Alastor
The army of the Athenians had suffered deplorable setbacks in the confines of Syracuse and the order to retreat was necessary. The ships in charge of facilitating it had been lost in a fight reestablished several times. We the survivors envied the happiness of those who were sacrificed. The bonfires consumed the dead and their spectacular military accessories and were marking the route of our day’s journey.
The army was moving slowly and with difficulty. The wounded, abandoned on the floor, broke into lamentations and thought they had fallen into the hands of the victor.
My companion in the field tent sat up from where he was succumbing and clung to my shoulders. We had grown up together in imitation of heroes and had agreed to help each other. He was frightened of dying amidst the abuses and even more of surviving only to end up in captivity.
I threw him down in front of me and took his life with a dart penetrated by infernal aconite and reserved for myself in case I was imprisoned.
I have blindly inflicted upon him the mortal wound. I have turned my face and covered my eyes with the other hand.
Unlimited compassion barely serves to alleviate my crime of having anticipated the necessary day for him. I describe without respite the event where my inquietude begins.
His soul did not drift away indignant.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.21.2011
Nuevos poemas: XX / Reynaldo Pérez Só
New Poems: XX
it refuses
to come out into the sun anymore the shadow
is warm and covers
it can’t
it must wait a little more
words threaded to a nonexistent sun
it’s made of shadow
it’s only made of shadow.
Translator’s note: Reynaldo Pérez Só (Caracas, 1945) will be the poet honored this year at the 8th Festival Mundial de Poesía 2011, next month in Caracas.
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
it refuses
to come out into the sun anymore the shadow
is warm and covers
it can’t
it must wait a little more
words threaded to a nonexistent sun
it’s made of shadow
it’s only made of shadow.
Translator’s note: Reynaldo Pérez Só (Caracas, 1945) will be the poet honored this year at the 8th Festival Mundial de Poesía 2011, next month in Caracas.
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
5.20.2011
Nuevos poemas: XVII / Reynaldo Pérez Só
New Poems: XVII
a minute ago
death did not exist
well it stood on the corner
and stopped traffic
took a left and had
its body thrown against the wall
now is an instant but
a minute ago eternity went in circles
and it will make a minute
and again death poses
its form on the scale
and combines the finger
the lady queen defeats herself
and the game begins.
November 1970
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
a minute ago
death did not exist
well it stood on the corner
and stopped traffic
took a left and had
its body thrown against the wall
now is an instant but
a minute ago eternity went in circles
and it will make a minute
and again death poses
its form on the scale
and combines the finger
the lady queen defeats herself
and the game begins.
November 1970
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
5.19.2011
Nuevos poemas: XIV / Reynaldo Pérez Só
New Poems: XIV
stone you can’t hear me
and it’s best
we don’t understand each other the northern hill
is big
the southern hill
is big
stone
another summer arrives
and the swaying wind
would be so similar but the dead one does not exist
the northern hill
carries another river
the northern one where I don’t
fit
always the hill
knowing so much is of no interest
crossing a street
is pure eternity.
January 1971
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
stone you can’t hear me
and it’s best
we don’t understand each other the northern hill
is big
the southern hill
is big
stone
another summer arrives
and the swaying wind
would be so similar but the dead one does not exist
the northern hill
carries another river
the northern one where I don’t
fit
always the hill
knowing so much is of no interest
crossing a street
is pure eternity.
January 1971
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
5.18.2011
Nuevos poemas: XIII / Reynaldo Pérez Só
New Poems: XIII
the thick door face
of the water that falls
the last
crying
who detains me in
the question
and strikes the blow?
with death one has
a black lapel
the wind is the same
the table is set
like a table.
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
the thick door face
of the water that falls
the last
crying
who detains me in
the question
and strikes the blow?
with death one has
a black lapel
the wind is the same
the table is set
like a table.
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
5.17.2011
Nuevos poemas: X / Reynaldo Pérez Só
New Poems: X
there is
no pine
twisted
in my soul
a king leans on his death
and awaits
an empire’s dusk
no pine can grow
in such a life
floating
but the king sustains himself
by watching shadows
and the complete night
silences the trees.
September 1973
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
there is
no pine
twisted
in my soul
a king leans on his death
and awaits
an empire’s dusk
no pine can grow
in such a life
floating
but the king sustains himself
by watching shadows
and the complete night
silences the trees.
