From the Trojan Cycle
Polydorus, last son of Priam, too young for military duty, lived far from the communal homeland in the court of a false king, where he had been relegated by the affectionate zeal of his own.
He knew nothing of the fateful siege, or its terminus in the night of lamentations, ink in flames, when it fell under the steel of its guest, moved in support of the victor.
His tomb, shaded by a rugged tuft that emits a compassionate voice, arouses fear in Virgil’s pilgrims.
The prince was withered by the effect of a monologue full of sighs. He was thinking of Iphigenia, who escaped amid the sacrifice and at the edge of death, sheltered among the Sarmatians, whose indefatigable steeds injure a ground of marmoreal snow. He had encountered the tacit virgin, of reposed countenance and pliant step, in one of the insular sanctuaries, where the neighboring peoples would establish friendships, separated by the personal grievances of their kings. Clytemnestra would animate the passion of the children; but her husband forbade her in the interest of politics and the insinuation of the priests, who were in need of a regal victim.
Clytemnestra saves her daughter with brave deceit, and mediates revenge for continuous years.
She awaits in her lioness den during the decennial of the fatal conflict, divided between advantages and setbacks: more than once the regal husband, comfortable and arrogant, despite the weight of splendid weapons, rebukes the hordes of his own people, terrified because a tempestuous thunder crosses the heights, and Hector throws the camp into disorder, redoubling his furious gale attack.
Clytemnestra arranges the death of the royal consort, in reparation for her ignored will, in compensation for her vile submission, characteristic of captives won by the spear; and the crime takes place the very night of the return and secretly, amid the anguished clamor of the nocturnal birds, of absurd and wavering flight.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
6.21.2011
El páramo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Plateau
The orphans have been educated in the free meadows. They only execute the velleities of their fancy.
They have discovered the secrets of rustic medicine, watching the customs of the animals. They reflect on the specimens of the forest, from the cedar to the hyssop, in the manner of Solomon, the happy monarch. A bear has ceded his cavern to them, using the graciousness of a grandfather. A strident bird teaches them how to forecast the rain.
They sing in the night’s retreat and the dark green frog dances on two feet in front of a mortal moon.
They dissipate the visions of shade and fear stirring in the air a branch of Celtic verbena.
They abstain from lighting a fire on days subject to an iniquitous constellation. A bloody figure, dressed in the cassock of the tortured, divides the fauces of the earth and declares itself their progenitor.
The orphans drive it away directing unworthy nicknames at it, reserved for the mole and other creatures of sordid homes.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The orphans have been educated in the free meadows. They only execute the velleities of their fancy.
They have discovered the secrets of rustic medicine, watching the customs of the animals. They reflect on the specimens of the forest, from the cedar to the hyssop, in the manner of Solomon, the happy monarch. A bear has ceded his cavern to them, using the graciousness of a grandfather. A strident bird teaches them how to forecast the rain.
They sing in the night’s retreat and the dark green frog dances on two feet in front of a mortal moon.
They dissipate the visions of shade and fear stirring in the air a branch of Celtic verbena.
They abstain from lighting a fire on days subject to an iniquitous constellation. A bloody figure, dressed in the cassock of the tortured, divides the fauces of the earth and declares itself their progenitor.
The orphans drive it away directing unworthy nicknames at it, reserved for the mole and other creatures of sordid homes.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
6.20.2011
El desahucio / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Eviction
The courtesan had arrived from London and cloaked herself with its fog. She was alone and ill.
I hurried to defend her from uncertainty and received her in my improvident room. She climbed the staircase leaning on my shoulder.
I stirred the fire to reestablish her from the chill of the cold. The joy of the flame tinged red the velvet curtains, a residue of my fortune saved from the claws of the creditors.
She came from the island of meadows, complaining about the shamelessness of the gendarmes and bitterly sobbing when she declared the ruin of her health and prestige.
She settled in the rosewood bed, enriched by bronze panels and encrusted with silver, in accordance with the style of Pompeii, and got lost amid the sheets abandoning herself to the mercy of her diseases. She could not resist the crowd of her aches.
I consumed the rest of my assets in her exequies and incinerated her with the artistic furniture, risking the final departure with the gesture of a Sardanapalus.
I could not pay the rent for the home and threw myself into the street in demand of the dangers of the open air.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The courtesan had arrived from London and cloaked herself with its fog. She was alone and ill.
I hurried to defend her from uncertainty and received her in my improvident room. She climbed the staircase leaning on my shoulder.
I stirred the fire to reestablish her from the chill of the cold. The joy of the flame tinged red the velvet curtains, a residue of my fortune saved from the claws of the creditors.
She came from the island of meadows, complaining about the shamelessness of the gendarmes and bitterly sobbing when she declared the ruin of her health and prestige.
She settled in the rosewood bed, enriched by bronze panels and encrusted with silver, in accordance with the style of Pompeii, and got lost amid the sheets abandoning herself to the mercy of her diseases. She could not resist the crowd of her aches.
I consumed the rest of my assets in her exequies and incinerated her with the artistic furniture, risking the final departure with the gesture of a Sardanapalus.
I could not pay the rent for the home and threw myself into the street in demand of the dangers of the open air.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
6.18.2011
Recuerdos de Ramos Sucre / Julián Padrón
Memories of Ramos Sucre
Last Friday the 13th marked 15 years since the death of doctor José Antonio Ramos Sucre, a writer of chaste style and deep thought whose books La torre de Timón, El cielo de esmalte and Las formas del fuego constitute one of the most original and profound oeuvres in Venezuelan literature.
I owe him these memories. He was my Latin and Greek roots professor at the Liceo Andrés Bello, and one of my first literary confidants. He was of short height, of thin complexion, with penetrating blue eyes, of nervous temperament. I can’t forget that emphatic voice, nor those incisive words, nor that dry laigh, with which he’d finish the emphasis of his phrases. He had the figure of a syllogism in his three propositions for life, love and literature.
My academic and literary adolescence had to receive an impression from that austere and wise man from Cumaná. I started taking notes from his comments in class and in conversations outside school in a notebook with the rules of Latin grammar that he taught us, a notebook I now deplore having lost along with other school notes. But since I owed him these memories I’ll try to recall those notes in order to weave this account of the interesting days when the cordial paths of that teacher and this disciple crossed.
Ramos Sucre gave his Latin lesson from 2 to 3 in the afternoon, the most stifling hour in the tropics, and yet his was one of the most pleasant classes in the school, because he didn’t limit himself to making us repeat by rote the declensions and conjugations, but instead applied a practical method for teaching them through the analysis and translation of selected excerpts from the Latin. Graeci troyanos, equo ligneo, dono pernicioso, superaverunt. Moreover, he enjoyed livening up his classes with stinging comments on the most varied topics and events, and with the reference of anecdotes regarding facts and characters he was the first to celebrate with that dry laugh that we his disciples would chorus.
