling the monuments of a deceased kingdom, erected according to a primordial arithmetic, rose to the rigorous clime and spoke into the wise ear the solution to the enigma of the universe, the secret of the impudent sphinx.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

Silvia / Hesnor Rivera

Silvia

The women who loved me
have surely died.
They belonged to a different race.
The atmosphere of flame necessary to their bodies
disappeared one night with the stars.
And now they can only rest their hair
on the illusion of sacred brightness
that is distance.

In the time of the sun
I could recognize them
by the mere movement of their shadows.
Then I was invaded by the impetus
of running barefoot on the transparent water.

And it was you Silvia
–nothing more than your magical glance
who were able to brighten the sand
where I would lay down to escape the night.
It was you who in passing made
each park regain its blazing youth.
And when we offered ourselves to the enchantment
                                                       [of the highest streets
facing the darkest windows
it was you who would invoke and place at our feet
the inhabitants of the shade.

One evening you buried a pearl in the lawn.
It was an homage to the beautiful days of December.

And when you perceived the presence
of the vagabonds who were spying on our offering
you postponed the birth of the tree that would unite us.
You vanished the possible rose
whose aroma would equal in weight
and consistency our blood.

Because from that point on
–from that gesture
you would have helped me save
this double appearance that imprisons us.
This double calling that requires us in one time
and leaves us immobile in the empty
world of its differences.

Then I saw weeping in your face for the first time.
I saw in your hands the stones you threw at the night:
The world was alone.
You told me about disappeared beings.
About disappeared seas.
About a certain star like an only mansion
where death and life, love and hate
were facts that were barely able
to liven an afternoon’s falling.

And from then on we were ghosts
–nothing more than ghosts.
You loved me Silvia. I loved in you the defiance
against the shade facing the woods.
The defiance of the woods facing the sky.
We loved each other and it was there in love
this disappearance that will annul us begins.
The love in my hands is a force
that distances whatever it caresses.
You will have disappeared. You will be in your race
–in your star where the flame blows.

Yet I know you still exist. I know you exist.
I have contemplated the trees again.
Felt the flowers.
I walked so much because one day
–I know it well– in a sea I don’t know.
In the great distance made as it is of blue sand
of small stones and fruits that have fallen
–in a dawn beyond time I will see you
I will hear you sing from your life.

I know you exist. And one day it will be you Silvia
–nothing more than your magical glance
who will manage to brighten the painful
sand that I make for myself.
Who will recover the blazing youth
of the oldest park in the world that I am now.

Otherwise you will know I am of the world
and I will curse you and cry
because hatred will hand me over to the night calling
to nourish its starving tunnels with me.




1954




{ Hesnor Rivera, Superficie del enigma, Maracaibo: Universidad del Zulia, 1968 }

La sombra de la hija del faraón / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Shadow of the Pharaoh’s Daughter

The vision was displaying the vehement traits of a living being. A vicious pack of hounds was being drawn in the nocturnal secret and was emerging to devour it. Bloody relics remained on the floor and the fierce dogs were leaving the place to some birds with ruby eyes. Dogs of that breed have disappeared from the inhabited world and their descendants, enemies of men, have hidden in the bends and vertices of some hills, with a fleeting resemblance to feudal battlements and towers. A bird, of constant and silent flight, unique in its kind, serves as a lookout and warns them with its sharp voice.
     My eyes opened to dawn when my burning head slipped from its place, on the shattered plinth.
     I had spent the night between the columns of a portico and under a bonfire’s protection. At that moment I was following and censuring the fabulous itineraries of the Greeks. A malignant fate was always directing me toward the remainders of some palace belonging to Cambyses, the sacrilegious king, where insatiable felines dwelled.
     I was able to take up lodgings after an audacious hunt. The dejected and mortally wounded beasts were reproducing the scene of a low relief excepted from the ruins, inspired or drawn by cruel Assyrian ingenuity.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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