September 1973
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
5.16.2011
Nuevos poemas: V / Reynaldo Pérez Só
New Poems: V
the curtain
climbs to the wind
and the shoulder
lets itself be taken
where the same one is not tired
and too much
wind
air over the leaves
departures and toys in
those exact hands
you are happy because of one
and another
drop of water
the cow will look at me
eternally.
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
the curtain
climbs to the wind
and the shoulder
lets itself be taken
where the same one is not tired
and too much
wind
air over the leaves
departures and toys in
those exact hands
you are happy because of one
and another
drop of water
the cow will look at me
eternally.
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
5.15.2011
Nuevos poemas: IV / Reynaldo Pérez Só
New Poems: IV
some animals
are
slower
when others climb so
quickly
because the waves arrive outside the water
to the foam
they are like that each day in
exchange for sun
more slowness
if we are rough
we run if the opposite
animates us
the soul lies down in the body
other animals are small
they barely breathe
by sun.
January 1971
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
some animals
are
slower
when others climb so
quickly
because the waves arrive outside the water
to the foam
they are like that each day in
exchange for sun
more slowness
if we are rough
we run if the opposite
animates us
the soul lies down in the body
other animals are small
they barely breathe
by sun.
January 1971
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
5.14.2011
Nuevos poemas: I / Reynaldo Pérez Só
New Poems: I
the flower that grows is white
and opens up to god
white toward the hill
of earth
it detaches lightly
leaving no fruit
mirrored by the stone
until it rolls.
September 1973
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
the flower that grows is white
and opens up to god
white toward the hill
of earth
it detaches lightly
leaving no fruit
mirrored by the stone
until it rolls.
September 1973
{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }
5.12.2011
El centro y la periferia / Armando Rojas Guardia
The Center and the Periphery
There is a hidden, and sometimes very explicit, feeling among us Venezuelans. More than a conceptualization, it’s that, a type of sensation, a feeling: the sensation and feeling of failure. Something deep in our collective feeling is organically related to what has failed, what is truncated, aborted, torn, diverted, lost (like an arrow that misses the mark).
That sensation or feeling of failure has, in my judgment, two objective causes: first, the “capitis diminutio,” the decrease in our self-esteem when we always compare ourselves to the heroic gesture that’s at the base, at the beginning of the republican life of Venezuela. We all feel chronically diminished in front of such political, military and generally existential magnitude, that of our first historical hour. That feeling was already present in the 19th century: when Fermín Toro died, Juan Vicente González wrote: “The last Venezuelan has died.” We all feel diminished, because we don’t perceive ourselves as heroes. And the collective psychology within which we are educated is not a heroic psychology. The factual result of that learning is always that we feel ourselves to be below the heroic status of our founding fathers. From the canvas of Arturo Michelena, which we all contemplate as children, Francisco de Miranda looks at us inquisitively, from his prison in La Carraca: his eyes judge us, interpolate us, demand from us and we, in our meager lives of 20th century men and women, are never up to the exigencies of that judgment, that interpolation and that demand. The psychology of the hero contains a great deal of the adolescent epic: the hero seeks to affirm himself before the world (which is why, because of that self-affirming obsession, the heroic feat is so egotistical.) So, anchoring ourselves as a country in the psychology of the hero means being permanently sent back to our republican adolescence, refusing to leave it. But what is crucial is that this epic psychological background, as an axial referent for our collective life, does not avoid for us, but rather the opposite, it pushes us headlong toward the permanent contrast of our modest historical achievements with the magnitude of that heroic age, the first of our national transformation. This seems to be the theme, I don’t know if central or collateral, of the book by Ana Teresa Torres titled La herencia de la tribu. And I don’t know if it’s central or collateral because it is a work I still haven’t read. It would be magnificent if my focus on the matter were to coincide with that of Ana Teresa, whom I respect and admire. Regardless, I have been thinking and alerting about this topic for a long time now, as shown by a long article I published in the Opinion page of El Nacional, in March 2003, which I titled “El ocaso de los héroes.”
