The Jealousy of the Phantasm
I was barely twenty years old when I finished my studies in an ancient university. I have adopted the solemnity of its cloisters.
I returned to the town of my birth, situated amid a luxuriant vegetation, upon an inundated district.
I fell in love suddenly with a candid girl, of soft epidermis.
I discovered her sitting on a stone bench, beneath the flaccid leaves of a tree lashed by the drizzle. She had arrived furtively, wrapped up in the rags of the fog.
She disappeared from my side at the arrival of spring. I have my doubts whether she died from the palustral region’s insidious diseases or if it was only an aerial phantasm.
Wanting to die, I have left my nebulous island in search of danger. I suffered the uniformity of the sea in the shadow of the arrogant sails. I have seen without passion or interest the happiness of meridional ports. I wanted to attend the mourning of irreconcilable countries, shackled for centuries amid the ruins of an august civilization.
I have joined the most arrogant army. I have seen the Byzantine sign of the crescent on the red cloth of the pavilions and on the turban of the fatalist warriors.
A despotic pasha was ruling that throng. He took with him the women of his harem, subject to a perpetual vigilance. One of them accompanied the sound of the guzla with a monotonous song. She would have satisfied my feeling for the candid girl.
I determined to abduct her in the tumult of the first armed conflict and hide her very far from her tyrant, in my nebulous island. Her affection would have cured me of the old fantastical passion.
I witnessed the army’s disaster in the first battle. The enemy officers gallantly appeared from the heart of a cloud of smoke.
I was visiting the sites of greatest danger with my hands in my pocket, dissembling my interest.
I headed, on horseback, to where the woman awaited me. She had agreed to save herself with me when the crisis of defeat arrived.
The vanquished had been desperate to save the captives. I saw them dying, rolling in their own blood, wounded with a shot to the temple.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
9.27.2011
El enviado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Envoy
The bard, afflicted by senescence, would clarify for the humble ones the calendar of fortunate and unfortunate days, work of his numen. He would enunciate to them healthy precepts for life and the work of navigator and farmer. He preferred, for his discourse, the vespertine tranquility, in days distinguished by the flowering of the thistle.
He spoke of himself as alive and active over the course of various human generations and superior in age to the holm oaks.
He was intruding in the house of the magnates. He had not been able to reconcile with them, despite his success with the mountain beasts.
He was pitying the indigent situation of his adepts and took them with him, to found a peaceful establishment, facing a fountain’s stone circle.
A lightning bolt was announcing the fortuitous exit from the water and the river would take shape along the way, fertilizing a bed of rushes.
He was able to put in order the strata of the city, anticipating the motives of discord. In accordance with his teachings, an intimate force gathers and sustains, around a center, the elements of each being of natural fabrication and he pointed out the case of the star and its separate points. Speaking of this fate, he would scrutinize in his hand a grain of sand the color of pearl.
He taught them the administration of milk from the herds and how to ferment it in wooden cubes.
He imposed on them the observation of a tolerant policy toward the people of the region and allowed them to start a war if one of three arrows tossed in the direction of the sun’s rotation fell fixed onto the floor. By means of this advice his nation came to grow from victory to victory.
He disappeared to die, always attentive to hiding the smallness of his human nature, and left climbing a ruinous hill, in the company of a grey bear.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The bard, afflicted by senescence, would clarify for the humble ones the calendar of fortunate and unfortunate days, work of his numen. He would enunciate to them healthy precepts for life and the work of navigator and farmer. He preferred, for his discourse, the vespertine tranquility, in days distinguished by the flowering of the thistle.
He spoke of himself as alive and active over the course of various human generations and superior in age to the holm oaks.
He was intruding in the house of the magnates. He had not been able to reconcile with them, despite his success with the mountain beasts.
He was pitying the indigent situation of his adepts and took them with him, to found a peaceful establishment, facing a fountain’s stone circle.
A lightning bolt was announcing the fortuitous exit from the water and the river would take shape along the way, fertilizing a bed of rushes.
He was able to put in order the strata of the city, anticipating the motives of discord. In accordance with his teachings, an intimate force gathers and sustains, around a center, the elements of each being of natural fabrication and he pointed out the case of the star and its separate points. Speaking of this fate, he would scrutinize in his hand a grain of sand the color of pearl.
He taught them the administration of milk from the herds and how to ferment it in wooden cubes.
He imposed on them the observation of a tolerant policy toward the people of the region and allowed them to start a war if one of three arrows tossed in the direction of the sun’s rotation fell fixed onto the floor. By means of this advice his nation came to grow from victory to victory.
He disappeared to die, always attentive to hiding the smallness of his human nature, and left climbing a ruinous hill, in the company of a grey bear.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
9.24.2011
“Donde se acaba el misterio, se acaba también el impulso de la escritura” / Carmen Victoria Vivas
“Where mystery ends, writing’s impulse likewise ends”
[Photo by Marcel Cifuentes]
Whether it’s a rigorous essay, a vulgarly provocative short story, or a poem, Roberto Martínez Bachrich always displays his devotion for the precise and unsettling word. Winner of the X Concurso Anual Transgenérico, for his book Tiempo hendido, a study of the life and work of Antonia Palacios, he anticipates that publication with the awaited release of his book Las guerras íntimas (published by Lugar Común), a collection of short stories fine-tuned in their structure, with unpredictable anecdotes and characters vitiated by their emotions.
Valéry sustained that the conclusion of a work is something accidental. In the presentation for your book Las guerras íntimas you commented that you would have been able to continue, for years even, your process of correction. What is it you achieved in those short stories that moved you to decide on their publication?
More than achievement, it’s always a matter, I think, of abandoning. That abandonment is, perhaps, the heart of the accident Valéry mentions. When I felt there existed a more or less closed book, that made sense, in some way, as a totality, that was when I decided to abandon it. If I hadn’t done that, as I mentioned on that day, I could have kept on polishing it for another decade, rewriting it, eliminating or adding stories; but the ten that were left, I’d like to think, are stories that can function, that lasted, remaining in the continuous selections and rewrites, that resisted and fought back, finally, against my manias. I’d like to think they were the strongest, the survivors of the debacle of rewriting, of the perpetual intimate war that is all writing. And, as Alfonso Reyes noted, we abandon what’s written, we publish so as to not spend our lives rewriting. So as to be able to, hopefully, turn the page, move on to something else.
In “Los colores oscuros” you narrate the execution of a perfect crime, despite the absence of weapons or a detective. Do you think this story responds to the structure of the crime genre, in that it, as Borges specified, “lives off the continuous and delicate infraction of its laws”?
It’s possible, but I wasn’t conscious of what you mention when I wrote it. Maybe it’s a crime story in reverse, speaking from Borges. Not the attempt to respond to the who, what, where, when and why of a determined crime, according to the classic credo of the genre, but rather a steady approach at the hands of the characters and following a meticulous chain of lies to perpetuate a crime. That story, actually, emerged after reading Cortázar’s “The Health of the Sick.” I tried to revert the structure of that masterful story. At its heart it’s nothing more than a humble and almost invisible tribute to a monster of the short story to whom everyone, I think, owes so much.
In “Blanco” you dare to employ an obscure aesthetic, in a certain way the image of a type of cinema that delights in kitsch terror, but it’s a gesture that isn’t repeated in the rest of the book. Is this exception due to the fact that you wager in favor of a literature that disassociates itself from delighting in bad taste?
In general terms I’d say no.Although I’m not sure if this “no” sustains itself in Las guerras íntimas. I mean, I think bad taste is very important. At one time I tried, from the form of the short story, to draw a fierce praise of the vulgar, to travel the sinuosity of its landscape, bordering, naturally, alongside the “powers of bad taste.” I don’t know if at that time I achieved it or not, but I think in this book I separated myself a bit from that. Regarding “Blanco,” from a very young age I’ve been an impenitent reader of supernatural horror literature. Stories like those of Poe or Lovecraft were fundamental in my formation as a reader. And I always wanted to write a story like that, a Lovecraftian story whose center would be a terrifying scene beyond the order of rational logic. The central moment of that tale came out of an image, the decapitated nurse, which recalls those types of films you’re talking about, movies that, I confess, entertain me a great deal. From that scene and the sinister one that it unleashed came the totality of the story. I think that more than achieving a story of supernatural horror, I was barely able to reach the texture of a fantastical tale. But if we consider that it’s a fantastical tale, it wouldn’t be so alone in the book. When I reached the final version of Las guerras íntimas, I wanted to make sure that, despite the apparent variety of themes and narrative registers, each story had a type of pair, a sibling story, mirror story. In that sense, the twin figure of “Blanco” would be “Densidad de las mesas,” which is very removed from supernatural horror, but does sympathize with the fantastic and the absurd.
“Sifilíticos e integrados” tells the story of a search for revenge after a heartbreak that emerges during the contagion of a venereal disease. An admirable plan whose execution depends on the complexities of those involved. Is that what interests you: an ingenious anecdote that will allow you to rummage around in damaged subjects?
I’d have to disagree a bit with you in such a reading. I don’t feel like ingenious anecdotes are my strength. I feel like in my stories these are, in general, pretty simple, very common. Maybe something in the events of “Sifilíticos e integrados” might seem obscure, but if we think about how the majority of youthful love dramas and, when the case fits, how bitterness and plans for revenge revolve around that orbit and are tinted, almost always, with those shades, the narrative loses all its strangeness or it’s not so unfaithful to the mirror of the real and the apparent. I don’t think that story and many of the others are concentrated exclusively on damaged subjects and in the evil? perverse? taste for rummaging in those wounds. I think that in the plot of the revenge, all that has failed and defeat are fundamental. And that implies and reveals a certain degree of tenderness, of human warmth in these characters. I was looking, in one way or another, to endear them to the reader. The end, as well as the rigorous choice of certain words, point in that direction: it is, in its own way, a happy ending, right? Maybe it’s true that an author is the worst reader of his own texts. But that’s also the beauty of the act, the gesture of writing. The what and why of the written turns out to be a mystery for one. Darkness, the nebulous, these always have a great weight. And I think that’s fortunate. Where mystery ends, writing’s impulse likewise ends. The “kingdom of the known,” I like to think, is fatal for a fiction writer.