It is doubtful that saying a writer writes like he speaks is praise; but it is high praise to affirm that Ramos Sucre spoke like he wrote. Among us there was a classmate, whom I have lost track of since the school benches, who liked to bother him with those childish pranks students employ against teachers. That classmate was tall, physically strong, ruddy and with his adolescent face covered with pimples, and to make more noise he wore thick-soled shoes like the ones worn by poor seminary students. That classmate’s jokes consisted of scandalously chorusing Ramos Sucre’s laugh, in entering the classroom loudly stamping his shoes on the floorboards and in asking him too many unnecessary questions and pointlessly debating his answers. One day when our classmate entered class later than usual, making his shoes stamp the floor more loudly and deliberately so as to interrupt the teacher’s lesson, Ramos Sucre couldn’t stand the impertinence, and before he took his seat he said to him with that full and emphatic voice, as though wanting to pulverize him: “Listen, kid, you’re nothing but an annoying and insipid German!”
Regarding that occurrence, and without any other proof to say so, Ramos Sucre seemed to harbor a certain animosity for some characteristics of German culture, which perhaps originated in the love he felt for Greco-Roman culture. Once, he interrupted class to make one of those comments with which he liked to illustrate his lessons.
“The Germans,” he concluded with that voice that took joy in the correct pronunciation of words, “are a people who have no knowledge of human dignity. In Germany a learned man writes a library in order to defend an unjust crime.”
On a certain occasion another classmate, today a reputed medical professional in Caracas, and in reference to those mischievous student pranks, moments before class placed on his desk a copy of “Fantoches,” in which the writer was mocked for one of his prose poems published in those days. Ramos Sucre arrived, sat down, grabbed the newspaper and threw a quick glance at the comment marked in red ink, and glancing beyond the students, ordered, undoubtedly addressing the author of the prank: “So-and-so,” and stopping after an accusatory emphasis on his last name, “go to the chalkboard.”
In the Greek roots class, he was writing on the chalkboard a list of Spanish words derived from the Greek, while at the same time explaining their respective etymologies. One of the classmates, by all signs a budding poet, pronounced from his seat: “Glauco, sir,” and Ramos Sucre, turning around quickly, as if stimulated by an electric discharge, defined him with his emphatic voice: “You are a silversmith.”
***
My literary encounter with Ramos Sucre is also one of the unforgettable moments for me. At that time I was secretly writing avant-garde romantic poems which later on ended up being so detestable to me that I still feel the embarrassment of having published them. This explains why I would read with admiration the prose poems Ramos Sucre published frequently in El Universal, and I paid attention to his words when he would reflect on literature during passing remarks in class. As a consequence of the word silversmith [orfebre], for example, after teaching its etymology, he would use the occasion to offer a friendly dissertation on silversmithing, in the worst sense of the word, among the majority of Venezuelan writers.
“The writer should be original,” he would conclude. “Originality consists in expressing oneself with clarity, accuracy and precision. He who has nothing to say writes one word after another with the goal of filling up the emptiness of his thought. Silversmith, in the worst sense of the word, is the writer who writes making cornucopias and garlands.”
At the time, Ramos Sucre’s renunciation against employing the word que [that] was very well-known, and even greater was the aversion he felt when someone used the verbal locution a base de [based on]. Once, I asked him the reasons for his aversion.
“The word que is an insignificant term,” he answered. “As for a base de, it’s a very tasteless phrase used by writers with a suspicious pharmaceutical flightiness.”
These pronouncements by Ramos Sucre made me admire his singular temperament. Young writers always try to be original and such an inclination is a good vocational symptom when originality isn’t attempted at the expense of the pedantry that nourishes the ignorance of youth. Ramos Sucre distinguished me with his regard and deference toward a student eager for knowledge, but he didn’t know I was committing unforgivable sins against literature. One time, I dared to confess my faults and expressed my desire to show him a few things. He made an appointment for me to visit him at his office in the Casa Amarilla [offices for the Ministry of Foreign Relations] at 5 in the afternoon that very same day.
With all the adolescent audacity that wasn’t overcome by a beginner’s timidity when faced with the severe writer that was Ramos Sucre and with a punctuality that was most un-Venezuelan, at the agreed upon hour I went up one of the staircases that lead to the second floor of the Foreign Ministry. When I knocked on the door indicated to me by the clerk in the front room that faces Plaza Bolívar, the teacher’s emphatic voice invited me to enter. He was organizing a big pile of books that were lying on the floor. He stood up with a volume in his hands and began to speak to me about the initiation of the writer, of the tremendous vocation of writing and of the suffering and joy of the literary art. I gave him the original copies of some poems and he took them, abandoning the book, and began to read them quietly, strolling through the room with a tiny yellow pencil behind his ear.
“Leave them with me,” he said after a long and embarrassing silence. “We have to talk. You can come every afternoon at this very hour. Plaza Bolívar is my home. Whenever you want to see me, you can find me here.”
That same afternoon we walked around the Plaza and afterward I accompanied him toward El Panteón while we talked. He did the talking. I listened and asked questions. Frequently, he would interrupt the chat to let his glance wander toward the beautiful women who walked by. Then he would raise the chape of the cane off the ground and the stroll and chat would continue.
On several afternoons afterward I accompanied him in his stroll around the Plaza and in his walk toward El Panteón. But that first time, after he conversed deliciously about literature, when he had already said goodbye to me and advanced a few steps, he suddenly turned around.
“Ah!” he called. “Listen. You have to read a few books. It’s not necessary to read so much, but rather to do so well and only the best. The good books are not that many. It’s enough to read the main classics of universal literature. However, it’s preferable if you can read them in the original language. And always with a good dictionary at hand.”
***
The personality of Ramos Sucre’s style has been pointed out and some have noted that he was dark and that his prose poems reveal an exotic spirit and a temperament touched by eccentricity. It would be curious to examine the imaginative world of Ramos Sucre in relation to the creations of the surrealists so as to discover, with the astonishment of the Rilkeans, that Ramos Sucre’s prose poems were the first to be written here under the vision of a subconscious world or an ancient world. And to notice that his first book was published in the year 28, when among us the movement known as vanguardismo, and which wrongly appropriated him, was at its peak. The formal characteristic of Ramos Sucre’s style is the precision and synthesis of the straight line, and in that line words exhale the profound meaning of the original, pristine, virgin term taken from etymology itself, when language was in its origins. But words start to lose their primitive style over time, and through the use and the different mentality of a people in their historical transformation. When we write the term virtud [virtue] today, we attribute to it the sense it is given in the latest edition of the Diccionario de la Academia. When Ramos Sucre wrote it he attributed to it the genesial meaning of man’s condition or way of being. Because his deep knowledge of the matrix languages of Spanish kept him in touch with that first meaning the word had at the birth of the language. There was in him a bit of rhetoric, but the good rhetoric that is given by the possession of the instruments essential for the creation of a literary work.