The second objective cause of our feeling of failure has been the enormous difficulty of Venezuela’s access to modernity. It’s as if we haven’t been able to keep up with the task of being an institutionally modern country. And this is felt by all of us; I repeat, more than a conceptual confirmation it’s a sensation, a feeling. A sensation and a feeling that can adopt aristocratic modalities, such as the “finis patriae” of some of our modernists (I think, above all, of Manuel Díaz Rodríguez) that establishes itself in a diagnosis of the national reality as existing just on the edge of being materially and symbolically dominated by barbarism, by a definitive historical regression. Or perhaps implicitly pessimistic modalities, that propose a type of agreement between the modernizing urge and the harsh and, for this modality, inescapable reality of our backwardness: the “Democratic Caesarism” of Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, that flagrant oxymoron, represents, along with the attitude of a few positivists facing the country’s situation, the most clamorous acceptance of our historical failure. Or perhaps more optimistic, though tragic, aesthetic-literary modalities: this is the case of Canaima, by Rómulo Gallegos: Marcos Vargas, as a character symbolizes in good measure the unfulfilled in our national destiny, the date with our unfinished collective identity we have always wasted and which never ends up coming to fruition (in that sense Canaima is a more complexly tragic aesthetic-literary proposal than Doña Bárbara; the latter ends up being more schematic and manichean and, because of that, more superficial). But the most frequented and most symbolically cogent modality adopted in Venezuelan literature by the feeling of failure for not finishing the entry of the country into the modern institutional orbit is the one we might call the “discourse of marginality.” It happens as though failure chose to speak to us, within many important texts of Venezuelan literary history, from the point of view of the periphery (precisely the marginal is peripheral): the characters from “La Lluvia,” Arturo Uslar Pietri’s best short story, Mateo Martán, the protagonist of Salvador Garmendia’s Los pequeños seres; the faceless prostitute in “La mano junto al muro,” by Guillermo Meneses, the two homosexuals in La revolución, by Isaac Chocrón, or the country for rent or for sale in Asia y el lejano Oriente, also by Chocrón; the characters in Caín Adolescente and El pez que fuma, by Román Chalbaud, Cosme and Pío Miranda, respectively in Acto Cultural and El día que me quieras, by José Ignacio Cabrujas; Andrés Barazarte, the protagonist of Adriano González León’s País portátil; the lyrical speaker in the two celebrated poems by Rafael Cadenas entitled “Derrota” [defeat] and “Fracaso” [failure], even the group of young men in Federico Vegas’s Falke fail in their dream of putting an end to the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez: they are all marginal voices, they all bring into fruition our periphery, our difficulty in historically acceding to the center, our existential failure, collectively psychological, institutional. The majority of these voices are not heroic: many of these characters are even antiheroes and this also turns out to be significant.
The only way of reverting the negativity of our feeling of failure is to face it, not repressing it, nor disguising it, nor sweetening it with new epic postures that distance us from our truncated historical reality. With the psychology of the collective masses there occurs something analogous to what happens within an individual psychology: Rafael López Pedraza affirms there are three psychic factors that prevent the individual from delineating himself beyond the triumphalist optic and situating himself within a mature and profound “awareness of failure,” beyond psychic circumstances, within which the indiscriminate and overwhelming aspiration for success maintains the subject within the impossibility of reaching successively higher levels of awareness and freedom. Those factors are: the psychological trace of the “eternal adolescent,” with his aspirations dazzled by the heroic gleam; the superficiality of hysteria, whose intra-psychic suffocation makes the person remain in a daily frenzy where he cannot truly auscultate himself; and psychopathic behavior, whose existential void can only be filled by the compulsive imitation of gregarious models. Effectively, these three factors are also produced at a collective level and, in that manner, a social subject, such as the Venezuelan, cannot look at his own failure head on and transform it into “kairos,” that is, a creative opportunity. An opportunity to rethink himself, to choose his priorities in an unprecedented manner, to choose, for example, a modernity or a postmodernity that will truly be incumbent on him (because there is a triumphalist modernity, salve to the religion of success, likewise incapable of having an “awareness of failure”: the word loser encapsulates an entire abject mythology that predominates, in many aspects and with many cultural layers, in the equally adolescent, hysterical and psychopathic North American contemporaneity).
Ramón Escovar Salom used to repeat until right before his death, that instead of aspiring to be a world power, Venezuela should seek to emulate nations like Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, small and medium-sized countries, without any historical and grandiloquent desires but where institutions and public services function in an optimal manner, along with democratic coexistence and a climate of utmost social tolerance. Adjusting our heroic paradigms to that model of civilization would reconcile us with ourselves.