{ Carmen Victoria Vivas, Tal Cual, 24 September 2011 }
[Photo by Marcel Cifuentes]
Whether it’s a rigorous essay, a vulgarly provocative short story, or a poem, Roberto Martínez Bachrich always displays his devotion for the precise and unsettling word. Winner of the X Concurso Anual Transgenérico, for his book Tiempo hendido, a study of the life and work of Antonia Palacios, he anticipates that publication with the awaited release of his book Las guerras íntimas (published by Lugar Común), a collection of short stories fine-tuned in their structure, with unpredictable anecdotes and characters vitiated by their emotions.
Valéry sustained that the conclusion of a work is something accidental. In the presentation for your book Las guerras íntimas you commented that you would have been able to continue, for years even, your process of correction. What is it you achieved in those short stories that moved you to decide on their publication?
More than achievement, it’s always a matter, I think, of abandoning. That abandonment is, perhaps, the heart of the accident Valéry mentions. When I felt there existed a more or less closed book, that made sense, in some way, as a totality, that was when I decided to abandon it. If I hadn’t done that, as I mentioned on that day, I could have kept on polishing it for another decade, rewriting it, eliminating or adding stories; but the ten that were left, I’d like to think, are stories that can function, that lasted, remaining in the continuous selections and rewrites, that resisted and fought back, finally, against my manias. I’d like to think they were the strongest, the survivors of the debacle of rewriting, of the perpetual intimate war that is all writing. And, as Alfonso Reyes noted, we abandon what’s written, we publish so as to not spend our lives rewriting. So as to be able to, hopefully, turn the page, move on to something else.
In “Los colores oscuros” you narrate the execution of a perfect crime, despite the absence of weapons or a detective. Do you think this story responds to the structure of the crime genre, in that it, as Borges specified, “lives off the continuous and delicate infraction of its laws”?
It’s possible, but I wasn’t conscious of what you mention when I wrote it. Maybe it’s a crime story in reverse, speaking from Borges. Not the attempt to respond to the who, what, where, when and why of a determined crime, according to the classic credo of the genre, but rather a steady approach at the hands of the characters and following a meticulous chain of lies to perpetuate a crime. That story, actually, emerged after reading Cortázar’s “The Health of the Sick.” I tried to revert the structure of that masterful story. At its heart it’s nothing more than a humble and almost invisible tribute to a monster of the short story to whom everyone, I think, owes so much.
In “Blanco” you dare to employ an obscure aesthetic, in a certain way the image of a type of cinema that delights in kitsch terror, but it’s a gesture that isn’t repeated in the rest of the book. Is this exception due to the fact that you wager in favor of a literature that disassociates itself from delighting in bad taste?
In general terms I’d say no.Although I’m not sure if this “no” sustains itself in Las guerras íntimas. I mean, I think bad taste is very important. At one time I tried, from the form of the short story, to draw a fierce praise of the vulgar, to travel the sinuosity of its landscape, bordering, naturally, alongside the “powers of bad taste.” I don’t know if at that time I achieved it or not, but I think in this book I separated myself a bit from that. Regarding “Blanco,” from a very young age I’ve been an impenitent reader of supernatural horror literature. Stories like those of Poe or Lovecraft were fundamental in my formation as a reader. And I always wanted to write a story like that, a Lovecraftian story whose center would be a terrifying scene beyond the order of rational logic. The central moment of that tale came out of an image, the decapitated nurse, which recalls those types of films you’re talking about, movies that, I confess, entertain me a great deal. From that scene and the sinister one that it unleashed came the totality of the story. I think that more than achieving a story of supernatural horror, I was barely able to reach the texture of a fantastical tale. But if we consider that it’s a fantastical tale, it wouldn’t be so alone in the book. When I reached the final version of Las guerras íntimas, I wanted to make sure that, despite the apparent variety of themes and narrative registers, each story had a type of pair, a sibling story, mirror story. In that sense, the twin figure of “Blanco” would be “Densidad de las mesas,” which is very removed from supernatural horror, but does sympathize with the fantastic and the absurd.
“Sifilíticos e integrados” tells the story of a search for revenge after a heartbreak that emerges during the contagion of a venereal disease. An admirable plan whose execution depends on the complexities of those involved. Is that what interests you: an ingenious anecdote that will allow you to rummage around in damaged subjects?
I’d have to disagree a bit with you in such a reading. I don’t feel like ingenious anecdotes are my strength. I feel like in my stories these are, in general, pretty simple, very common. Maybe something in the events of “Sifilíticos e integrados” might seem obscure, but if we think about how the majority of youthful love dramas and, when the case fits, how bitterness and plans for revenge revolve around that orbit and are tinted, almost always, with those shades, the narrative loses all its strangeness or it’s not so unfaithful to the mirror of the real and the apparent. I don’t think that story and many of the others are concentrated exclusively on damaged subjects and in the evil? perverse? taste for rummaging in those wounds. I think that in the plot of the revenge, all that has failed and defeat are fundamental. And that implies and reveals a certain degree of tenderness, of human warmth in these characters. I was looking, in one way or another, to endear them to the reader. The end, as well as the rigorous choice of certain words, point in that direction: it is, in its own way, a happy ending, right? Maybe it’s true that an author is the worst reader of his own texts. But that’s also the beauty of the act, the gesture of writing. The what and why of the written turns out to be a mystery for one. Darkness, the nebulous, these always have a great weight. And I think that’s fortunate. Where mystery ends, writing’s impulse likewise ends. The “kingdom of the known,” I like to think, is fatal for a fiction writer.
{ Carmen Victoria Vivas, Tal Cual, 24 September 2011 }
9.23.2011
Lay / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Lay
The king permitted the beggars to make themselves comfortable at the foot of his throne, on the steps of a staircase. He attended to their requests and was pleased to discover the veiled interest in their absurd stories.
The natives of the kingdom lived disseminated in the countryside or gathered in their humble villages. The battle crow had suspended its flight in the tarnished atmosphere. It reminded the new generations of the greatness of Artus.
The clement king had regretted consenting to the refuge of the miscreants in the churches and cemeteries. They were using the guarantee of asylum to steal. He ordered their exile through the closes port and they departed, humiliated to the point of imploring charity, each of them carrying crosses.
The king was rarely mistaken in tasks of governance when he observed his own discernment. He would become delirious when he incurred in the weakness of consulting a voice born in the heart of a mausoleum. He dared not emancipate himself from Merlin’s command.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The king permitted the beggars to make themselves comfortable at the foot of his throne, on the steps of a staircase. He attended to their requests and was pleased to discover the veiled interest in their absurd stories.
The natives of the kingdom lived disseminated in the countryside or gathered in their humble villages. The battle crow had suspended its flight in the tarnished atmosphere. It reminded the new generations of the greatness of Artus.
The clement king had regretted consenting to the refuge of the miscreants in the churches and cemeteries. They were using the guarantee of asylum to steal. He ordered their exile through the closes port and they departed, humiliated to the point of imploring charity, each of them carrying crosses.
The king was rarely mistaken in tasks of governance when he observed his own discernment. He would become delirious when he incurred in the weakness of consulting a voice born in the heart of a mausoleum. He dared not emancipate himself from Merlin’s command.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
9.21.2011
Los 25 secretos mejor guardados de América Latina: Roberto Martínez Bachrich
The 25 Best Kept Secrets in Latin America: Roberto Martínez Bachrich
“I work tirelessly because I have so many doubts: I rewrite each text in an obsessive, maniacal manner. And I publish very little, out of respect for the readers.
I’m interested in domestic, intimate universes, rummaging and imagining how in unexpected corners of the quotidian an extreme, overwhelming situation can emerge, suddenly. The monstrous dimension of certain minor, private epics is what most attracts me about writing a story.”
Biography
I was born in a warm and tranquil city. Beside a river and an hour from the sea. Affectionate parents, great siblings and multiple dogs, cats, fish and turtles, surrounded my initial voyage.
Since childhood I was an impenitent reader. And without knowing it, maybe as a natural consequence of reading so much, I got sick with writing. Today I make my living teaching literature classes and editing books or magazines. It’s the only way, up to now, of doing something related to what one likes and being able to live off it. And, meanwhile, of course, I read, imagine, write. From that work, delicious and hard, my books have emerged; three short story collections, Desencuentros (1998), Vulgar (2000) and Las guerras íntimas (2011); a collection of poems, Las noches de cobalto (2002) and an essay, Tiempo hendido (2011).
People ask me why anyone should read me. I don’t have the slightest idea. I suppose the world, in a strict sense, doesn’t need to read me. I can’t offer anything that others, with better tools, haven’t already offered to literary space. They should read Kafka and Dostoyevsky, Melville and Camus. Conrad and Flaubert, Poe and Chekhov. Reyes, Paz and Picón Salas, Cortázar, Bolaño and Ribeyro. Ramos Sucre and Gerbasi, Cadenas and Gramcko.
But from reading them so much, one ends up writing. And maybe a reader can find tributes, clues, roads plowed for the re-encounter with great voices, in what one, humbly, scribbles. Or better said, wanting to establish the fact that they’ve always accompanied me. Literature, Borges said already, hasn’t done anything new for centuries. Since the Bible, Homer and Dante, we always tell the same three or four stories. But I feel that it’s important to tell them again. Over and over. It’s an exercise in resistance and continuity: a silent tribute. Maybe, just like it’s important to keep telling these stories, it’s also important that we keep reading them. Renewed, from other angles, other visions of the world. It’s what little I can say to whomever might want, graciously, to read my papers. I wish my short stories could accompany any reader, just as so many works by others have accompanied me. The dialogue is endless. The axe keeps coming down, as Kafka requested, on the frozen sea. And that’s the happiness, the beauty, I think, of continuing to write, continuing to read.
