Siboney
The light conceals you, but your sickly lineage has measure and a corporeal nature: make pain, now, make sangria of insides. Move your soul to the least modest side and it will be nighttime and you will be outside, where no one observes you, under the light, this light.
La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.28.2011
11.27.2011
Introduction for Cedar Sigo at Minor American
In the Preface to his 2003 novel The Mask of the Beggar, the Guyanese writer Wilson Harris outlines his methods:
“The artist or author does not have absolute control of his creations but is subject to being created afresh by the characters (or character-masks) he creates. In this way there is no final creation since finality is ceaselessly partial and subject to profoundest alterations.
The artist experiences an excitement, troubling and ecstatic, as he finds himself launched on pathways he never expected to travel and on which his intuition is aroused afresh.”
Cedar Sigo is both the creator and a participant of the “troubling and ecstatic” adventures we find in his verse. His books enact an unpredictable tension between control and intuition. They seek an awareness of how the poem might take root and unfold its charm, somewhere in the process of reading & writing. A few of the “character-masks” in his strange new book have accompanied him for over a decade, many of them first appearing in hand-crafted, semi-secret broadsides and chapbooks, others in private, typewritten letters. Reading his books, we can note how his poems have built up a repertoire of words and images that are distinctly his own. These familiar presences serve as signposts for the reader, though they remain unsettled. Some of these shades that inhabit his poetry include: hotels, blood, rooms, typewriters, windows, antique or rare editions, the city (as an event & organism), music and the night.
What we might hear tonight is a type of music played on vinyl. It actually begins with pause in the room when someone gets up to select the right record, stopping to admire its sleeve. We wait for the needle to drop, the orphic pulse of a figure leaning over an old machine, broadcasting. Please welcome Cedar Sigo.
(For the reading by Cedar Sigo & Ken Taylor at the Minor American reading series on 19 October 2011, Duke University, Durham, NC)
“The artist or author does not have absolute control of his creations but is subject to being created afresh by the characters (or character-masks) he creates. In this way there is no final creation since finality is ceaselessly partial and subject to profoundest alterations.
The artist experiences an excitement, troubling and ecstatic, as he finds himself launched on pathways he never expected to travel and on which his intuition is aroused afresh.”
Cedar Sigo is both the creator and a participant of the “troubling and ecstatic” adventures we find in his verse. His books enact an unpredictable tension between control and intuition. They seek an awareness of how the poem might take root and unfold its charm, somewhere in the process of reading & writing. A few of the “character-masks” in his strange new book have accompanied him for over a decade, many of them first appearing in hand-crafted, semi-secret broadsides and chapbooks, others in private, typewritten letters. Reading his books, we can note how his poems have built up a repertoire of words and images that are distinctly his own. These familiar presences serve as signposts for the reader, though they remain unsettled. Some of these shades that inhabit his poetry include: hotels, blood, rooms, typewriters, windows, antique or rare editions, the city (as an event & organism), music and the night.
What we might hear tonight is a type of music played on vinyl. It actually begins with pause in the room when someone gets up to select the right record, stopping to admire its sleeve. We wait for the needle to drop, the orphic pulse of a figure leaning over an old machine, broadcasting. Please welcome Cedar Sigo.
(For the reading by Cedar Sigo & Ken Taylor at the Minor American reading series on 19 October 2011, Duke University, Durham, NC)
11.26.2011
Poética / Miguel James
Poetics
Let’s say
that poetry
is writing
and speaking
words
and pretty things
The rest
Is Prose
And Tragedy.
A las diosas del mar (1999)
{ Miguel James, Mi novia Ítala come flores y otras novias, Mérida: Ediciones Mucuglifo, 2007 }
Let’s say
that poetry
is writing
and speaking
words
and pretty things
The rest
Is Prose
And Tragedy.
A las diosas del mar (1999)
{ Miguel James, Mi novia Ítala come flores y otras novias, Mérida: Ediciones Mucuglifo, 2007 }
11.21.2011
Contra la policía / Miguel James
Against the Police
My entire Oeuvre is against the police
If I write a Love poem it’s against the police
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police
And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police
I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police
All my prose is against the police
My entire Oeuvre
Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against the police.
Kentakes, poemas para la reina y otras obras maestras (2003)
{ Miguel James, Mi novia Ítala come flores y otras novias, Mérida: Ediciones Mucuglifo, 2007 }
My entire Oeuvre is against the police
If I write a Love poem it’s against the police
And if I sing the nakedness of bodies I sing against the police
And if I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police
If I speak wildly in my poems I speak against the police
And if I manage to create a poem it’s against the police
I haven’t written a single word, a verse, a stanza that isn’t against the police
All my prose is against the police
My entire Oeuvre
Including this poem
My whole Oeuvre
Is against the police.