Because an “awareness of failure,” as an individual or collective failure, also means following the path that is traced for us by Rafael Cadenas’s poem “Fracaso,” which I would make required reading in all Venezuelan schools, so it might serve as an antidote, a revulsive and warning from childhood onwards: the path is neither epic nor heroic, that will get us out of the chatter, the panoply, the frivolity, the immense mirage of petroleum, towards the willing savoring of our limits, our precariousness, our indigence, in order to transform them into spiritual creativity and redeeming maturity. Only then will marginality cease to be a curse, a sentence, and it will constitute itself in a true calling, a genuine vocation, in another manner, unusual, of accessing the center.
(Fragment from an unpublished book)
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Tal Cual, 8 May 2011 }
There is a hidden, and sometimes very explicit, feeling among us Venezuelans. More than a conceptualization, it’s that, a type of sensation, a feeling: the sensation and feeling of failure. Something deep in our collective feeling is organically related to what has failed, what is truncated, aborted, torn, diverted, lost (like an arrow that misses the mark).
That sensation or feeling of failure has, in my judgment, two objective causes: first, the “capitis diminutio,” the decrease in our self-esteem when we always compare ourselves to the heroic gesture that’s at the base, at the beginning of the republican life of Venezuela. We all feel chronically diminished in front of such political, military and generally existential magnitude, that of our first historical hour. That feeling was already present in the 19th century: when Fermín Toro died, Juan Vicente González wrote: “The last Venezuelan has died.” We all feel diminished, because we don’t perceive ourselves as heroes. And the collective psychology within which we are educated is not a heroic psychology. The factual result of that learning is always that we feel ourselves to be below the heroic status of our founding fathers. From the canvas of Arturo Michelena, which we all contemplate as children, Francisco de Miranda looks at us inquisitively, from his prison in La Carraca: his eyes judge us, interpolate us, demand from us and we, in our meager lives of 20th century men and women, are never up to the exigencies of that judgment, that interpolation and that demand. The psychology of the hero contains a great deal of the adolescent epic: the hero seeks to affirm himself before the world (which is why, because of that self-affirming obsession, the heroic feat is so egotistical.) So, anchoring ourselves as a country in the psychology of the hero means being permanently sent back to our republican adolescence, refusing to leave it. But what is crucial is that this epic psychological background, as an axial referent for our collective life, does not avoid for us, but rather the opposite, it pushes us headlong toward the permanent contrast of our modest historical achievements with the magnitude of that heroic age, the first of our national transformation. This seems to be the theme, I don’t know if central or collateral, of the book by Ana Teresa Torres titled La herencia de la tribu. And I don’t know if it’s central or collateral because it is a work I still haven’t read. It would be magnificent if my focus on the matter were to coincide with that of Ana Teresa, whom I respect and admire. Regardless, I have been thinking and alerting about this topic for a long time now, as shown by a long article I published in the Opinion page of El Nacional, in March 2003, which I titled “El ocaso de los héroes.”
The second objective cause of our feeling of failure has been the enormous difficulty of Venezuela’s access to modernity. It’s as if we haven’t been able to keep up with the task of being an institutionally modern country. And this is felt by all of us; I repeat, more than a conceptual confirmation it’s a sensation, a feeling. A sensation and a feeling that can adopt aristocratic modalities, such as the “finis patriae” of some of our modernists (I think, above all, of Manuel Díaz Rodríguez) that establishes itself in a diagnosis of the national reality as existing just on the edge of being materially and symbolically dominated by barbarism, by a definitive historical regression. Or perhaps implicitly pessimistic modalities, that propose a type of agreement between the modernizing urge and the harsh and, for this modality, inescapable reality of our backwardness: the “Democratic Caesarism” of Laureano Vallenilla Lanz, that flagrant oxymoron, represents, along with the attitude of a few positivists facing the country’s situation, the most clamorous acceptance of our historical failure. Or perhaps more optimistic, though tragic, aesthetic-literary modalities: this is the case of Canaima, by Rómulo Gallegos: Marcos Vargas, as a character symbolizes in good measure the unfulfilled in our national destiny, the date with our unfinished collective identity we have always wasted and which never ends up coming to fruition (in that sense Canaima is a more complexly tragic aesthetic-literary proposal than Doña