Literary Fragment
Fragment from “Aguas perdidas, aguas encontradas.” Taken from Las guerras íntimas (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2011).
“Ricardo and Luisiana enter the vortex fearlessly. I go more slowly: I think, doubt, wait. I swim a few feet backwards and forwards. At times you can catch a glimpse of a foot or a head in the jumble. Something stops me from the other side. I take a deep breath, submerge myself, come out again. I watch the passage to the other shore slightly horrified. It would be fantastic if the sea were to calm down a bit. To go on swimming without setbacks: with no shame, no glory. But it won’t happen. I turn my back to the uneven ground. I stare at the horizon. The sea isn’t as beautiful when you’re inside, absolutely alone, separated from the shore by a swarm of furious waves. I tell myself, enough fucking around, and dive into the water, deep down, foam and shoving. Just before going in again I take another deep breath: my lungs swell and my heart accelerates. A wave passes, another one returns. One comes, another goes. I embark on that one and move my feet and hands at full speed. I need to slide from one wave to another before they break in the crash. An impossible endeavor. I feel the scream underwater. A thousandth of a second before I feel it with my whole body, I feel the scream of two waves crashing against each other. And there’s no time to assimilate the sound. My body already belongs to the wave: it’s already pushing me from one side to another, it’s already turning me into a miserable rubber doll, turns me around like a rotisserie barbecue, it makes me lose my hearing, stuns me, scares me. I’ve heard many times that you have to let yourself be dragged a while before getting out onto shore. It’s a well-processed fact, it’s almost a reflex. But I let myself be kneaded by the waves a few seconds without understanding which one’s the precise moment for escape. And my breathing starts to fail me. Then I forget my body’s flaccidity and become rigid, I start to kick the waves, to swim, seeking the surface. The sea beats me down and my race is useless. I lose all sense of orientation and swim without knowing where I’m headed. I look for the light and I think I see it to my left. I accelerate and swim, but another wave crashes over my head. I swallow salt, my mouth fills with sand. I can’t open my eyes anymore. I make another effort and start to swim desperately in any direction. And my hands suddenly touch ground, preceding my head which crashes against the bottom. That’s where I understand what fear is. I turn around and push upwards with my feet. It’s a brief ray of hope knowing that now there’s an up and a down: maybe you always have to touch bottom before being saved. I swim toward the light dazed, it seems like the surface is approaching. And right there, when the episode seems to have ended, a new wave massacres me from above. All hope drowns within me. My body loses the sky again and twirls underwater at the whim of each wave. That’s where I understand what horror is. But suddenly the noise ends. It’s a matter of seconds, but the stupefying murmur of the waves crashing one after another stops. The sea grows quiet and plunges me into the silence. It’s a thick silence, a perfect symphony of quiet. I open my eyes and the earth that mixes with the waves seems to have disappeared: the sea has become completely blue. It’s a clean, whole, brilliant, transparent blue. It’s the bluest blue I’ve ever seen. It’s a veracious, absolute blue. At that point I lose my fear and say to myself, almost with certainty, almost aloud though my mouth is sealed by the water, that I’ve died. And I understand it like you understand one plus one is two. Without fear. Without desperation. I’ve died. Like that, in past perfect. Like a real, finite, certain fact. I’ve died. And it’ll be a real shame, I think, because I’m young and stupid and I still wanted to do so many things in life. But I’ve died.”
(Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, 2011)
“I work tirelessly because I have so many doubts: I rewrite each text in an obsessive, maniacal manner. And I publish very little, out of respect for the readers.
I’m interested in domestic, intimate universes, rummaging and imagining how in unexpected corners of the quotidian an extreme, overwhelming situation can emerge, suddenly. The monstrous dimension of certain minor, private epics is what most attracts me about writing a story.”
Biography
I was born in a warm and tranquil city. Beside a river and an hour from the sea. Affectionate parents, great siblings and multiple dogs, cats, fish and turtles, surrounded my initial voyage.
Since childhood I was an impenitent reader. And without knowing it, maybe as a natural consequence of reading so much, I got sick with writing. Today I make my living teaching literature classes and editing books or magazines. It’s the only way, up to now, of doing something related to what one likes and being able to live off it. And, meanwhile, of course, I read, imagine, write. From that work, delicious and hard, my books have emerged; three short story collections, Desencuentros (1998), Vulgar (2000) and Las guerras íntimas (2011); a collection of poems, Las noches de cobalto (2002) and an essay, Tiempo hendido (2011).
People ask me why anyone should read me. I don’t have the slightest idea. I suppose the world, in a strict sense, doesn’t need to read me. I can’t offer anything that others, with better tools, haven’t already offered to literary space. They should read Kafka and Dostoyevsky, Melville and Camus. Conrad and Flaubert, Poe and Chekhov. Reyes, Paz and Picón Salas, Cortázar, Bolaño and Ribeyro. Ramos Sucre and Gerbasi, Cadenas and Gramcko.
But from reading them so much, one ends up writing. And maybe a reader can find tributes, clues, roads plowed for the re-encounter with great voices, in what one, humbly, scribbles. Or better said, wanting to establish the fact that they’ve always accompanied me. Literature, Borges said already, hasn’t done anything new for centuries. Since the Bible, Homer and Dante, we always tell the same three or four stories. But I feel that it’s important to tell them again. Over and over. It’s an exercise in resistance and continuity: a silent tribute. Maybe, just like it’s important to keep telling these stories, it’s also important that we keep reading them. Renewed, from other angles, other visions of the world. It’s what little I can say to whomever might want, graciously, to read my papers. I wish my short stories could accompany any reader, just as so many works by others have accompanied me. The dialogue is endless. The axe keeps coming down, as Kafka requested, on the frozen sea. And that’s the happiness, the beauty, I think, of continuing to write, continuing to read.
Literary Fragment
Fragment from “Aguas perdidas, aguas encontradas.” Taken from Las guerras íntimas (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2011).
“Ricardo and Luisiana enter the vortex fearlessly. I go more slowly: I think, doubt, wait. I swim a few feet backwards and forwards. At times you can catch a glimpse of a foot or a head in the jumble. Something stops me from the other side. I take a deep breath, submerge myself, come out again. I watch the passage to the other shore slightly horrified. It would be fantastic if the sea were to calm down a bit. To go on swimming without setbacks: with no shame, no glory. But it won’t happen. I turn my back to the uneven ground. I stare at the horizon. The sea isn’t as beautiful when you’re inside, absolutely alone, separated from the shore by a swarm of furious waves. I tell myself, enough fucking around, and dive into the water, deep down, foam and shoving. Just before going in again I take another deep breath: my lungs swell and my heart accelerates. A wave passes, another one returns. One comes, another goes. I embark on that one and move my feet and hands at full speed. I need to slide from one wave to another before they break in the crash. An impossible endeavor. I feel the scream underwater. A thousandth of a second before I feel it with my whole body, I feel the scream of two waves crashing against each other. And there’s no time to assimilate the sound. My body already belongs to the wave: it’s already pushing me from one side to another, it’s already turning me into a miserable rubber doll, turns me around like a rotisserie barbecue, it makes me lose my hearing, stuns me, scares me. I’ve heard many times that you have to let yourself be dragged a while before getting out onto shore. It’s a well-processed fact, it’s almost a reflex. But I let myself be kneaded by the waves a few seconds without understanding which one’s the precise moment for escape. And my breathing starts to fail me. Then I forget my body’s flaccidity and become rigid, I start to kick the waves, to swim, seeking the surface. The sea beats me down and my race is useless. I lose all sense of orientation and swim without knowing where I’m headed. I look for the light and I think I see it to my left. I accelerate and swim, but another wave crashes over my head. I swallow salt, my mouth fills with sand. I can’t open my eyes anymore. I make another effort and start to swim desperately in any direction. And my hands suddenly touch ground, preceding my head which crashes against the bottom. That’s where I understand what fear is. I turn around and push upwards with my feet. It’s a brief ray of hope knowing that now there’s an up and a down: maybe you always have to touch bottom before being saved. I swim toward the light dazed, it seems like the surface is approaching. And right there, when the episode seems to have ended, a new wave massacres me from above. All hope drowns within me. My body loses the sky again and twirls underwater at the whim of each wave. That’s where I understand what horror is. But suddenly the noise ends. It’s a matter of seconds, but the stupefying murmur of the waves crashing one after another stops. The sea grows quiet and plunges me into the silence. It’s a thick silence, a perfect symphony of quiet. I open my eyes and the earth that mixes with the waves seems to have disappeared: the sea has become completely blue. It’s a clean, whole, brilliant, transparent blue. It’s the bluest blue I’ve ever seen. It’s a veracious, absolute blue. At that point I lose my fear and say to myself, almost with certainty, almost aloud though my mouth is sealed by the water, that I’ve died. And I understand it like you understand one plus one is two. Without fear. Without desperation. I’ve died. Like that, in past perfect. Like a real, finite, certain fact. I’ve died. And it’ll be a real shame, I think, because I’m young and stupid and I still wanted to do so many things in life. But I’ve died.”
(Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, 2011)
9.20.2011
El lego del convento / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Layman of the Convent
When I traversed the roads of Italy, I had the fortune of receiving advice from Love himself, disguised as a pilgrim. No mortal, besides Dante, could count on that privilege.
He announced to me a solitary life and congratulated me for having listened to the woman with a child’s voice, without arriving at her presence. The prayer, a Eucharistic hymn, was being born in the darkness of the countryside and flying to lose itself in the immaculate ether.
I removed myself from the world and directed my contemplation to the very object of the sacred canticle. I renounced earthly applause and forgot the idle pursuit of art when my masters, the contemporary poets, were expressing the weariness of a generation decimated by the Napoleonic wars and Leopardi was gathering in his work the accent of the offended homeland.