One proof of his formal conception of style as a straight line is produced by the analysis of his poems. They are all made with the greatest economy of the primordial elements of the sentence. At one point he maximized this idea in an article shorter than the author’s own signature. The article contained only three lines: the title above, the signature below and in the middle the thought: “Conservatives are liberals” [Los godos son liberales].
***
How did Ramos Sucre react to the Venezuelan environment of his era? A spirit of his intellectual heights could not live harmoniously amidst an environment of hostility and ignorance and the subversion of spiritual values. At one point, I can’t recall whether responding to allusions to his small physical stature, or thinking of the first chapter of his autobiography, I heard him say: “A man must be small and have been born at the edge of the sea.” The Venezuelan writer begins to be appreciated among us when he brings from abroad the letter of recommendation and acknowledgment of his worth. For that reason or for health reasons, Ramos Sucre obtained a Consulate to leave the country and breathe more propitious airs. In the year 1930 he died in Europe. His close friends can surely remember his caustic phrases against the hostility and meanness that prevailed in the atmosphere of the homeland that we have yet to overcome in regards to the appreciation of our cultural values.
I can’t forget that dry laugh that seemed like the act of reading, with his emphatic voice, from the engraving of laughter. Nor that allusion to human dignity he later condensed in a prose poem, not included in a book, regarding religion. I recall it began like this: “Dostoyevsky, that anomalous Russian, preached the religion of suffering.” And it concluded: “The best religion is that of human dignity, without clerics or altars.” And yet, Ramos Sucre died of suffering, of physical and spiritual suffering. His close friend Pedro Sotillo, who wrote one of the best studies of his work, read to me after his death a few of his letters. They are the most harrowing confessions of a man who was a good and wise Venezuelan writer.
Obras completas, Aguilar S.A. de ediciones, México, 1945, pp. 85-93.
{ Julián Padrón, Ramos Sucre Ante la crítica, ed. José Ramón Medina, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }
Last Friday the 13th marked 15 years since the death of doctor José Antonio Ramos Sucre, a writer of chaste style and deep thought whose books La torre de Timón, El cielo de esmalte and Las formas del fuego constitute one of the most original and profound oeuvres in Venezuelan literature.
I owe him these memories. He was my Latin and Greek roots professor at the Liceo Andrés Bello, and one of my first literary confidants. He was of short height, of thin complexion, with penetrating blue eyes, of nervous temperament. I can’t forget that emphatic voice, nor those incisive words, nor that dry laigh, with which he’d finish the emphasis of his phrases. He had the figure of a syllogism in his three propositions for life, love and literature.
My academic and literary adolescence had to receive an impression from that austere and wise man from Cumaná. I started taking notes from his comments in class and in conversations outside school in a notebook with the rules of Latin grammar that he taught us, a notebook I now deplore having lost along with other school notes. But since I owed him these memories I’ll try to recall those notes in order to weave this account of the interesting days when the cordial paths of that teacher and this disciple crossed.
Ramos Sucre gave his Latin lesson from 2 to 3 in the afternoon, the most stifling hour in the tropics, and yet his was one of the most pleasant classes in the school, because he didn’t limit himself to making us repeat by rote the declensions and conjugations, but instead applied a practical method for teaching them through the analysis and translation of selected excerpts from the Latin. Graeci troyanos, equo ligneo, dono pernicioso, superaverunt. Moreover, he enjoyed livening up his classes with stinging comments on the most varied topics and events, and with the reference of anecdotes regarding facts and characters he was the first to celebrate with that dry laugh that we his disciples would chorus.
It is doubtful that saying a writer writes like he speaks is praise; but it is high praise to affirm that Ramos Sucre spoke like he wrote. Among us there was a classmate, whom I have lost track of since the school benches, who liked to bother him with those childish pranks students employ against teachers. That classmate was tall, physically strong, ruddy and with his adolescent face covered with pimples, and to make more noise he wore thick-soled shoes like the ones worn by poor seminary students. That classmate’s jokes consisted of scandalously chorusing Ramos Sucre’s laugh, in entering the classroom loudly stamping his shoes on the floorboards and in asking him too many unnecessary questions and pointlessly debating his answers. One day when our classmate entered class later than usual, making his shoes stamp the floor more loudly and deliberately so as to interrupt the teacher’s lesson, Ramos Sucre couldn’t stand the impertinence, and before he took his seat he said to him with that full and emphatic voice, as though wanting to pulverize him: “Listen, kid, you’re nothing but an annoying and insipid German!”
Regarding that occurrence, and without any other proof to say so, Ramos Sucre seemed to harbor a certain animosity for some characteristics of German culture, which perhaps originated in the love he felt for Greco-Roman culture. Once, he interrupted class to make one of those comments with which he liked to illustrate his lessons.
“The Germans,” he concluded with that voice that took joy in the correct pronunciation of words, “are a people who have no knowledge of human dignity. In Germany a learned man writes a library in order to defend an unjust crime.”
On a certain occasion another classmate, today a reputed medical professional in Caracas, and in reference to those mischievous student pranks, moments before class placed on his desk a copy of “Fantoches,” in which the writer was mocked for one of his prose poems published in those days. Ramos Sucre arrived, sat down, grabbed the newspaper and threw a quick glance at the comment marked in red ink, and glancing beyond the students, ordered, undoubtedly addressing the author of the prank: “So-and-so,” and stopping after an accusatory emphasis on his last name, “go to the chalkboard.”
In the Greek roots class, he was writing on the chalkboard a list of Spanish words derived from the Greek, while at the same time explaining their respective etymologies. One of the classmates, by all signs a budding poet, pronounced from his seat: “Glauco, sir,” and Ramos Sucre, turning around quickly, as if stimulated by an electric discharge, defined him with his emphatic voice: “You are a silversmith.”
***
My literary encounter with Ramos Sucre is also one of the unforgettable moments for me. At that time I was secretly writing avant-garde romantic poems which later on ended up being so detestable to me that I still feel the embarrassment of having published them. This explains why I would read with admiration the prose poems Ramos Sucre published frequently in El Universal, and I paid attention to his words when he would reflect on literature during passing remarks in class. As a consequence of the word silversmith [orfebre], for example, after teaching its etymology, he would use the occasion to offer a friendly dissertation on silversmithing, in the worst sense of the word, among the majority of Venezuelan writers.
“The writer should be original,” he would conclude. “Originality consists in expressing oneself with clarity, accuracy and precision. He who has nothing to say writes one word after another with the goal of filling up the emptiness of his thought. Silversmith, in the worst sense of the word, is the writer who writes making cornucopias and garlands.”