Bárbara; the latter ends up being more schematic and manichean and, because of that, more superficial). But the most frequented and most symbolically cogent modality adopted in Venezuelan literature by the feeling of failure for not finishing the entry of the country into the modern institutional orbit is the one we might call the “discourse of marginality.” It happens as though failure chose to speak to us, within many important texts of Venezuelan literary history, from the point of view of the periphery (precisely the marginal is peripheral): the characters from “La Lluvia,” Arturo Uslar Pietri’s best short story, Mateo Martán, the protagonist of Salvador Garmendia’s Los pequeños seres; the faceless prostitute in “La mano junto al muro,” by Guillermo Meneses, the two homosexuals in La revolución, by Isaac Chocrón, or the country for rent or for sale in Asia y el lejano Oriente, also by Chocrón; the characters in Caín Adolescente and El pez que fuma, by Román Chalbaud, Cosme and Pío Miranda, respectively in Acto Cultural and El día que me quieras, by José Ignacio Cabrujas; Andrés Barazarte, the protagonist of Adriano González León’s País portátil; the lyrical speaker in the two celebrated poems by Rafael Cadenas entitled “Derrota” [defeat] and “Fracaso” [failure], even the group of young men in Federico Vegas’s Falke fail in their dream of putting an end to the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez: they are all marginal voices, they all bring into fruition our periphery, our difficulty in historically acceding to the center, our existential failure, collectively psychological, institutional. The majority of these voices are not heroic: many of these characters are even antiheroes and this also turns out to be significant.
The only way of reverting the negativity of our feeling of failure is to face it, not repressing it, nor disguising it, nor sweetening it with new epic postures that distance us from our truncated historical reality. With the psychology of the collective masses there occurs something analogous to what happens within an individual psychology: Rafael López Pedraza affirms there are three psychic factors that prevent the individual from delineating himself beyond the triumphalist optic and situating himself within a mature and profound “awareness of failure,” beyond psychic circumstances, within which the indiscriminate and overwhelming aspiration for success maintains the subject within the impossibility of reaching successively higher levels of awareness and freedom. Those factors are: the psychological trace of the “eternal adolescent,” with his aspirations dazzled by the heroic gleam; the superficiality of hysteria, whose intra-psychic suffocation makes the person remain in a daily frenzy where he cannot truly auscultate himself; and psychopathic behavior, whose existential void can only be filled by the compulsive imitation of gregarious models. Effectively, these three factors are also produced at a collective level and, in that manner, a social subject, such as the Venezuelan, cannot look at his own failure head on and transform it into “kairos,” that is, a creative opportunity. An opportunity to rethink himself, to choose his priorities in an unprecedented manner, to choose, for example, a modernity or a postmodernity that will truly be incumbent on him (because there is a triumphalist modernity, salve to the religion of success, likewise incapable of having an “awareness of failure”: the word loser encapsulates an entire abject mythology that predominates, in many aspects and with many cultural layers, in the equally adolescent, hysterical and psychopathic North American contemporaneity).
Ramón Escovar Salom used to repeat until right before his death, that instead of aspiring to be a world power, Venezuela should seek to emulate nations like Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, small and medium-sized countries, without any historical and grandiloquent desires but where institutions and public services function in an optimal manner, along with democratic coexistence and a climate of utmost social tolerance. Adjusting our heroic paradigms to that model of civilization would reconcile us with ourselves.
Because an “awareness of failure,” as an individual or collective failure, also means following the path that is traced for us by Rafael Cadenas’s poem “Fracaso,” which I would make required reading in all Venezuelan schools, so it might serve as an antidote, a revulsive and warning from childhood onwards: the path is neither epic nor heroic, that will get us out of the chatter, the panoply, the frivolity, the immense mirage of petroleum, towards the willing savoring of our limits, our precariousness, our indigence, in order to transform them into spiritual creativity and redeeming maturity. Only then will marginality cease to be a curse, a sentence, and it will constitute itself in a true calling, a genuine vocation, in another manner, unusual, of accessing the center.
(Fragment from an unpublished book)
{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Tal Cual, 8 May 2011 }
5.10.2011
Granizo, de Dayana Fraile. / Luis Guillermo Franquiz
Granizo, by Dayana Fraile.