I conserved the noble admiration for the woman from the lineage of Beatrice and came to serve in a Franciscan society, professing in her benefit holy mendacity. I imitate the incipient brother, administrator of the collections donkey in Manzoni’s perfect novel.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
When I traversed the roads of Italy, I had the fortune of receiving advice from Love himself, disguised as a pilgrim. No mortal, besides Dante, could count on that privilege.
He announced to me a solitary life and congratulated me for having listened to the woman with a child’s voice, without arriving at her presence. The prayer, a Eucharistic hymn, was being born in the darkness of the countryside and flying to lose itself in the immaculate ether.
I removed myself from the world and directed my contemplation to the very object of the sacred canticle. I renounced earthly applause and forgot the idle pursuit of art when my masters, the contemporary poets, were expressing the weariness of a generation decimated by the Napoleonic wars and Leopardi was gathering in his work the accent of the offended homeland.
I conserved the noble admiration for the woman from the lineage of Beatrice and came to serve in a Franciscan society, professing in her benefit holy mendacity. I imitate the incipient brother, administrator of the collections donkey in Manzoni’s perfect novel.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
9.18.2011
El donaire / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Elegance
The dwarfs were forging tridents for the marine divinities. They were teaching the natives of the quarry islands the art of fishing for sponges. They invented obsidian mirrors.
They occupied themselves with educating the nightingale and the kingfisher, the birds of happiness. They lived in plaster homes and only dared with the rabbits. They were exiled by a throng of caustic ants.
Aristophanes was pleased to refer, amid Homeric guffaws, the submersion of the dwarfs in a swamp after their fierce resistance in a forest of irises and saffrons.
The dwarfs would have emerged as victors without the animadversion of some cranes with incisive beaks, authors of incurable lesions.
The dwarfs ran to save themselves in the ship of the Argonauts and confessed the origin of their misfortune. They had imitated in a cheerful manner the steps of Empuse, a crippled larva, with donkey legs.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The dwarfs were forging tridents for the marine divinities. They were teaching the natives of the quarry islands the art of fishing for sponges. They invented obsidian mirrors.
They occupied themselves with educating the nightingale and the kingfisher, the birds of happiness. They lived in plaster homes and only dared with the rabbits. They were exiled by a throng of caustic ants.
Aristophanes was pleased to refer, amid Homeric guffaws, the submersion of the dwarfs in a swamp after their fierce resistance in a forest of irises and saffrons.
The dwarfs would have emerged as victors without the animadversion of some cranes with incisive beaks, authors of incurable lesions.
The dwarfs ran to save themselves in the ship of the Argonauts and confessed the origin of their misfortune. They had imitated in a cheerful manner the steps of Empuse, a crippled larva, with donkey legs.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
9.17.2011
La valentía / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Bravery
The cleric keeps the violent mastiffs, clutched with the leash. He has gone over the pages of the epopee so as to assign them a genteel nickname. He directs the dogs to an inclement grandee, versed in the roundabouts of the hunt, emulator of the sun and obstinate in choosing it as a cypher of his vanity and sign of his shield.
The grandee is delayed in a simple village and his unsociable life and solemn ways motivate the birth and release of underhanded rumors. The mistrustful satellites live around him and under the empire of his inflexible voice.
The grandee attains a politician’s name in a seditious kingdom, in a century of monks and knights, deviating from feudal criteria. He is guarded from the assault of fortune by engulfing himself in the warnings of history’s drama and discovers solace from the pounding of the world in the images of a free romance.
The cleric marvels at the verve of the grandee, his will directed toward the domination of the earth and his affection for the unsettled of his fantasy. He deposits in his hands a fatuous legend, where he himself, author of capricious inspiration, levels conflicts by the ministry of chance.
The grandee once more displays irrepressible resolve. He suspends the interview with the cleric and steps away to suppress the sanguinary howl of the hounds, wounding them on their face with a bony hand.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The cleric keeps the violent mastiffs, clutched with the leash. He has gone over the pages of the epopee so as to assign them a genteel nickname. He directs the dogs to an inclement grandee, versed in the roundabouts of the hunt, emulator of the sun and obstinate in choosing it as a cypher of his vanity and sign of his shield.
The grandee is delayed in a simple village and his unsociable life and solemn ways motivate the birth and release of underhanded rumors. The mistrustful satellites live around him and under the empire of his inflexible voice.
The grandee attains a politician’s name in a seditious kingdom, in a century of monks and knights, deviating from feudal criteria. He is guarded from the assault of fortune by engulfing himself in the warnings of history’s drama and discovers solace from the pounding of the world in the images of a free romance.
The cleric marvels at the verve of the grandee, his will directed toward the domination of the earth and his affection for the unsettled of his fantasy. He deposits in his hands a fatuous legend, where he himself, author of capricious inspiration, levels conflicts by the ministry of chance.
The grandee once more displays irrepressible resolve. He suspends the interview with the cleric and steps away to suppress the sanguinary howl of the hounds, wounding them on their face with a bony hand.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
9.15.2011
El viajero / Ramón Palomares
The Traveler
I let myself look back,
drink a glass and laugh
in everything like the sky
and its toast of fine liquor over my head.
This is how I begin the delicious party
in which the fair
is transformed by my heart
pure, stripped of bad flavors
and matters of contempt.
I enter like this,
resembling the morning winner
or the bird that steals the final star.
This is my luck
and that’s how my dice turn out,
my cards amid the towels that rule chance.
A woman lights up this face
from very far.
Made by her love,
to her I owe the shine of my mouth
and the bath offered in my lips
when beauty possesses me.
Shine so tall in my praise her breasts,
may they become the immortal iris.
Friends, deserters of the leap,
escapees from the honey of the game.
In what part, disseminated,
do the little past glories
sow the years with company
and cry, from nostalgia?
At each day
the sky thickens
and the ships move slowly.
Let us extend this love
and the only dew of kisses.
A toast, a toast to you,
precious love, gone
or coming
or nevermore.
And though this red rose die
and my forehead be crowned one day by the white rose
an intimate and purified pleasure will remain in the air.
No matter how much the airs don't call me
the aroma will live
and happiness will embroider the earth.
If you don’t know my name
my name is traveler,
who am unable to be the trinitarian flower.
But today I posses you, sun,
no less than the foam
or the hidden fish.
Time has passed since my father abandoned the city,
but my presence gives him credit.
And, constant,
the high mountains demolish the light,
and the horses play over the gold
under the final sun.
Brothers, how far,
what air so different do we breathe today,
at your wedding
Were there not tears?
Was the dress not stained by dawn
and did it not rain while we slept?
Does someone think of us
now, facing the plain,
when the descent of certain birds happens?
How long the afternoon
and given to meditation.
Soon, by the tree I look at beside night
dense shores will appear
brilliant toward the sky.
Because of all this I weigh
and compare at the pace of the winds
I see I must be somewhat sad.
But in an instant I blow out nostalgia
and pull happiness from myself
like the most beautiful flower from my body.
And at the pace of stars,
dead people
and disappeared events
I toast the hidden
the unknown birds of the next detour,
telling myself I will never return.
And that’s how I begin my adventure.
1958
{ Ramón Palomares, El reino, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2001 }
I let myself look back,
drink a glass and laugh
in everything like the sky
and its toast of fine liquor over my head.
This is how I begin the delicious party
in which the fair
is transformed by my heart
pure, stripped of bad flavors
and matters of contempt.
I enter like this,
resembling the morning winner
or the bird that steals the final star.
This is my luck
and that’s how my dice turn out,
my cards amid the towels that rule chance.
A woman lights up this face
from very far.
Made by her love,
to her I owe the shine of my mouth
and the bath offered in my lips
when beauty possesses me.
Shine so tall in my praise her breasts,
may they become the immortal iris.
Friends, deserters of the leap,
escapees from the honey of the game.
In what part, disseminated,
do the little past glories
sow the years with company
and cry, from nostalgia?
At each day
the sky thickens
and the ships move slowly.
Let us extend this love
and the only dew of kisses.
A toast, a toast to you,
precious love, gone
or coming
or nevermore.
And though this red rose die
and my forehead be crowned one day by the white rose
an intimate and purified pleasure will remain in the air.
No matter how much the airs don't call me
the aroma will live
and happiness will embroider the earth.
If you don’t know my name
my name is traveler,
who am unable to be the trinitarian flower.
But today I posses you, sun,
no less than the foam
or the hidden fish.
Time has passed since my father abandoned the city,
but my presence gives him credit.
And, constant,
the high mountains demolish the light,
and the horses play over the gold
under the final sun.
Brothers, how far,
what air so different do we breathe today,
at your wedding
Were there not tears?
Was the dress not stained by dawn
and did it not rain while we slept?
Does someone think of us
now, facing the plain,
when the descent of certain birds happens?
How long the afternoon
and given to meditation.
Soon, by the tree I look at beside night
dense shores will appear
brilliant toward the sky.
Because of all this I weigh
and compare at the pace of the winds
I see I must be somewhat sad.
But in an instant I blow out nostalgia
and pull happiness from myself
like the most beautiful flower from my body.
And at the pace of stars,
dead people
and disappeared events
I toast the hidden
the unknown birds of the next detour,
telling myself I will never return.
And that’s how I begin my adventure.