At the time, Ramos Sucre’s renunciation against employing the word que [that] was very well-known, and even greater was the aversion he felt when someone used the verbal locution a base de [based on]. Once, I asked him the reasons for his aversion.
“The word que is an insignificant term,” he answered. “As for a base de, it’s a very tasteless phrase used by writers with a suspicious pharmaceutical flightiness.”
These pronouncements by Ramos Sucre made me admire his singular temperament. Young writers always try to be original and such an inclination is a good vocational symptom when originality isn’t attempted at the expense of the pedantry that nourishes the ignorance of youth. Ramos Sucre distinguished me with his regard and deference toward a student eager for knowledge, but he didn’t know I was committing unforgivable sins against literature. One time, I dared to confess my faults and expressed my desire to show him a few things. He made an appointment for me to visit him at his office in the Casa Amarilla [offices for the Ministry of Foreign Relations] at 5 in the afternoon that very same day.
With all the adolescent audacity that wasn’t overcome by a beginner’s timidity when faced with the severe writer that was Ramos Sucre and with a punctuality that was most un-Venezuelan, at the agreed upon hour I went up one of the staircases that lead to the second floor of the Foreign Ministry. When I knocked on the door indicated to me by the clerk in the front room that faces Plaza Bolívar, the teacher’s emphatic voice invited me to enter. He was organizing a big pile of books that were lying on the floor. He stood up with a volume in his hands and began to speak to me about the initiation of the writer, of the tremendous vocation of writing and of the suffering and joy of the literary art. I gave him the original copies of some poems and he took them, abandoning the book, and began to read them quietly, strolling through the room with a tiny yellow pencil behind his ear.
“Leave them with me,” he said after a long and embarrassing silence. “We have to talk. You can come every afternoon at this very hour. Plaza Bolívar is my home. Whenever you want to see me, you can find me here.”
That same afternoon we walked around the Plaza and afterward I accompanied him toward El Panteón while we talked. He did the talking. I listened and asked questions. Frequently, he would interrupt the chat to let his glance wander toward the beautiful women who walked by. Then he would raise the chape of the cane off the ground and the stroll and chat would continue.
On several afternoons afterward I accompanied him in his stroll around the Plaza and in his walk toward El Panteón. But that first time, after he conversed deliciously about literature, when he had already said goodbye to me and advanced a few steps, he suddenly turned around.
“Ah!” he called. “Listen. You have to read a few books. It’s not necessary to read so much, but rather to do so well and only the best. The good books are not that many. It’s enough to read the main classics of universal literature. However, it’s preferable if you can read them in the original language. And always with a good dictionary at hand.”
***
The personality of Ramos Sucre’s style has been pointed out and some have noted that he was dark and that his prose poems reveal an exotic spirit and a temperament touched by eccentricity. It would be curious to examine the imaginative world of Ramos Sucre in relation to the creations of the surrealists so as to discover, with the astonishment of the Rilkeans, that Ramos Sucre’s prose poems were the first to be written here under the vision of a subconscious world or an ancient world. And to notice that his first book was published in the year 28, when among us the movement known as vanguardismo, and which wrongly appropriated him, was at its peak. The formal characteristic of Ramos Sucre’s style is the precision and synthesis of the straight line, and in that line words exhale the profound meaning of the original, pristine, virgin term taken from etymology itself, when language was in its origins. But words start to lose their primitive style over time, and through the use and the different mentality of a people in their historical transformation. When we write the term virtud [virtue] today, we attribute to it the sense it is given in the latest edition of the Diccionario de la Academia. When Ramos Sucre wrote it he attributed to it the genesial meaning of man’s condition or way of being. Because his deep knowledge of the matrix languages of Spanish kept him in touch with that first meaning the word had at the birth of the language. There was in him a bit of rhetoric, but the good rhetoric that is given by the possession of the instruments essential for the creation of a literary work.
One proof of his formal conception of style as a straight line is produced by the analysis of his poems. They are all made with the greatest economy of the primordial elements of the sentence. At one point he maximized this idea in an article shorter than the author’s own signature. The article contained only three lines: the title above, the signature below and in the middle the thought: “Conservatives are liberals” [Los godos son liberales].
***
How did Ramos Sucre react to the Venezuelan environment of his era? A spirit of his intellectual heights could not live harmoniously amidst an environment of hostility and ignorance and the subversion of spiritual values. At one point, I can’t recall whether responding to allusions to his small physical stature, or thinking of the first chapter of his autobiography, I heard him say: “A man must be small and have been born at the edge of the sea.” The Venezuelan writer begins to be appreciated among us when he brings from abroad the letter of recommendation and acknowledgment of his worth. For that reason or for health reasons, Ramos Sucre obtained a Consulate to leave the country and breathe more propitious airs. In the year 1930 he died in Europe. His close friends can surely remember his caustic phrases against the hostility and meanness that prevailed in the atmosphere of the homeland that we have yet to overcome in regards to the appreciation of our cultural values.
I can’t forget that dry laugh that seemed like the act of reading, with his emphatic voice, from the engraving of laughter. Nor that allusion to human dignity he later condensed in a prose poem, not included in a book, regarding religion. I recall it began like this: “Dostoyevsky, that anomalous Russian, preached the religion of suffering.” And it concluded: “The best religion is that of human dignity, without clerics or altars.” And yet, Ramos Sucre died of suffering, of physical and spiritual suffering. His close friend Pedro Sotillo, who wrote one of the best studies of his work, read to me after his death a few of his letters. They are the most harrowing confessions of a man who was a good and wise Venezuelan writer.
Obras completas, Aguilar S.A. de ediciones, México, 1945, pp. 85-93.
{ Julián Padrón, Ramos Sucre Ante la crítica, ed. José Ramón Medina, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }
6.16.2011
El vértigo de la decadencia / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Vertigo of Decadence
I assist in the Roman coliseum the sacrifice of the sublime martyrs. They have gathered in the center of the stadium and suggest the case of a decimated cohort, sensible to the commandment of honor.
The wild animals loosed from their jail surround the pitiful mob, speeding up for the assault. The flexible spines undulate voluptuously and the sharp claws, planted in the ground, throw up sleeves of dust.
The crowd of spectators, animated by a festive cruelty, breaks into a savage clamor. It reproduces the roar of the ovation.
The sovereign of the domesticated orb notes the accidents and details of the party, watching it through an emerald, the stone best qualified for the adornment of divinities.
The wild animals fatigue themselves dilacerating the unarmed group and respect the inanimate remains and a virgin of prophetic gesture.
A voice condemns her to the torture of fire and provokes unanimous assent. The crowd assumes an indivisible responsibility and loses itself in the delirium of its evil, wounding innocence.