It is a theater of varietés with continuous shows. It is a game of circus mirrors. It is a kaleidoscope ceaselessly spinning. It is also a conversation overheard from a nearby table, to which we pay attention surreptitiously. At a certain moment, eventually, we change places, sit at that adjacent table and participate in what’s being told, without shyness or shame. Dayana Fraile’s verbal magic functions as an anesthetic for social and literary conventions, it suggests, convinces, seduces. It draws the veil of narrative fantasy and until the end of the book it will find a way to walk across the tightrope without losing its balance and falling into boredom. Dayana Fraile seems to follow in the path of several contemporary authors who prefer to dispense with special effects and speak to the reader bluntly, almost abusing trust, employing a simple and direct language that leaves no room for amazement or false likenesses. She accomplishes it, and very well, offering images written like those of a carousel that spins and barely allows a glimpse, a view, appearing and fading within its own narrative scheme without adding any frivolous explanations that serve no function.
The characters described in Granizo (Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2011), winner of the short story collection prize in the I Bienal de Literatura Julián Padrón, make up a symbiotic gallery where each one takes up and offers the other, crossing lines, becoming tangential, speaking among themselves and barely letting us perceive a group energy that is only comprehensible to them. We are passersby in a reconstructed city through the youthful experiences of the protagonist, of the other characters who interact with her, and argue, and cry, and dare to dream or vomit their existentialist entrails, all by means of a language that functions according to what the author wants to tell and portray. It is a simple reading, but not because of that simple or plain. It has nuances, imperfections, wrinkles that confer an adequate credibility to what is narrated. It is a pleasure to read because there are no cardboard cut-outs, poses, pompous moments in the language. It works because the author seems to have worried about the small details, the inconsistencies, weaving well the threads that tie the pieces together using metaphors that make us smile without realizing it.
The different stories are offered as though they came with the trust of a friend’s glance, amid glasses of wine or cups of coffee, whatever might be needed. The narrative style allows for our attention to be sustained, so that one wants to know where these fictional women come from and where they’re going, who occasionally change roles. It is a very feminine book, though not one-dimensional. The characters Dayana Fraile traces are there, at the edge of a glance, names one never pronounces completely, strident colors that run through the opacity of conventional routine. They are characters from a fairy tale that has turned into a concrete reality to the sound of Venezuelan rock. Tangible. Palpable. Recognizable behind a corner, a brief glimpse, indefinite. One is left with the sensation of having arrived in the middle of the work, reaching a fragment that alludes to the rest, to the entire event, just as the day described in Mrs. Dalloway allows us to assimilate the totality of her life, the ceramic pieces scattered in the short stories of Granizo let us to reconstruct a particular universe, a shadow behind the mirror.
I keep thinking of a kaleidoscope due to the sequence of apparently disconnected scenes, although linked together, like a steel spiderweb. A succession that sustains itself through the narrator’s moves, an exchange of places that functions like a hinge, a vehicle for transitions, the bridge that lets us come and go between the various parts of the book, literally. There is also humor. A type of rancid, salubrious humor that pulls a cynical smile of acknowledgment, because the characters are well delineated, with the traits of their humanity nicely distributed and measured to concede to them the appropriate weight for narrative drama. They exist, they almost leap from the page with their complicated literary manners and their city neuroses. I am quite happy to be able to recommend this first book of short stories by a writer who promises, if she decides, to offer us more unconventional fictions. You can find the book in any of the Librerías del Sur throughout Venezuela. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
{ Luis Guillermo Franquiz, Diario, 2 May 2011 }
It is a theater of varietés with continuous shows. It is a game of circus mirrors. It is a kaleidoscope ceaselessly spinning. It is also a conversation overheard from a nearby table, to which we pay attention surreptitiously. At a certain moment, eventually, we change places, sit at that adjacent table and participate in what’s being told, without shyness or shame. Dayana Fraile’s verbal magic functions as an anesthetic for social and literary conventions, it suggests, convinces, seduces. It draws the veil of narrative fantasy and until the end of the book it will find a way to walk across the tightrope without losing its balance and falling into boredom. Dayana Fraile seems to follow in the path of several contemporary authors who prefer to dispense with special effects and speak to the reader bluntly, almost abusing trust, employing a simple and direct language that leaves no room for amazement or false likenesses. She accomplishes it, and very well, offering images written like those of a carousel that spins and barely allows a glimpse, a view, appearing and fading within its own narrative scheme without adding any frivolous explanations that serve no function.