1958
{ Ramón Palomares, El reino, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2001 }
9.11.2011
Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto / Edgardo Dobry
Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto
Poetry. Lorenzo García Vega (Jagüey Grande, Cuba, 1926) was the youngest member of the group led by José Lezama in the Havana of the fifties, an experience to which he gave testimony in Los años de Orígenes (1997, published a second time in Buenos Aires in 2007). A book completely removed from self-serving memories and the trickle of prestigious names: García Vega speaks there of the “baroque boogie,” of “the lie of the French,” of “the opportunistic firmness of the farcical Latin American left.” Since, residing in Miami (which he indefectibly calls “Playa Albina”) for forty years now, he had to endure the unconditional support for the Cuban revolution, that condemned the true exiles of that Latin American chimera to ostracism; and the profuse mythology surrounding Lezama and the Orígenes group, against which he took revenge in that book. At once heir to this last resplendence of great Cuban poetry and marginalized, alone, without a tribune, a press or a professorship, García Vega wrote a series of desolate and funny poems, without pity or vain commiseration. Closer to Samuel Beckett’s convulsions of pain and laughter than to any neo-baroque rhetoric in use, there we have extraordinary, extremely unique books that have been published lately: El oficio de perder, No mueras sin laberinto, Devastación del Hotel San Luis. At eighty-five García Vega publishes this book made up of two blocks –Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto–, in a hybrid genre of prose poem, a sketch of chronicles of the void, fragmentary reflection removed from all systems. To the marginality of the exiled poet, of the man stripped of his destiny without receiving anything in return, sharply disillusioned of any fantasy of redemption (for him, for the world), he now adds the resentment of old age, received like a jovial mask: “Sitting at the living room sofa, at five in the afternoon –I didn’t do anything else (if before five in the afternoon you can say I did anything).” Or this: “A sad reality of this Playa Albina where I live. Drums, knick-knacks. What finally makes no noise, even if one spends the day playing the drum.” Play the drum: write the poem. Nietzsche said: “Nihilism is a type of idleness.” But a form of humanism persists in desolation, in the uncomfortable laugh, in the histrionic astonishment of true pain. If you want to know what forms truly contemporary poetry seeks in our language it is impossible not to read Lorenzo García Vega.
Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto
Lorenzo García Vega
Ediciones La Palma, 2011
284 pages. 13 euros
{ Edgardo Dobry, Babelia, El País, 10 September 2011 }
Poetry. Lorenzo García Vega (Jagüey Grande, Cuba, 1926) was the youngest member of the group led by José Lezama in the Havana of the fifties, an experience to which he gave testimony in Los años de Orígenes (1997, published a second time in Buenos Aires in 2007). A book completely removed from self-serving memories and the trickle of prestigious names: García Vega speaks there of the “baroque boogie,” of “the lie of the French,” of “the opportunistic firmness of the farcical Latin American left.” Since, residing in Miami (which he indefectibly calls “Playa Albina”) for forty years now, he had to endure the unconditional support for the Cuban revolution, that condemned the true exiles of that Latin American chimera to ostracism; and the profuse mythology surrounding Lezama and the Orígenes group, against which he took revenge in that book. At once heir to this last resplendence of great Cuban poetry and marginalized, alone, without a tribune, a press or a professorship, García Vega wrote a series of desolate and funny poems, without pity or vain commiseration. Closer to Samuel Beckett’s convulsions of pain and laughter than to any neo-baroque rhetoric in use, there we have extraordinary, extremely unique books that have been published lately: El oficio de perder, No mueras sin laberinto, Devastación del Hotel San Luis. At eighty-five García Vega publishes this book made up of two blocks –Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto–, in a hybrid genre of prose poem, a sketch of chronicles of the void, fragmentary reflection removed from all systems. To the marginality of the exiled poet, of the man stripped of his destiny without receiving anything in return, sharply disillusioned of any fantasy of redemption (for him, for the world), he now adds the resentment of old age, received like a jovial mask: “Sitting at the living room sofa, at five in the afternoon –I didn’t do anything else (if before five in the afternoon you can say I did anything).” Or this: “A sad reality of this Playa Albina where I live. Drums, knick-knacks. What finally makes no noise, even if one spends the day playing the drum.” Play the drum: write the poem. Nietzsche said: “Nihilism is a type of idleness.” But a form of humanism persists in desolation, in the uncomfortable laugh, in the histrionic astonishment of true pain. If you want to know what forms truly contemporary poetry seeks in our language it is impossible not to read Lorenzo García Vega.
Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto
Lorenzo García Vega
Ediciones La Palma, 2011
284 pages. 13 euros
{ Edgardo Dobry, Babelia, El País, 10 September 2011 }
9.09.2011
Divagación / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Divagation
I had waited for the spring equinox, the traditional day for the flowering of the daffodil.
The flower of metamorphosis had been honored in the annals of a just people with contrary luck.
I wanted to visit the relics of their home and advanced through the hollow of a dry river. From the languid branches of a thicket a few birds of bothersome warbling were taking flight.
I reclined near a decapitated statue. Its right hand gripped an ash tree spear, in accordance with its usage in the Iliad, and its round shield lay on the ground, shattered in pieces. On the socle read the name of an immortal artist.
I received the reward for my efforts and for my veneration of the vestiges of a simple age. A woman, a traveler in a car pulled by lions, invited me to her side and inspired a living confidence in me. Her image, with the same apparatus and decoration of the wild animals, adorned a hidden fountain and her name was that of the country during the most fortunate centuries.
She was pointing out for me the sidereal courses and speaking of the ulterior days, reserved for the bonanza. Her discourse had anticipated the arrival of night, with a phosphorescent canopy.
She altered at will the appearance of the circle and left me at the start of a fertile plain, where the beings offered themselves by the measure of man’s exiguity and the colors of the clouds were painted with the invalid tints of the matutinal twilight.
A horse with two white feet, of solar lineage, was dominating the territory and scanning it from a height. Its bronze voice and the deep sound of its steps were determining in the distance the oblique escape of the wolf with the cursed barking.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I had waited for the spring equinox, the traditional day for the flowering of the daffodil.
The flower of metamorphosis had been honored in the annals of a just people with contrary luck.
I wanted to visit the relics of their home and advanced through the hollow of a dry river. From the languid branches of a thicket a few birds of bothersome warbling were taking flight.
I reclined near a decapitated statue. Its right hand gripped an ash tree spear, in accordance with its usage in the Iliad, and its round shield lay on the ground, shattered in pieces. On the socle read the name of an immortal artist.
I received the reward for my efforts and for my veneration of the vestiges of a simple age. A woman, a traveler in a car pulled by lions, invited me to her side and inspired a living confidence in me. Her image, with the same apparatus and decoration of the wild animals, adorned a hidden fountain and her name was that of the country during the most fortunate centuries.
She was pointing out for me the sidereal courses and speaking of the ulterior days, reserved for the bonanza. Her discourse had anticipated the arrival of night, with a phosphorescent canopy.
She altered at will the appearance of the circle and left me at the start of a fertile plain, where the beings offered themselves by the measure of man’s exiguity and the colors of the clouds were painted with the invalid tints of the matutinal twilight.
A horse with two white feet, of solar lineage, was dominating the territory and scanning it from a height. Its bronze voice and the deep sound of its steps were determining in the distance the oblique escape of the wolf with the cursed barking.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
9.05.2011
En días de Cartago / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
In Days of Carthage
I
The sands and the sea extend indefinitely beneath the tower, nailed like a dart. The watchtower feels that the salty gust around it is mixed with the vapors from the desert. Without moving from its place, it dominates the opposite routes, from where Carthage is threatened by the Roman fleet and the cavalry of the unfaithful Numidians.
The beautiful women rise in a noisy court to await the trace of danger. Sofonisba stands out with her strange beauty, her green eyes and dark hair. She reproduces the spell of her mother, a captive purchased in a fabulous northern island.
From her love, when it is ingenuous, hangs the fate of the homeland. According to the servant of a sanguinary divinity, the most ancient of the priests, for whom nature is transparent and the time to come frank.
But Sofonisba’s love oscillates like a weightless balance. She alternately councils her people in favor of the enmity or support of Sifaz, and of course inverts the spirit of Masinisa, his rival.
The two most divergent men agree on the object of passion. Sifaz fights through the arm of his captains, and cultivates politics in retreat. Masinisa tests the exquisite iron of his weapons in the burning and uncertain battles.
II
Carthage is bending under the disaster. Scipio threatens it with a tightened blockade. The youth have fallen with pity in Spain, the amassed and ferocious country, from whose wars there is no return. The ships idle in the port, cowed by defeat, eluding the combat they sought covered in bunting and swift. The corpses of the vanquished abound in the Mediterranean.
Sofonisba departs in a numerous cavalcade toward Sifaz, whose astuteness the republic needs. The guardians say that Masinisa does not dare withing reach of the war machines, by which the city defends its district. For some time now they have not recognized him under the new attire of his helmet finished off with a ponytail and his cloak shaped by lion’s leather.
The concourse advances toward the ambush, under the direction of a perfidious guide. A hundred men assault it suddenly from the rubble of a village. The guardians resist clumsily, struggling against the frightened beasts. Masinisa abducts Sofonisba and, amid the spears that stab tremulously, mocks the the clamor of her maidens.
Scipio applauds his ally’s move, and obsequiously praises the captive, who responds with dissembling passion. In her presence he forgets the habit of severity, changes his energetic countenance, disregards the voices of the senate.
Masinisa is sure he will irremediably lose his captive, and defrauds his rival with poison. Sofonisba dies, painlessly and in love, on a warm afternoon. That same night, the singular tumult of the winds, as it mimics the steeds’ gallop, augurs the return of combat.
The shame of having ceded redoubles Scipio’s patriotism. In front of the victim’s corpse, he praises the fortune that definitively levels his path.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I
The sands and the sea extend indefinitely beneath the tower, nailed like a dart. The watchtower feels that the salty gust around it is mixed with the vapors from the desert. Without moving from its place, it dominates the opposite routes, from where Carthage is threatened by the Roman fleet and the cavalry of the unfaithful Numidians.
The beautiful women rise in a noisy court to await the trace of danger. Sofonisba stands out with her strange beauty, her green eyes and dark hair. She reproduces the spell of her mother, a captive purchased in a fabulous northern island.
From her love, when it is ingenuous, hangs the fate of the homeland. According to the servant of a sanguinary divinity, the most ancient of the priests, for whom nature is transparent and the time to come frank.
But Sofonisba’s love oscillates like a weightless balance. She alternately councils her people in favor of the enmity or support of Sifaz, and of course inverts the spirit of Masinisa, his rival.