The bonfire gives off a fatidic light and draws, on the most restless ones, the face of a cadaver.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I assist in the Roman coliseum the sacrifice of the sublime martyrs. They have gathered in the center of the stadium and suggest the case of a decimated cohort, sensible to the commandment of honor.
The wild animals loosed from their jail surround the pitiful mob, speeding up for the assault. The flexible spines undulate voluptuously and the sharp claws, planted in the ground, throw up sleeves of dust.
The crowd of spectators, animated by a festive cruelty, breaks into a savage clamor. It reproduces the roar of the ovation.
The sovereign of the domesticated orb notes the accidents and details of the party, watching it through an emerald, the stone best qualified for the adornment of divinities.
The wild animals fatigue themselves dilacerating the unarmed group and respect the inanimate remains and a virgin of prophetic gesture.
A voice condemns her to the torture of fire and provokes unanimous assent. The crowd assumes an indivisible responsibility and loses itself in the delirium of its evil, wounding innocence.
The bonfire gives off a fatidic light and draws, on the most restless ones, the face of a cadaver.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
6.14.2011
Wave / Roberto Martínez Bachrich
Wave
Agora eu já sei
da onda que se ergueu no mar
e das estrelas que esquecemos de contar
o amor se deixa surpreender
enquanto a noite vem nos envolver.
Antonio Carlos Jobim
We’re young and thoughtless, Verónica and I, and we’ve always been proud of it. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t too hard for us to lie to our parents. Verónica assured my mom we wouldn’t go to the beach, that not for anything in the world would it occur to us –with the signs of that horrible storm approaching the coast– to go to the sea, no way, we’d stay at her aunt Carmelina’s house in Coro, and spend the weekend visiting the colonial center and getting to know the city. Likewise, I promised Verónica’s dad he didn’t need to worry, we’d stay with my aunt Dulce and my cousins, no beach for us, because the truth is I hate the sun and the sticky sand, besides, those beaches there are full of jellyfish that time of year and I can’t stand those slimy things, but more than anything the possibility of hurricane Sabrina hitting the coasts of Falcón terrifies me too much (I often have nightmares about that). So, we said, Vero and I have our whole lives in front of us and don’t plan on taking stupid risks and ruining our future with any old carelessness. Our parents were absolutely convinced and relieved, so Verónica and I hit the road.
As soon as we arrive at the guest house in Adícora, and after dropping off our things, we put on our bathing suits and take the road to the beaches on the north end of the peninsula. The weather seems perfectly normal: the same thick heat as always and the salty breeze typical of any coastal zone. I ask Verónica whether Playa Blanca or Saledales, it’s her turn to decide, because I chose the guest house. Vero checks me out from head to toe and decides Playa Blanca, arguing that sand dunes ending in the sea are profoundly romantic and beautiful. It seems perfect to me, but not only because of Vero’s reasons, but also because Saledales always has too many people and that means submitting ourselves to prudence and chastity, such undesirable things when considering Verónica’s erect and recently operated breasts. I blush foolishly and quickly return to my color. I know it: desire is duplicated at the sea. There’s something in the sea breeze that tears off all the layers of habit: the salt water seems to irremediably induce the games of the body, the sea makes us sensual. And this becomes pure delight when things go just beyond a pair of perfect breasts: it’s love, ardent as a Guadalajara blood sausage sea urchin, sweet as a Viennese pastry cream dolphin, tasty as a piña colada octopus, big as a eucalyptus whale. Yes, the marine air duplicates the endlessly reformed and cloying syntax of silly love.
We stop at a liquor store to stock up on drinks. It’s my turn to decide, so I choose gin and orange juice, though I know Vero would have preferred vodka with lemon, but everyone knows that lemon on the beach stains and I imagine the corners of Verónica’s lips darkened can’t be too appetizing. Then we keep going and she discovers, along the way, a little restaurant she finds very picturesque. She suggests we have lunch there and I tell her it’s better on the beach, in any kiosk by the shore, but she looks at me severely and says it’s her turn to decide the fate of our next lunch. I accept, slightly annoyed, because honestly I’m dying to lay her down on the beach immediately and kiss her, caress her whole body, lick every single bit of her and make love to her until night falls to finish counting the stars in her eyes; but following the interpolated decisions has always been the single law of our relationship and, besides, that gives me the power to decide exactly what we’ll do when the beach is finally in front of us.
We eat lunch without too much appetite because the food isn’t that good and the buzzing of a noisy radio whose signal comes and goes keeps the only waiter in the place occupied, completely lost in the news of the storm. Afterward we continue with our route and, just up ahead, some National Guardsmen stop us trying to make us turn back and wanting to warn us about the hurricane. I tell them we’re headed to find my poor aunt Dulce, who lives alone in the next village and is probably really scared –she’s an elderly woman, you understand– about the approach of Sabrina. So they let us go through and a couple miles up the road, Playa Blanca appears in front of our eyes completely solitary and paradisiacal. I park the jeep at the edge of the road and we cross the dunes that separate us from the sea on foot. The salty storm has grown slightly and the sun seems too drowsy for it to be midday. Verónica starts to say that maybe it really is dangerous, wondering if it might not be better to turn back and leave the beach for another day, since anyways we have our room at the guest house where we can have fun together in the sweetest way, but I plant a long, warm kiss on her mouth and assure her there’s not the slightest reason to worry, she’s with me, nothing’s gonna happen to us and the sand on Playa Blanca is much more comfortable than our sad cot in the guest house. My effervescent animal desire, however, won’t last very long. As soon as we’re facing the sea the sun seems to hide completely in a thick, dark cloud. The sea is choppy and the storm has become a gale. We stop and Vero holds on to me scared. The wind keeps gathering strength and in a matter of seconds the last dune before the water starts to move toward the point where we’re standing. Verónica sinks into a strange trembling and I’m invaded by a deep and paralyzing confusion. The water stirs furiously and each minute a new immense wave is born that crashes a few feet from our paralysis. Vero demands that we leave and a few tears the dust clouds make disappear within milliseconds flow from her eyes. We try to go back, get to the jeep, but the effort is useless. The dunes have decided to merge into the sea and run in the opposite direction of our escape. We advance three steps and a great shapeless dune in perpetual movement returns us to the same spot. Verónica starts to cry in panic as her glance is disfigured. We keep trying, panting, and it’s all useless. The sea convulses ferociously, the waves –each time more voluminous– crash into each other and produce a horrific din. My car, which can barely be seen through the sand in the air, suddenly disappears buried by a dune. Verónica holds on to me with that superhuman strength despair grants us. And we stand there, amid the slaps from the sand and the terrible rumor of the waves. The chorus is now joined by dozens of thunderclaps that tirelessly burst in the celestial vault. And suddenly a rain storm explodes that seems to fracture the firmament and tear it apart in liquid pieces. Then the sea seems to open up, the waters rehearse a horrible contraction and drain toward the sides, leaving in the center of our visibility a distant and mysterious small blue island that makes a sinister silence coagulate in the wind. At that instant we realize: it’s the wave that grows. An enormous, monstrous wave that marches full speed toward us and seems to scratch the air as it moves producing a dry and clamorous sound, an unbearable roar. It’s the same wave I’ve dreamed of so many times before, it’s the same recurring nightmare, that repeats itself with a rigorous and macabre perfection in reality: myself, hugging the body of a woman with firm breasts (in the dream the woman was faceless, I couldn’t have known it was Verónica), watching the wave approach, both of us terrified, paralyzed in front of the final horror. Then I know this time I won’t wake up. And it’s my turn to decide how all this will end: either letting us be dragged, crushed and drowned by the wave or handing ourselves over to the sepulcher of the immense white dune moving furiously from the other side. “I’ll pass,” I think, but it’s too late for me to tell Vero.