Kentakes, poemas para la reina y otras obras maestras (2003)
{ Miguel James, Mi novia Ítala come flores y otras novias, Mérida: Ediciones Mucuglifo, 2007 }
11.20.2011
Las otras ruinas circulares / Gabriel Payares
The Other Circular Ruins
It’s always a discomfort to speak in generational terms: whoever does it runs the risk of raising a banner in the name of many. Which is why in the following lines I’ll try, in any case, to speak from a perspective that’s my own, singular and personal. I think that those of us who were born in the eighties were fated to begin writing surrounded mostly by ruins: those of a formal educational system, for example, that a long time ago lost its bearings and collapsed, in a frank and open demonstration of the scant interest Venezuelans take in the construction of their future generations; but also the ruins of a culture of citizenship, manifested in the post-apocalyptic aspect of our unloved cities, in our shameful political behavior or in the brutal quota of violence that day by day desensitizes us to death and suffering. A country in ruins, then, to reiterate the journalistic cliché. I’m afraid this won’t be a very hopeful reading.
But it’s not my intention to repeat here what everyone knows, rather to own that metaphor for a while: ruins are, at once, remembrance of an ancient project and totem of a future desire, and that is precisely the idea that governs our particular imaginary of home: since every moment in the past was always better, we’ve chosen to wait for it to magically repeat itself; we are the debtors of Bolívar’s cadaver, waiting for the instant when he’ll rise from his bicentennial tomb and rescue us. The term “ruin,” [ruina] on the other hand, contains the word “contemptible” [ruin], whose most obvious meaning is linked to a state of moral degradation, of evil, of vileness. And it isn’t accidental: our crisis, it has already been said quite frequently, is a profound moral crisis, which both film and literature have tried to echo, maybe not in the most effective manner. It’s enough to recall the films of the nineties, incapable of overcoming their surprise at the country’s growing marginal communities, or the literary production of more or less the same era, half obsessed with finding answers in national historical references, as in that branch of fiction that Luz Marina Rivas has baptized as “intrahistoric,” and likewise with the idea of reporting an increasingly coarse reality, perhaps as a strategy to digest it: to make it fit within a narrative, to summarize it, quantify it.
Whatever the case, the conclusion this leads to was already announced to us by the great Juan Liscano, when he affirmed that our creators have always succumbed to an imperative desire for realism, for an artist’s commitment to his corresponding historical moment, in frank detriment however of the deployment of his inner worlds. The exercise of fiction, it seems, constitutes in our country a form of cultured referentiality, and in obedience, quite often, to a political mandate that assumes the writer’s role is to raise the awareness of the masses, to “open their eyes” to reality, as if people were sleeping and expectant, waiting for an illuminated figure to point the way for them or speak as their representative. Seen in this manner, it is the literary equivalent of populism, whose most recent evolution proposes one write for a “basic” reader, one who is “down to earth” and “average,” like a reading for invalids, and which in many cases is merely an excuse to hide the scarce poetic projection of the whoever is writing. I think one should distrust whoever proposes a decaffeinated literature for vacations.
The critic Carlos Sandoval critiqued something similar in a recent edition of the Bienal Mariano Picón Salas prize, when he referred to the predominance, in our 21st century fiction, of proposals that are incapable of “...overcoming the anecdotal and descriptive.” Our fictional muscle, it seems, continues to be just as weak as before, despite the fact that the unbearable social crisis, to which a political crisis has been added, already has more popular figures that concern themselves with it, such as journalists and data analysts, political scientists or pollsters, and that historical discourse, which today resounds louder than ever, remains a territory for scholars of the field and historians. So what then is the role, the place of the writer today?
There’s more than one answer. For some it’s found under the lights and cameras, in hundreds of photos tagged on Facebook, new stars of the naked king, of the writer who never writes, or in interminable lists of blogs and web pages of varied and often contradictory poetic value. For others it’s found anchored in the idea of the city, in the description of urban surroundings like postmodern chroniclers of the Indies, determined to combat the worn out rural and epic discourse of the independence era with a paradoxical exaltation of our impoverished modernity. And for a very few the writer’s place is in the dark, struggling with language in order to attempt to create a world of one’s own, an “inner meadow” –as the cartoon character Miguelito by Quino would say– that will allow him to endure (or not) Venezuela’s crushing and autonomous reality. “More fiction and less realism” was also the diagnosis of the fiction writer from Trujillo Carolina Lozada, in a recent interview, worried about the myopia with which we seem to contemplate the task of writing, a myopia that gets worse with the deficit of specialized editors in the country and which moreover forgets that the commitment of every writer is first to fiction, to poetry, to finding the answers to life in a language that is his own and autonomous, as free as possible yet believable, by which I mean, with the production of keys that can interpret not only the country and the world, but also the self: the writer’s commitment should be profoundly subjective, and it should be a priority in his life.