The two most divergent men agree on the object of passion. Sifaz fights through the arm of his captains, and cultivates politics in retreat. Masinisa tests the exquisite iron of his weapons in the burning and uncertain battles.
II
Carthage is bending under the disaster. Scipio threatens it with a tightened blockade. The youth have fallen with pity in Spain, the amassed and ferocious country, from whose wars there is no return. The ships idle in the port, cowed by defeat, eluding the combat they sought covered in bunting and swift. The corpses of the vanquished abound in the Mediterranean.
Sofonisba departs in a numerous cavalcade toward Sifaz, whose astuteness the republic needs. The guardians say that Masinisa does not dare withing reach of the war machines, by which the city defends its district. For some time now they have not recognized him under the new attire of his helmet finished off with a ponytail and his cloak shaped by lion’s leather.
The concourse advances toward the ambush, under the direction of a perfidious guide. A hundred men assault it suddenly from the rubble of a village. The guardians resist clumsily, struggling against the frightened beasts. Masinisa abducts Sofonisba and, amid the spears that stab tremulously, mocks the the clamor of her maidens.
Scipio applauds his ally’s move, and obsequiously praises the captive, who responds with dissembling passion. In her presence he forgets the habit of severity, changes his energetic countenance, disregards the voices of the senate.
Masinisa is sure he will irremediably lose his captive, and defrauds his rival with poison. Sofonisba dies, painlessly and in love, on a warm afternoon. That same night, the singular tumult of the winds, as it mimics the steeds’ gallop, augurs the return of combat.
The shame of having ceded redoubles Scipio’s patriotism. In front of the victim’s corpse, he praises the fortune that definitively levels his path.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
9.04.2011
“Quisimos ser voluntariamente críticos” / Gabriel Payares
“We wanted to be voluntarily critical”
Thirty years have gone by since the appearance of the literary group Tráfico and its “Sí, manifiesto,” one of the country’s last and most cited poetic and collective shouts, arising from the heart of a society made drowsy by petroleum money during the eighties. Armando Rojas Guardia, founding poet of the group, looks back and evaluates what was undoubtedly a fundamental poetic experience in Venezuela’s literary development.
Most of the approximations of the Tráfico group coincide in seeing it as an attempt to restore a critical will of the intellectual toward power, which was lost during the years of petroleum boom. “To make more sincere the poet’s relationship with Venezuela,” stated the group’s manifesto. How do you perceive that need today?
Exactly, we emerged as a group in a historical context where that critical disposition in the face of power had become rather feeble. La República del Este represented that feebleness for us, that unnatural fraternity of a certain left with Miraflores Palace. It was the symbol of everything we didn’t want for the intellectual, for the writer and, specifically, for the poet. Seen retrospectively, however, the manifesto is saturated with a messianic voluntarism. We postulated that the poet had to go out into the street and create, write and publish a type of poetry that would approximate the average Venezuelan, and we were guilty of overlooking the fact that the divorce between poetry and the majority of Venezuelans isn’t the fault of poets, but rather obeys structural causes of a political, social, cultural and economic type. So, the idea that the poet had to go out to the ghetto, to the army base, to the factory, to the public plaza, to the parks, today sound to me like that messianic voluntarism, as if the qualitative change represented by a new perception of the poetic phenomenon and the role of the poet in society depended on the exclusive will of poets.
So Black Friday and the debacle in Venezuelan democracy that began with it meant the confirmation of Tráfico’s complaints?
Of course. We were talking about the petroleum-based democracy, and in a certain way we were echoing what Arturo Uslar Pietri called “Balthazar’s feast,” that dance of the millions that materialized in the “That’s cheap, gimme two” attitude of the Miami-centric Venezuela and the urban middle class. Black Friday came to be the sign of alarm that the decadence had begun, that the feast, if it hadn’t ended, was about to end. We wanted to speak consciously and voluntarily from the urban middle class, but without identifying ourselves with the majority of their stereotypes and with a great deal of their mental universe. We wanted to be voluntarily critical regarding those stereotypes and that mental universe.
Do you think the “critical realism” Tráfico proposed is something outdated, or do your still consider it a necessary path in Venezuelan poetry?
Each thematic focus in poetry involves its own procedures. When I wrote La nada vigilante I faced an intra-psychic problem for whose treatment the procedures postulated by the manifesto were of no use to me. I wanted to write about a psychic block, I wanted to write the poem of the impossible poem, I wanted to write about the impossibility of writing. That involved a stylistic procedure that didn’t have anything to do with Tráfico. The ontologizing psychology of Rafael Cadenas, Juan Sánchez Peláez’s critique of the world’s apparent reality by means of the primordial images of poetic dream or the philosophical-aesthetic preoccupations of Alfredo Silva Estrada, for example, require their own stylistic procedures that have nothing to do with what is postulated in the manifesto. In that sense, the wager for critical realism seems valid as an option to choose; the manifesto erected it as the only one possible and in that sense it’s a dogmatic and fanatical affirmation. Miguel Márquez has just made, in his latest book, Poemas de la Independencia y del escarnio, a stylistic experiment that hadn’t ever been done before in Venezuela and for which I can only remember as an antecedent a book by Ernesto Cardenal, El estrecho dudoso. Miguel takes historical texts and chronicles from the period of Independence and subjects them to a musical rhythmic treatment that places them in new dimensions, in the same manner as Cardenal takes some texts from the chroniclers of the West Indies: Fernández de Oviedo, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Bartolomé de las Casas, and obtains from them a distinctly poetic value. This experiment is inscribed within a type of critical realism that’s perfectly valid as an option, but not as the only legitimate one. In poetry, as in literature and social life, the plural game of options must have the final word.
So, did the experience of Tráfico stray in its subsequent writing journey?
Well, Yolanda Pantin was telling me a few weeks ago over the phone that all the poetry those of us from Tráfico make at this moment has nothing to do with what we postulated in the manifesto, except, of course, Miguel’s. I’m not sure that’s true. Igor Barreto’s poetry is one that maintains a surprising fidelity, in its procedures and in its style, to what was pointed out in the manifesto. I myself couldn’t have written a poem like “La desnudez del loco” without having passed through Tráfico. The collage technique I learned in Solentiname studying Pound –because every afternoon after five hours of manual labor in Solentiname I would devote myself to studying the collage technique Pound uses in The Cantos, or that T.S. Eliot uses in “The Waste Land,” or that Robert Lowell uses in his poetry–, I later applied to some of what I consider to be my best poetic texts. The same thing happens with the revaluing, which we claimed, of narrativity and in consequence of the anecdote; facing the mostly abstract, quintessential and impersonal poetry that was being written and published in the country, we felt that one of the specific means of bringing back to Venezuelan poetry an existentialism and committed and explicit subjectivity consisted in returning to narrativity, preferably autobiographical. Although it’s a poem written after Tráfico had already disappeared, “Retén judicial,” that text of mine included in Patria y otros poemas, carries the narrative imprint of the group’s poetry. We always acknowledged a slender but true tradition in what we were proposing at the time: the poetry of Víctor Valera Mora and the one represented in Copa de huesos by Caupolicán Ovalles and, to a degree, also in Oh smog and Ciudadanos sin fin by Juan Calzadilla. Likewise, we felt an affinity for the Alejandro Oliveros of El sonido de la casa, for Blas Perozo Naveda, William Osuna and the more narrative poems of Enrique Hernández-D'Jesús. As for Latin American poetry in general, we perceived ourselves as being very close to creators like Ernesto Cardenal, José Coronel Urtecho, Juan Gelman, Antonio Cisneros, Rodolfo Hinostroza, Mario Rivero, Jotamario Arbeláez, Luis Rogelio Noguera: all of them elaborate a poetry with room for local dialects, first names, colloquial turns, conversational diction, the incorporation of conventionally non-poetic elements in lyrical discourse, the first person singular, aesthetically calculated prose, the narrative. In the same way, we recognized the teaching represented by the so-called Spanish “poetry of experience,” whose greatest exponent was Jaime Gil de Biedma.
And what happened, as you see it, to the legacy of Tráfico in the subsequent collectives and poetic tendencies?
I’ve been leading poetry workshops on a weekly basis for eight years, I’m currently teaching three of them at once and I’m in touch with a good part of what young poets write and publish in the country. I wouldn’t say that Tráfico constitutes the fundamental reference point in the work of these poets; but it’s undoubtedly an important one in their mental map. In our effort to reconnect the poet with the audience, and in that sense to give poetry a new social dimension, in Tráfico we wanted to renovate readings. The poetry reading is today a currency widely in use, something that didn’t happen in the beginning of the eighties, when it was looked down upon, considered something for patron saint festivals, for high school cultural events and it was associated with declamatory affectation; so that we proposed to resuscitate that practice for the purpose of a new connection for the poet with the audience. Another undeniable conquest by Tráfico was its insistence on a poetry that would rescue the historical and the quotidian, the collective macro-history and the individual and existential micro-history of man in his daily life. We felt that the poetic orb within modern poetry where these elements were most explicitly displayed was that of American poetry. And if today poets venture into those themes, and even more if people are studying American poetry with new eyes, all that is due to Tráfico. Collections of excellent aesthetic quality such as Harry Almela’s La patria forajida and Armadura de piedra by Edda Armas, in which the country’s historical present stirs, I don’t think these are conceivable without the experience of Tráfico having acted on their creators at least as a mental reference point. And if we focus on what the youngest ones are writing, the extraordinary homoerotic poetry of Alejandro Castro, his irreverent ease, his wise and subversive irony, within which the urban atmosphere is a tacit but also an overwhelming presence, this isn’t explainable without the antecedent of Tráfico. The same can be said of the political and urban code in the marvelous poem called “Sexto mandamiento,” by Leonardo González Alcalá.