Translator’s Note: This short story is included in the new book by Roberto Martínez Bachrich, Las guerras íntimas (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2011).
{ Roberto Martínez Bachrich, Prodavinci, 3 June 2011 }
Agora eu já sei
da onda que se ergueu no mar
e das estrelas que esquecemos de contar
o amor se deixa surpreender
enquanto a noite vem nos envolver.
Antonio Carlos Jobim
We’re young and thoughtless, Verónica and I, and we’ve always been proud of it. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t too hard for us to lie to our parents. Verónica assured my mom we wouldn’t go to the beach, that not for anything in the world would it occur to us –with the signs of that horrible storm approaching the coast– to go to the sea, no way, we’d stay at her aunt Carmelina’s house in Coro, and spend the weekend visiting the colonial center and getting to know the city. Likewise, I promised Verónica’s dad he didn’t need to worry, we’d stay with my aunt Dulce and my cousins, no beach for us, because the truth is I hate the sun and the sticky sand, besides, those beaches there are full of jellyfish that time of year and I can’t stand those slimy things, but more than anything the possibility of hurricane Sabrina hitting the coasts of Falcón terrifies me too much (I often have nightmares about that). So, we said, Vero and I have our whole lives in front of us and don’t plan on taking stupid risks and ruining our future with any old carelessness. Our parents were absolutely convinced and relieved, so Verónica and I hit the road.
As soon as we arrive at the guest house in Adícora, and after dropping off our things, we put on our bathing suits and take the road to the beaches on the north end of the peninsula. The weather seems perfectly normal: the same thick heat as always and the salty breeze typical of any coastal zone. I ask Verónica whether Playa Blanca or Saledales, it’s her turn to decide, because I chose the guest house. Vero checks me out from head to toe and decides Playa Blanca, arguing that sand dunes ending in the sea are profoundly romantic and beautiful. It seems perfect to me, but not only because of Vero’s reasons, but also because Saledales always has too many people and that means submitting ourselves to prudence and chastity, such undesirable things when considering Verónica’s erect and recently operated breasts. I blush foolishly and quickly return to my color. I know it: desire is duplicated at the sea. There’s something in the sea breeze that tears off all the layers of habit: the salt water seems to irremediably induce the games of the body, the sea makes us sensual. And this becomes pure delight when things go just beyond a pair of perfect breasts: it’s love, ardent as a Guadalajara blood sausage sea urchin, sweet as a Viennese pastry cream dolphin, tasty as a piña colada octopus, big as a eucalyptus whale. Yes, the marine air duplicates the endlessly reformed and cloying syntax of silly love.
We stop at a liquor store to stock up on drinks. It’s my turn to decide, so I choose gin and orange juice, though I know Vero would have preferred vodka with lemon, but everyone knows that lemon on the beach stains and I imagine the corners of Verónica’s lips darkened can’t be too appetizing. Then we keep going and she discovers, along the way, a little restaurant she finds very picturesque. She suggests we have lunch there and I tell her it’s better on the beach, in any kiosk by the shore, but she looks at me severely and says it’s her turn to decide the fate of our next lunch. I accept, slightly annoyed, because honestly I’m dying to lay her down on the beach immediately and kiss her, caress her whole body, lick every single bit of her and make love to her until night falls to finish counting the stars in her eyes; but following the interpolated decisions has always been the single law of our relationship and, besides, that gives me the power to decide exactly what we’ll do when the beach is finally in front of us.
We eat lunch without too much appetite because the food isn’t that good and the buzzing of a noisy radio whose signal comes and goes keeps the only waiter in the place occupied, completely lost in the news of the storm. Afterward we continue with our route and, just up ahead, some National Guardsmen stop us trying to make us turn back and wanting to warn us about the hurricane. I tell them we’re headed to find my poor aunt Dulce, who lives alone in the next village and is probably really scared –she’s an elderly woman, you understand– about the approach of Sabrina. So they let us go through and a couple miles up the road, Playa Blanca appears in front of our eyes completely solitary and paradisiacal. I park the jeep at the edge of the road and we cross the dunes that separate us from the sea on foot. The salty storm has grown slightly and the sun seems too drowsy for it to be midday. Verónica starts to say that maybe it really is dangerous, wondering if it might not be better to turn back and leave the beach for another day, since anyways we have our room at the guest house where we can have fun together in the sweetest way, but I plant a long, warm kiss on her mouth and assure her there’s not the slightest reason to worry, she’s with me, nothing’s gonna happen to us and the sand on Playa Blanca is much more comfortable than our sad cot in the guest house. My effervescent animal desire, however, won’t last very long. As soon as we’re facing the sea the sun seems to hide completely in a thick, dark cloud. The sea is choppy and the storm has become a gale. We stop and Vero holds on to me scared. The wind keeps gathering strength and in a matter of seconds the last dune before the water starts to move toward the point where we’re standing. Verónica sinks into a strange trembling and I’m invaded by a deep and paralyzing confusion. The water stirs furiously and each minute a new immense wave is born that crashes a few feet from our paralysis. Vero demands that we leave and a few tears the dust clouds make disappear within milliseconds flow from her eyes. We try to go back, get to the jeep, but the effort is useless. The dunes have decided to merge into the sea and run in the opposite direction of our escape. We advance three steps and a great shapeless dune in perpetual movement returns us to the same spot. Verónica starts to cry in panic as her glance is disfigured. We keep trying, panting, and it’s all useless. The sea convulses ferociously, the waves –each time more voluminous– crash into each other and produce a horrific din. My car, which can barely be seen through the sand in the air, suddenly disappears buried by a dune. Verónica holds on to me with that superhuman strength despair grants us. And we stand there, amid the slaps from the sand and the terrible rumor of the waves. The chorus is now joined by dozens of thunderclaps that tirelessly burst in the celestial vault. And suddenly a rain storm explodes that seems to fracture the firmament and tear it apart in liquid pieces. Then the sea seems to open up, the waters rehearse a horrible contraction and drain toward the sides, leaving in the center of our visibility a distant and mysterious small blue island that makes a sinister silence coagulate in the wind. At that instant we realize: it’s the wave that grows. An enormous, monstrous wave that marches full speed toward us and seems to scratch the air as it moves producing a dry and clamorous sound, an unbearable roar. It’s the same wave I’ve dreamed of so many times before, it’s the same recurring nightmare, that repeats itself with a rigorous and macabre perfection in reality: myself, hugging the body of a woman with firm breasts (in the dream the woman was faceless, I couldn’t have known it was Verónica), watching the wave approach, both of us terrified, paralyzed in front of the final horror. Then I know this time I won’t wake up. And it’s my turn to decide how all this will end: either letting us be dragged, crushed and drowned by the wave or handing ourselves over to the sepulcher of the immense white dune moving furiously from the other side. “I’ll pass,” I think, but it’s too late for me to tell Vero.