The characters described in Granizo (Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2011), winner of the short story collection prize in the I Bienal de Literatura Julián Padrón, make up a symbiotic gallery where each one takes up and offers the other, crossing lines, becoming tangential, speaking among themselves and barely letting us perceive a group energy that is only comprehensible to them. We are passersby in a reconstructed city through the youthful experiences of the protagonist, of the other characters who interact with her, and argue, and cry, and dare to dream or vomit their existentialist entrails, all by means of a language that functions according to what the author wants to tell and portray. It is a simple reading, but not because of that simple or plain. It has nuances, imperfections, wrinkles that confer an adequate credibility to what is narrated. It is a pleasure to read because there are no cardboard cut-outs, poses, pompous moments in the language. It works because the author seems to have worried about the small details, the inconsistencies, weaving well the threads that tie the pieces together using metaphors that make us smile without realizing it.
The different stories are offered as though they came with the trust of a friend’s glance, amid glasses of wine or cups of coffee, whatever might be needed. The narrative style allows for our attention to be sustained, so that one wants to know where these fictional women come from and where they’re going, who occasionally change roles. It is a very feminine book, though not one-dimensional. The characters Dayana Fraile traces are there, at the edge of a glance, names one never pronounces completely, strident colors that run through the opacity of conventional routine. They are characters from a fairy tale that has turned into a concrete reality to the sound of Venezuelan rock. Tangible. Palpable. Recognizable behind a corner, a brief glimpse, indefinite. One is left with the sensation of having arrived in the middle of the work, reaching a fragment that alludes to the rest, to the entire event, just as the day described in Mrs. Dalloway allows us to assimilate the totality of her life, the ceramic pieces scattered in the short stories of Granizo let us to reconstruct a particular universe, a shadow behind the mirror.
I keep thinking of a kaleidoscope due to the sequence of apparently disconnected scenes, although linked together, like a steel spiderweb. A succession that sustains itself through the narrator’s moves, an exchange of places that functions like a hinge, a vehicle for transitions, the bridge that lets us come and go between the various parts of the book, literally. There is also humor. A type of rancid, salubrious humor that pulls a cynical smile of acknowledgment, because the characters are well delineated, with the traits of their humanity nicely distributed and measured to concede to them the appropriate weight for narrative drama. They exist, they almost leap from the page with their complicated literary manners and their city neuroses. I am quite happy to be able to recommend this first book of short stories by a writer who promises, if she decides, to offer us more unconventional fictions. You can find the book in any of the Librerías del Sur throughout Venezuela. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
{ Luis Guillermo Franquiz, Diario, 2 May 2011 }
5.06.2011
Romanza / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Romanza
When my grieving youth now declines, and the nostalgia of its first days is born, the same love that invited its matutinal impetus returns.
You come back to me in one of life’s landings, in a bend of the dense jungle, when your faltering beauty is now a dull moon mirror.
You retain the graceful bearing and the triumphal diadem of hair, a relic of happy gifts and golden galas; why does the complexion of beautiful girls not have the smoothness of the lake, that escapes swift time?
Those days of soft hours and blue dreams are fugitive birds whose chirping afflicts the wandering mariner. A twist of fate has moved to sadness the frolic of the warm morning: now the night guides toward us the silent wheels of its ivory coach, and the occidental sun, along the sea, figures the lion’s head peering over the horizon of the desert; a swan in mourning augurs our route and, found again by chance, we are the only travelers aboard the vessel that carries our defunct ideal.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
When my grieving youth now declines, and the nostalgia of its first days is born, the same love that invited its matutinal impetus returns.
You come back to me in one of life’s landings, in a bend of the dense jungle, when your faltering beauty is now a dull moon mirror.
You retain the graceful bearing and the triumphal diadem of hair, a relic of happy gifts and golden galas; why does the complexion of beautiful girls not have the smoothness of the lake, that escapes swift time?
Those days of soft hours and blue dreams are fugitive birds whose chirping afflicts the wandering mariner. A twist of fate has moved to sadness the frolic of the warm morning: now the night guides toward us the silent wheels of its ivory coach, and the occidental sun, along the sea, figures the lion’s head peering over the horizon of the desert; a swan in mourning augurs our route and, found again by chance, we are the only travelers aboard the vessel that carries our defunct ideal.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.03.2011
El derrotero de Camoens / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Camoen’s Course
We were proposing to visit a timorous kinglet. He depended on the assent of Great Britain.