{ Gabriel Payares, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 9 July 2011 }
Thirty years have gone by since the appearance of the literary group Tráfico and its “Sí, manifiesto,” one of the country’s last and most cited poetic and collective shouts, arising from the heart of a society made drowsy by petroleum money during the eighties. Armando Rojas Guardia, founding poet of the group, looks back and evaluates what was undoubtedly a fundamental poetic experience in Venezuela’s literary development.
Most of the approximations of the Tráfico group coincide in seeing it as an attempt to restore a critical will of the intellectual toward power, which was lost during the years of petroleum boom. “To make more sincere the poet’s relationship with Venezuela,” stated the group’s manifesto. How do you perceive that need today?
Exactly, we emerged as a group in a historical context where that critical disposition in the face of power had become rather feeble. La República del Este represented that feebleness for us, that unnatural fraternity of a certain left with Miraflores Palace. It was the symbol of everything we didn’t want for the intellectual, for the writer and, specifically, for the poet. Seen retrospectively, however, the manifesto is saturated with a messianic voluntarism. We postulated that the poet had to go out into the street and create, write and publish a type of poetry that would approximate the average Venezuelan, and we were guilty of overlooking the fact that the divorce between poetry and the majority of Venezuelans isn’t the fault of poets, but rather obeys structural causes of a political, social, cultural and economic type. So, the idea that the poet had to go out to the ghetto, to the army base, to the factory, to the public plaza, to the parks, today sound to me like that messianic voluntarism, as if the qualitative change represented by a new perception of the poetic phenomenon and the role of the poet in society depended on the exclusive will of poets.
So Black Friday and the debacle in Venezuelan democracy that began with it meant the confirmation of Tráfico’s complaints?
Of course. We were talking about the petroleum-based democracy, and in a certain way we were echoing what Arturo Uslar Pietri called “Balthazar’s feast,” that dance of the millions that materialized in the “That’s cheap, gimme two” attitude of the Miami-centric Venezuela and the urban middle class. Black Friday came to be the sign of alarm that the decadence had begun, that the feast, if it hadn’t ended, was about to end. We wanted to speak consciously and voluntarily from the urban middle class, but without identifying ourselves with the majority of their stereotypes and with a great deal of their mental universe. We wanted to be voluntarily critical regarding those stereotypes and that mental universe.
Do you think the “critical realism” Tráfico proposed is something outdated, or do your still consider it a necessary path in Venezuelan poetry?
Each thematic focus in poetry involves its own procedures. When I wrote La nada vigilante I faced an intra-psychic problem for whose treatment the procedures postulated by the manifesto were of no use to me. I wanted to write about a psychic block, I wanted to write the poem of the impossible poem, I wanted to write about the impossibility of writing. That involved a stylistic procedure that didn’t have anything to do with Tráfico. The ontologizing psychology of Rafael Cadenas, Juan Sánchez Peláez’s critique of the world’s apparent reality by means of the primordial images of poetic dream or the philosophical-aesthetic preoccupations of Alfredo Silva Estrada, for example, require their own stylistic procedures that have nothing to do with what is postulated in the manifesto. In that sense, the wager for critical realism seems valid as an option to choose; the manifesto erected it as the only one possible and in that sense it’s a dogmatic and fanatical affirmation. Miguel Márquez has just made, in his latest book, Poemas de la Independencia y del escarnio, a stylistic experiment that hadn’t ever been done before in Venezuela and for which I can only remember as an antecedent a book by Ernesto Cardenal, El estrecho dudoso. Miguel takes historical texts and chronicles from the period of Independence and subjects them to a musical rhythmic treatment that places them in new dimensions, in the same manner as Cardenal takes some texts from the chroniclers of the West Indies: Fernández de Oviedo, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Bartolomé de las Casas, and obtains from them a distinctly poetic value. This experiment is inscribed within a type of critical realism that’s perfectly valid as an option, but not as the only legitimate one. In poetry, as in literature and social life, the plural game of options must have the final word.
So, did the experience of Tráfico stray in its subsequent writing journey?
Well, Yolanda Pantin was telling me a few weeks ago over the phone that all the poetry those of us from Tráfico make at this moment has nothing to do with what we postulated in the manifesto, except, of course, Miguel’s. I’m not sure that’s true. Igor Barreto’s poetry is one that maintains a surprising fidelity, in its procedures and in its style, to what was pointed out in the manifesto. I myself couldn’t have written a poem like “La desnudez del loco” without having passed through Tráfico. The collage technique I learned in Solentiname studying Pound –because every afternoon after five hours of manual labor in Solentiname I would devote myself to studying the collage technique Pound uses in The Cantos, or that T.S. Eliot uses in “The Waste Land,” or that Robert Lowell uses in his poetry–, I later applied to some of what I consider to be my best poetic texts. The same thing happens with the revaluing, which we claimed, of narrativity and in consequence of the anecdote; facing the mostly abstract, quintessential and impersonal poetry that was being written and published in the country, we felt that one of the specific means of bringing back to Venezuelan poetry an existentialism and committed and explicit subjectivity consisted in returning to narrativity, preferably autobiographical. Although it’s a poem written after Tráfico had already disappeared, “Retén judicial,” that text of mine included in Patria y otros poemas, carries the narrative imprint of the group’s poetry. We always acknowledged a slender but true tradition in what we were proposing at the time: the poetry of Víctor Valera Mora and the one represented in Copa de huesos by Caupolicán Ovalles and, to a degree, also in Oh smog and Ciudadanos sin fin by Juan Calzadilla. Likewise, we felt an affinity for the Alejandro Oliveros of El sonido de la casa, for Blas Perozo Naveda, William Osuna and the more narrative poems of Enrique Hernández-D'Jesús. As for Latin American poetry in general, we perceived ourselves as being very close to creators like Ernesto Cardenal, José Coronel Urtecho, Juan Gelman, Antonio Cisneros, Rodolfo Hinostroza, Mario Rivero, Jotamario Arbeláez, Luis Rogelio Noguera: all of them elaborate a poetry with room for local dialects, first names, colloquial turns, conversational diction, the incorporation of conventionally non-poetic elements in lyrical discourse, the first person singular, aesthetically calculated prose, the narrative. In the same way, we recognized the teaching represented by the so-called Spanish “poetry of experience,” whose greatest exponent was Jaime Gil de Biedma.
And what happened, as you see it, to the legacy of Tráfico in the subsequent collectives and poetic tendencies?
I’ve been leading poetry workshops on a weekly basis for eight years, I’m currently teaching three of them at once and I’m in touch with a good part of what young poets write and publish in the country. I wouldn’t say that Tráfico constitutes the fundamental reference point in the work of these poets; but it’s undoubtedly an important one in their mental map. In our effort to reconnect the poet with the audience, and in that sense to give poetry a new social dimension, in Tráfico we wanted to renovate readings. The poetry reading is today a currency widely in use, something that didn’t happen in the beginning of the eighties, when it was looked down upon, considered something for patron saint festivals, for high school cultural events and it was associated with declamatory affectation; so that we proposed to resuscitate that practice for the purpose of a new connection for the poet with the audience. Another undeniable conquest by Tráfico was its insistence on a poetry that would rescue the historical and the quotidian, the collective macro-history and the individual and existential micro-history of man in his daily life. We felt that the poetic orb within modern poetry where these elements were most explicitly displayed was that of American poetry. And if today poets venture into those themes, and even more if people are studying American poetry with new eyes, all that is due to Tráfico. Collections of excellent aesthetic quality such as Harry Almela’s La patria forajida and Armadura de piedra by Edda Armas, in which the country’s historical present stirs, I don’t think these are conceivable without the experience of Tráfico having acted on their creators at least as a mental reference point. And if we focus on what the youngest ones are writing, the extraordinary homoerotic poetry of Alejandro Castro, his irreverent ease, his wise and subversive irony, within which the urban atmosphere is a tacit but also an overwhelming presence, this isn’t explainable without the antecedent of Tráfico. The same can be said of the political and urban code in the marvelous poem called “Sexto mandamiento,” by Leonardo González Alcalá.
{ Gabriel Payares, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 9 July 2011 }
9.02.2011
Ante “la diosa ambarina” / Antonio Puente
Facing “the Amber Goddess”
“I already knew that coming to Europe this time of year wouldn’t guarantee anything,” he said to break the ice, glancing at the untimely whirlwind outside the large window of his humble room in Madrid. “Well, like any other time of year and any other place,” he concluded, with his proverbial causticity, the fist at the mouth of great shy people and, as in a cubist frame, on his lean Indian face, his piercing and astonished obsidian eyes. Emilio Adolfo Westphalen –whose death occurred a decade ago on August 17th, and his birth a hundred years ago in July– at the time was already more than an octogenarian; but only the publication, a few years ago, of his brief collected poems, Bajo las zarpas de la quimera (Alianza, 1991) –a clinical title, like the eye of his poetics, since it speaks simultaneously of finding oneself under the claws of the chimera and of how depressed one emerges from it– would make him emerge from his condition of enormous secret poet.
After his resplendent books of youth, Las ínsulas extrañas (1933) and Abolición de la muerte (1935), surreal and magmatic, he kept silence for more than forty years, to come back with a laconic and hermetic poetry by which to register the subsidiary character –no more than an “astonished somnambulist” subjected to the whims of the “the amber goddess”– granted by the poet’s task. A succession of epitaphs, ludic and incredulous, chiseled by a senile boy, he composes his books of old age –above all Belleza de una espada clavada en la lengua (1980) and Ha vuelto la Diosa Ambarina (1988)–; at times, as expressive as the mortal simile of this sudden railroad stop: “The train has stopped in the opaque and echoless silence of the anonymous night. It is the arrival at the terminus –there will be no resumption of agitation, noise or anxiety.” And, on occasion, with a point of redemption regarding his complete skepticism and condolence regarding human relations: “Irreconcilably linked / At the edge of desperation / Exchanging business cards.”