Translator’s Note: This short story is included in the new book by Roberto Martínez Bachrich, Las guerras íntimas (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2011).
{ Roberto Martínez Bachrich, Prodavinci, 3 June 2011 }
6.12.2011
El desagravio / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Amends
I have witnessed the cavalcade directed toward a meridional kingdom, under the command of an agreeable lady. I saw the imitation of spring and of her bizarre escort.
Each man was on foot in front of the palfrey of his chosen woman, leading it by the right hand, and was listening to some mirthful or gallant tale from his companion. In this manner they were driving away melancholy, following the instructions imposed for the journey by the sovereign of the retinue.
I had retired to a barren wilderness, where I was simulating the fulfillment of a penance assigned by the lady of my devotion, discontent with my eccentric ways.
The ladies of the retinue heard amid laughter the story of my mistake and decided to take me with them, in the hopes of attaining my absolution.
I joined the company of nobles and adopted their delirious happiness, mounted on a recalcitrant ass.
I fell on my knees in front of my lady, while the others persuaded her in a noisy chorus. The most beautiful of all of them meanwhile was adapting a paper crown to my head.
The lady of my thoughts lifted me from humiliation, stretching out her right arm to me.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I have witnessed the cavalcade directed toward a meridional kingdom, under the command of an agreeable lady. I saw the imitation of spring and of her bizarre escort.
Each man was on foot in front of the palfrey of his chosen woman, leading it by the right hand, and was listening to some mirthful or gallant tale from his companion. In this manner they were driving away melancholy, following the instructions imposed for the journey by the sovereign of the retinue.
I had retired to a barren wilderness, where I was simulating the fulfillment of a penance assigned by the lady of my devotion, discontent with my eccentric ways.
The ladies of the retinue heard amid laughter the story of my mistake and decided to take me with them, in the hopes of attaining my absolution.
I joined the company of nobles and adopted their delirious happiness, mounted on a recalcitrant ass.
I fell on my knees in front of my lady, while the others persuaded her in a noisy chorus. The most beautiful of all of them meanwhile was adapting a paper crown to my head.
The lady of my thoughts lifted me from humiliation, stretching out her right arm to me.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
6.11.2011
Roberto Martínez Bachrich: Me siento lúcido frente a un cuento / Michelle Roche Rodríguez
Roberto Martínez Bachrich: I feel lucid in front of a short story
While his short stories are shrouded with the quick intensity that drags the reader toward the final effect, Roberto Martínez Bachrich’s modesty captivates. Wary of interviews, or false stage lights, he only feels comfortable when talking about the writer’s work. For him, literature is what others do; his own work is merely “an irresponsibility.”
But since every mania has its cure and and each writer his editor, the new imprint Lugar Común presented last night Las guerras íntimas, the most recent collection of short stories by the author born in Valencia in 1977.
A relationship that unravels, two vengeful nephews, a man with an aversion toward tables, a pair of reckless youths, the feline perversity of a woman who uses her lovers, the journey of a family of Italian immigrants or the ghost of a decapitated nurse, these are some of the anecdotes about small daily passions that parade through the book.
(Re)writing. Martínez Bachrich finds the best of his literary experience in the constant editing of his texts, even to the point of paroxysm. For example, the first version of Las guerras íntimas was finished in 2001 and it was a collection of 16 short stories. But, in the process of correcting it, only the title and five stories remained. Between 2002 and 2007 he created a dozen more and after the task of rewriting he was left with the list of 10 stories that have just been published: “My first short story collections were published very quickly and I try not to repeat those errors any more.”
The most evident trait of his prose is a return to the classical forms of the short story, which once represented the vanguard of the style of Julio Cortázar’s Historias de cronopios y famas (1962).
With cohesion as a premise, not a single phrase in his stories is extraneous. “Surprise is a pillar of the classic short story and in these texts I’m working on the idea of attaining it, thinking of the knock out Cortázar discusses,” he points out before emphasizing the real weight of the symbol in the short story: “The image can be a point of departure, but the arrival passes through the necessity of a story that’s autonomous and well-rounded, that works.”
Other short story collections by the same author are Desencuentros (1998) and Vulgar (2000). Nearly a decade ago he published the poetry collection Las noches de cobalto, but he prefers not to talk about that genre, though he hasn’t abandoned it: “I feel lucid in front of a short story because I can defend it and I understand where it comes from, which doesn’t happen to me with the poem.”
Now, as he enjoys or in his case, rather, flees from the brief flashes of celebrity that touch those who present a book in Venezuela, he is also finishing the last details of his biography of Antonia Palacios entitled Tiempo hendido, which won the tenth edition of the Concurso Transgenérico de la Fundación para la Cultura Urbana last year.
{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 4 June 2011 }
While his short stories are shrouded with the quick intensity that drags the reader toward the final effect, Roberto Martínez Bachrich’s modesty captivates. Wary of interviews, or false stage lights, he only feels comfortable when talking about the writer’s work. For him, literature is what others do; his own work is merely “an irresponsibility.”
But since every mania has its cure and and each writer his editor, the new imprint Lugar Común presented last night Las guerras íntimas, the most recent collection of short stories by the author born in Valencia in 1977.
A relationship that unravels, two vengeful nephews, a man with an aversion toward tables, a pair of reckless youths, the feline perversity of a woman who uses her lovers, the journey of a family of Italian immigrants or the ghost of a decapitated nurse, these are some of the anecdotes about small daily passions that parade through the book.