He ordered, to facilitate our journey, an escort of his ministers, dressed in yellow silk. They were riding a fluvial boat, war canoe, similar to an unfurled butterfly. The adornment of its sails was so original!
We always had in view some pagoda in the shape of a bell situated in a forest clearing. Tropical nature was releasing the chorus of its innumerable voices and was governed by the scream of a monkey hanging by a single hand. The kinglet’s ministers were increasing the racket by sounding a music of rattle and drum.
We overcame the detours of the majestic caudal of water and arrived at the palace of our character, a building of chimerical style, amid a salvo of disused cannons. The scarecrows of sleep and the beasts of the desert constituted the architecture’s ornamental motives. The king was incorporating to his own name, a series of sanguinary epithets and attributes, idleness of his ingenuous vanity.
He received us courteously and was satisfied with our prostrated greeting. He recited for us, during the first interview, the precepts relative to anger and pride, so as to give us an idea of the doctrines of his race.
He invited us, the following evening, to the pastime of a drama. The decoration possessed a forgotten liturgical sense and the parliaments, similar and prolific, were composing the story of a vengeance. The conflict was unfolding by means of an unlikely accident and dramatic illusion was yielding to an actual outrage. A woman of the seraglio, abhorred by the king, was playing the most odious role and was buried alive.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
We were proposing to visit a timorous kinglet. He depended on the assent of Great Britain.
He ordered, to facilitate our journey, an escort of his ministers, dressed in yellow silk. They were riding a fluvial boat, war canoe, similar to an unfurled butterfly. The adornment of its sails was so original!
We always had in view some pagoda in the shape of a bell situated in a forest clearing. Tropical nature was releasing the chorus of its innumerable voices and was governed by the scream of a monkey hanging by a single hand. The kinglet’s ministers were increasing the racket by sounding a music of rattle and drum.
We overcame the detours of the majestic caudal of water and arrived at the palace of our character, a building of chimerical style, amid a salvo of disused cannons. The scarecrows of sleep and the beasts of the desert constituted the architecture’s ornamental motives. The king was incorporating to his own name, a series of sanguinary epithets and attributes, idleness of his ingenuous vanity.
He received us courteously and was satisfied with our prostrated greeting. He recited for us, during the first interview, the precepts relative to anger and pride, so as to give us an idea of the doctrines of his race.
He invited us, the following evening, to the pastime of a drama. The decoration possessed a forgotten liturgical sense and the parliaments, similar and prolific, were composing the story of a vengeance. The conflict was unfolding by means of an unlikely accident and dramatic illusion was yielding to an actual outrage. A woman of the seraglio, abhorred by the king, was playing the most odious role and was buried alive.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
5.01.2011
El alumno de Garcilaso / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Garcilaso’s Student
The page visits the fountain of the alders, where an affectionate woman, in a distant century, had finished her life crying. He takes off the secure iron-plated armor. He keeps in mind the details of the unhappy case and recites them low-voiced in a romance. He enjoys taking refuge in the secret spot, disposing himself in a single degree, for the trade of arms and the subtlety of art.
An autumn dusk paints the flower gardens red. A throng of birds has grown from the trees and exhibits the color of the primitive leaf.
A simple hermit has approached this spot in another time. He came and went on a donkey overburdened by a black figure of the cross. He regaled various orphans of the same age, committed to a distrustful swan, and crowned life with martyrdom.
The page flourishes a viola, fabricated with acoustic wood from that same place. He pays his tribute to the woman’s grief and to the religious man’s abnegation, decanted by the villagers, and floods the forest in an Argentine serenity.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The page visits the fountain of the alders, where an affectionate woman, in a distant century, had finished her life crying. He takes off the secure iron-plated armor. He keeps in mind the details of the unhappy case and recites them low-voiced in a romance. He enjoys taking refuge in the secret spot, disposing himself in a single degree, for the trade of arms and the subtlety of art.
An autumn dusk paints the flower gardens red. A throng of birds has grown from the trees and exhibits the color of the primitive leaf.
A simple hermit has approached this spot in another time. He came and went on a donkey overburdened by a black figure of the cross. He regaled various orphans of the same age, committed to a distrustful swan, and crowned life with martyrdom.
The page flourishes a viola, fabricated with acoustic wood from that same place. He pays his tribute to the woman’s grief and to the religious man’s abnegation, decanted by the villagers, and floods the forest in an Argentine serenity.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)