Why the great analogical blackout in the intermittence of his poetry? “I would say it left in a fortuitous manner because of perhaps necessary circumstances, and it reappeared afterward in a necessary manner because of fortuitous circumstances,” he answered my question, incorrigible, while, outside, the rain has remitted from the overflow that he himself tended to use in the poetry of his youth, and acquired the sober preventative rhythm he gives it in his old age; thus, in “Error de cálculo”: “The sea has slipped in the poem as in its cave or natural shelter without taking into account the difference of proportions. When the seams give in under the weight, where will all the accumulated bluegreen end up draining?” A retaining wall and, along the way, an affectionate and melancholic palinode regarding the delusions of grandeur of the youthful poet, are promoted by his later poetry. Tightens the saddlebags of he who cannot be anything more than a humble carrier of a “pocket apocalypse”; whose task does not go beyond “underlining emptiness.” This is why he abhored (at that point he did speak at length, when it stopped raining and the summer sun filtered through his bathrobe) the “kettle drums of rhetoric,” and sustained that “erudition is the poet’s main enemy.”
Facing poetry’s exclusive domain, the poet prays: “I am not –I will never be anything but an astonished somnambulist facing the dreadful Beauty of the Amber Goddess.
Nothing exists –nothing can exist beyond the Amber Goddess and her Beauty of a dazzling and lethal Medusa.” What’s more, the poem always comes up short when it faces that omnipotence of poetry: “What might the poem be if not a castle demolished before it is erected / Innocuous work of the diligent scribe or poetaster?”
In the beauty of the Amber Goddess (supreme face of Fate) the nimbus of death and the judgment of the woman-child coincide. The old poet from Lima confesses: “Sudden and irresistible desire to bite juicy coralline damp lips –to deliberately sink (but strongly –but implacably) my teeth in a half opened mouth (...) Hallucinating rite –but an instant more lived than any image plucked from oblivion.” And he soon notices that amber has appeared with the spontaneity of a gang of adolescents “with nubile bodies and minuscule breasts,” who, by merely jumping rope, take him to the agonized awareness: “Why would it always be tender girls who would mark him with the terrible iron of amorous anguish and dissatisfaction?” In compensation, Westphalen sends into the wind the most camouflaged and imperishable epitaph one might imagine: “To aspire to become those fallen leaves that burn in the pupils of certain mulatto girls.”
Antonio Puente (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1961) is a writer, journalist and literary critic. His latest publications are the poetry collections Agua por señas and Sofá de arena (Ediciones Idea).
{ Antonio Puente, Babelia, El País, 27 August 2011 }
“I already knew that coming to Europe this time of year wouldn’t guarantee anything,” he said to break the ice, glancing at the untimely whirlwind outside the large window of his humble room in Madrid. “Well, like any other time of year and any other place,” he concluded, with his proverbial causticity, the fist at the mouth of great shy people and, as in a cubist frame, on his lean Indian face, his piercing and astonished obsidian eyes. Emilio Adolfo Westphalen –whose death occurred a decade ago on August 17th, and his birth a hundred years ago in July– at the time was already more than an octogenarian; but only the publication, a few years ago, of his brief collected poems, Bajo las zarpas de la quimera (Alianza, 1991) –a clinical title, like the eye of his poetics, since it speaks simultaneously of finding oneself under the claws of the chimera and of how depressed one emerges from it– would make him emerge from his condition of enormous secret poet.
After his resplendent books of youth, Las ínsulas extrañas (1933) and Abolición de la muerte (1935), surreal and magmatic, he kept silence for more than forty years, to come back with a laconic and hermetic poetry by which to register the subsidiary character –no more than an “astonished somnambulist” subjected to the whims of the “the amber goddess”– granted by the poet’s task. A succession of epitaphs, ludic and incredulous, chiseled by a senile boy, he composes his books of old age –above all Belleza de una espada clavada en la lengua (1980) and Ha vuelto la Diosa Ambarina (1988)–; at times, as expressive as the mortal simile of this sudden railroad stop: “The train has stopped in the opaque and echoless silence of the anonymous night. It is the arrival at the terminus –there will be no resumption of agitation, noise or anxiety.” And, on occasion, with a point of redemption regarding his complete skepticism and condolence regarding human relations: “Irreconcilably linked / At the edge of desperation / Exchanging business cards.”
Why the great analogical blackout in the intermittence of his poetry? “I would say it left in a fortuitous manner because of perhaps necessary circumstances, and it reappeared afterward in a necessary manner because of fortuitous circumstances,” he answered my question, incorrigible, while, outside, the rain has remitted from the overflow that he himself tended to use in the poetry of his youth, and acquired the sober preventative rhythm he gives it in his old age; thus, in “Error de cálculo”: “The sea has slipped in the poem as in its cave or natural shelter without taking into account the difference of proportions. When the seams give in under the weight, where will all the accumulated bluegreen end up draining?” A retaining wall and, along the way, an affectionate and melancholic palinode regarding the delusions of grandeur of the youthful poet, are promoted by his later poetry. Tightens the saddlebags of he who cannot be anything more than a humble carrier of a “pocket apocalypse”; whose task does not go beyond “underlining emptiness.” This is why he abhored (at that point he did speak at length, when it stopped raining and the summer sun filtered through his bathrobe) the “kettle drums of rhetoric,” and sustained that “erudition is the poet’s main enemy.”
Facing poetry’s exclusive domain, the poet prays: “I am not –I will never be anything but an astonished somnambulist facing the dreadful Beauty of the Amber Goddess.
Nothing exists –nothing can exist beyond the Amber Goddess and her Beauty of a dazzling and lethal Medusa.” What’s more, the poem always comes up short when it faces that omnipotence of poetry: “What might the poem be if not a castle demolished before it is erected / Innocuous work of the diligent scribe or poetaster?”
In the beauty of the Amber Goddess (supreme face of Fate) the nimbus of death and the judgment of the woman-child coincide. The old poet from Lima confesses: “Sudden and irresistible desire to bite juicy coralline damp lips –to deliberately sink (but strongly –but implacably) my teeth in a half opened mouth (...) Hallucinating rite –but an instant more lived than any image plucked from oblivion.” And he soon notices that amber has appeared with the spontaneity of a gang of adolescents “with nubile bodies and minuscule breasts,” who, by merely jumping rope, take him to the agonized awareness: “Why would it always be tender girls who would mark him with the terrible iron of amorous anguish and dissatisfaction?” In compensation, Westphalen sends into the wind the most camouflaged and imperishable epitaph one might imagine: “To aspire to become those fallen leaves that burn in the pupils of certain mulatto girls.”
Antonio Puente (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1961) is a writer, journalist and literary critic. His latest publications are the poetry collections Agua por señas and Sofá de arena (Ediciones Idea).
{ Antonio Puente, Babelia, El País, 27 August 2011 }
9.01.2011
Por la pradera diminuta... / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen
Through the minute prairie...
Through the minute prairie of a voice floating in the airs
With the easy weight of the planets worn by the flowers
Amid the ensigns of the days uprooted and wandering
On a succession of seas marvelously cultivated
With the song of the birds as bed and trench of the barques
And the tail of the peacock as nimbus of the smallest things
The transparent shells the porcelain seaweed
The lopped off fingers of children and the born thimbles
Under the crust of mushrooms in the mud flats
In the tangled hair of a girl in the milky way
In the heart itself of music stepping
With the sun against our chests deepening
Letting blood run like a good river
Because the one I receive and the one you carry are the same
And the same thickets resound in our screams
And the same doves rest on our eyes
And the same flutes traverse us to establish our domain
Turning the moons over villages
And the serpents over forests
Bringing the sky over our venture
Its foam splashing our beaches
The feverish trees continuing their life in our veins
The poplar groves leaning to the compass of our hearts
You as the lagoon and me as the eye
That one and the other interpenetrate each other
So the tree and the breeze so the dream and the world
Taking depth from the night and from the day extension
To what caves fleeing against so much splendor
Day that never moves sky that walks for us
Rivers that don’t know how to wound and barques that crowd
our chests
The mouths float like zodiac signs
The arms cross like flowers on water
The foreheads follow the currents and the eyes separate
nothing
It is the flaming glory that rests in our bodies
Lifting over the atrocious battle of darkness and light
The ensign of the holy company and the still glances
It is glory fallen at our feet
It is triumph wounded like a subterranean twilight
Changing seasons in the core of the quicksilver
Like a rose drowned amid our arms
Or like the sea being born from your lips
Abolición de la muerte (1935)
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }
Through the minute prairie of a voice floating in the airs
With the easy weight of the planets worn by the flowers
Amid the ensigns of the days uprooted and wandering
On a succession of seas marvelously cultivated
With the song of the birds as bed and trench of the barques
And the tail of the peacock as nimbus of the smallest things
The transparent shells the porcelain seaweed
The lopped off fingers of children and the born thimbles
Under the crust of mushrooms in the mud flats
In the tangled hair of a girl in the milky way
In the heart itself of music stepping
With the sun against our chests deepening
Letting blood run like a good river
Because the one I receive and the one you carry are the same
And the same thickets resound in our screams
And the same doves rest on our eyes
And the same flutes traverse us to establish our domain
Turning the moons over villages
And the serpents over forests
Bringing the sky over our venture
Its foam splashing our beaches
The feverish trees continuing their life in our veins
The poplar groves leaning to the compass of our hearts
You as the lagoon and me as the eye
That one and the other interpenetrate each other
So the tree and the breeze so the dream and the world
Taking depth from the night and from the day extension
To what caves fleeing against so much splendor
Day that never moves sky that walks for us
Rivers that don’t know how to wound and barques that crowd
our chests
The mouths float like zodiac signs
The arms cross like flowers on water
The foreheads follow the currents and the eyes separate
nothing
It is the flaming glory that rests in our bodies
Lifting over the atrocious battle of darkness and light
The ensign of the holy company and the still glances
It is glory fallen at our feet
It is triumph wounded like a subterranean twilight
Changing seasons in the core of the quicksilver
Like a rose drowned amid our arms
Or like the sea being born from your lips
Abolición de la muerte (1935)
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }
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