(Re)writing. Martínez Bachrich finds the best of his literary experience in the constant editing of his texts, even to the point of paroxysm. For example, the first version of Las guerras íntimas was finished in 2001 and it was a collection of 16 short stories. But, in the process of correcting it, only the title and five stories remained. Between 2002 and 2007 he created a dozen more and after the task of rewriting he was left with the list of 10 stories that have just been published: “My first short story collections were published very quickly and I try not to repeat those errors any more.”
The most evident trait of his prose is a return to the classical forms of the short story, which once represented the vanguard of the style of Julio Cortázar’s Historias de cronopios y famas (1962).
With cohesion as a premise, not a single phrase in his stories is extraneous. “Surprise is a pillar of the classic short story and in these texts I’m working on the idea of attaining it, thinking of the knock out Cortázar discusses,” he points out before emphasizing the real weight of the symbol in the short story: “The image can be a point of departure, but the arrival passes through the necessity of a story that’s autonomous and well-rounded, that works.”
Other short story collections by the same author are Desencuentros (1998) and Vulgar (2000). Nearly a decade ago he published the poetry collection Las noches de cobalto, but he prefers not to talk about that genre, though he hasn’t abandoned it: “I feel lucid in front of a short story because I can defend it and I understand where it comes from, which doesn’t happen to me with the poem.”
Now, as he enjoys or in his case, rather, flees from the brief flashes of celebrity that touch those who present a book in Venezuela, he is also finishing the last details of his biography of Antonia Palacios entitled Tiempo hendido, which won the tenth edition of the Concurso Transgenérico de la Fundación para la Cultura Urbana last year.
{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 4 June 2011 }
6.08.2011
Farándula / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Show Business
The drama begins with the altercation between an impetuous young man and a courtesan of withered age. The controversy is transferred to the presence of the king and falls under his arbitrage.
The progenitor of the irascible young man has perished, years earlier, in a nocturnal ambush. He was leaving a splendid dance and challenging his enemies leaving behind him and at a great distance the entourage of his horseback pages and torch carriers. He was rushing ahead to the encounter with death, when his minions were composing a nuptial theory for him, in accordance with Hellenic usage.
The people’s rumor accused the most cautious and ambitious courtier, the rancor of the orphan recrudesced and enabled him for the martial arrest.
The king discharges the dissidents and sends them off to disparate kingdoms, prohibiting them from reconciliation before a marked lapse.
The young gentleman has struck up a casual conversation with the politician’s daughter and dedicates himself to following her steps and to pleasing her caprices and thoughts. In this manner the veto of the monarch is frustrated and the convention occurs in the City of Master Singers.
The young man and the destitute minister confer on the successive perfidies of the king and clarify the homicide of the arrogant magnate, madly in advance of his men the night of the celebrated festival.
The two return triumphantly from exile when the sudden death of the king occurs. The people’s voice insists that he was suffocated by his stewards.
The wedding of the impetuous young man with the daughter of the ancient relative of the sovereign is verified in the hall of the deplored dance.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The drama begins with the altercation between an impetuous young man and a courtesan of withered age. The controversy is transferred to the presence of the king and falls under his arbitrage.
The progenitor of the irascible young man has perished, years earlier, in a nocturnal ambush. He was leaving a splendid dance and challenging his enemies leaving behind him and at a great distance the entourage of his horseback pages and torch carriers. He was rushing ahead to the encounter with death, when his minions were composing a nuptial theory for him, in accordance with Hellenic usage.
The people’s rumor accused the most cautious and ambitious courtier, the rancor of the orphan recrudesced and enabled him for the martial arrest.
The king discharges the dissidents and sends them off to disparate kingdoms, prohibiting them from reconciliation before a marked lapse.
The young gentleman has struck up a casual conversation with the politician’s daughter and dedicates himself to following her steps and to pleasing her caprices and thoughts. In this manner the veto of the monarch is frustrated and the convention occurs in the City of Master Singers.
The young man and the destitute minister confer on the successive perfidies of the king and clarify the homicide of the arrogant magnate, madly in advance of his men the night of the celebrated festival.
The two return triumphantly from exile when the sudden death of the king occurs. The people’s voice insists that he was suffocated by his stewards.
The wedding of the impetuous young man with the daughter of the ancient relative of the sovereign is verified in the hall of the deplored dance.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
6.07.2011
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 }
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 }
6.05.2011
Del destierro / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Of Exile
I carry in my spirit the desolation of the landscape, nature is in mourning; the mountain communicated its immobility to the fog that envelops it; the air is orphaned of aroma and song, melancholic trees, sleepily agonize under a leaden sky, in an asphyxiating atmosphere. In this place full of silence, it seems as though my heart only lives on encouraged by a memory, by a dead sensation.
I remember the morning, when she passed me, incarnation of tempting beauty that would torment an ascetic’s dream: arrogant stride, disdainful gesture; from the depths of her eyes’ perverse glance occult love was throwing its arrows; on her face, living silk a mole like a diminutive muffled star; with a blonde head she was placing a smile of light a festival sun...
In divine ecstasy, wanting to make that instant eternal, I contemplated her as she walked away with my tranquility through the astonishing avenue of trees, whose leaves whispered with murmurs of very still voices.
From that moment shame is my host, I live consecrated to her, whose absence kills me; that memory that torments me like a claw sinking made its nest in my chest.
We live off pain and the past, dispelling sadness, making black thoughts flee, the memory of that woman makes my heart palpitate, the only being who seems to live in this place of silence nature, tired of activity and anxious dies.
Translator’s Note: This text, Ramos Sucre's first publication, appeared in the Cumaná literary magazine Ritmo e ideas on 15 December 1911.
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I carry in my spirit the desolation of the landscape, nature is in mourning; the mountain communicated its immobility to the fog that envelops it; the air is orphaned of aroma and song, melancholic trees, sleepily agonize under a leaden sky, in an asphyxiating atmosphere. In this place full of silence, it seems as though my heart only lives on encouraged by a memory, by a dead sensation.
I remember the morning, when she passed me, incarnation of tempting beauty that would torment an ascetic’s dream: arrogant stride, disdainful gesture; from the depths of her eyes’ perverse glance occult love was throwing its arrows; on her face, living silk a mole like a diminutive muffled star; with a blonde head she was placing a smile of light a festival sun...
In divine ecstasy, wanting to make that instant eternal, I contemplated her as she walked away with my tranquility through the astonishing avenue of trees, whose leaves whispered with murmurs of very still voices.
From that moment shame is my host, I live consecrated to her, whose absence kills me; that memory that torments me like a claw sinking made its nest in my chest.
We live off pain and the past, dispelling sadness, making black thoughts flee, the memory of that woman makes my heart palpitate, the only being who seems to live in this place of silence nature, tired of activity and anxious dies.
Translator’s Note: This text, Ramos Sucre's first publication, appeared in the Cumaná literary magazine Ritmo e ideas on 15 December 1911.
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
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