Maybe for thinking in this manner it’s been my role to insist, maybe foolishly, stubbornly, stupidly even, in mistrusting the excessive celebratory eagerness to which we tend to be so disposed. The recent multiplication of young voices willing to enter into the field of writing should no doubt make us happy, but not so much as to affirm the existence of a boom, or much less of a golden age for our fiction, irresponsible affirmations that simply raise the bar beyond reach, sentencing us later to settling with what exists, since as our invisible friends say, “this is what we got.” A disservice, in my opinion, for those of us who have the hope of being read, and which ends up being more painful today, in the light of the implacable recession we suffer in the editorial world. Where are they now, the voices who sang about our unstoppable advance, our golden age, our editorial flowering? It ends up being ironic, what’s more, that we celebrate a realist literature without having our feet firmly on the ground, ignoring the fact that in literary matters, one, two or three books published are little more than the beginning of a career, and not the cusp and much less the goal, and that complacency, short cuts and immediacy, conditions so in tune with our sad idiosyncrasy, once again play, just as they do in other realms of experience, openly against us. Moral: we shouldn’t want to resuscitate, like voodoo priests, that better past that our abundant ruins accuse. The road lies, instead, in the demanding maturation of our incipient talents and excellence: if we never learned how to sow our petroleum, at least we should learn to cultivate patience. Cadenas has said it: “culture is a thing of patience.”
And in this sense, I would like to close by remembering what the good Ednodio Quintero was kind enough to share with me one day, a product of his readings of the Argentine César Aira: the samurai from Los Andes told me there are two ways to become a writer, which are: to publish first and then write, a strategy that guarantees a quick access to fame, or writing first and publishing later, by which you place your wager on the rigors of transcendence. And since it will be time that decides the wheat from the chaff, we should procure to keep our feet on the ground, and in the best of cases, and paraphrasing a famous Spanish painter, let time find us writing. Everything else, I’m afraid, is new illusions.
Thank you very much.
Text read at the Universidad de Carabobo, in the city of Valencia, by invitation from the Jornadas de Voz Creativa 2011.
{ Gabriel Payares, Blog Caribe, 18 November 2011 }
It’s always a discomfort to speak in generational terms: whoever does it runs the risk of raising a banner in the name of many. Which is why in the following lines I’ll try, in any case, to speak from a perspective that’s my own, singular and personal. I think that those of us who were born in the eighties were fated to begin writing surrounded mostly by ruins: those of a formal educational system, for example, that a long time ago lost its bearings and collapsed, in a frank and open demonstration of the scant interest Venezuelans take in the construction of their future generations; but also the ruins of a culture of citizenship, manifested in the post-apocalyptic aspect of our unloved cities, in our shameful political behavior or in the brutal quota of violence that day by day desensitizes us to death and suffering. A country in ruins, then, to reiterate the journalistic cliché. I’m afraid this won’t be a very hopeful reading.
But it’s not my intention to repeat here what everyone knows, rather to own that metaphor for a while: ruins are, at once, remembrance of an ancient project and totem of a future desire, and that is precisely the idea that governs our particular imaginary of home: since every moment in the past was always better, we’ve chosen to wait for it to magically repeat itself; we are the debtors of Bolívar’s cadaver, waiting for the instant when he’ll rise from his bicentennial tomb and rescue us. The term “ruin,” [ruina] on the other hand, contains the word “contemptible” [ruin], whose most obvious meaning is linked to a state of moral degradation, of evil, of vileness. And it isn’t accidental: our crisis, it has already been said quite frequently, is a profound moral crisis, which both film and literature have tried to echo, maybe not in the most effective manner. It’s enough to recall the films of the nineties, incapable of overcoming their surprise at the country’s growing marginal communities, or the literary production of more or less the same era, half obsessed with finding answers in national historical references, as in that branch of fiction that Luz Marina Rivas has baptized as “intrahistoric,” and likewise with the idea of reporting an increasingly coarse reality, perhaps as a strategy to digest it: to make it fit within a narrative, to summarize it, quantify it.
Whatever the case, the conclusion this leads to was already announced to us by the great Juan Liscano, when he affirmed that our creators have always succumbed to an imperative desire for realism, for an artist’s commitment to his corresponding historical moment, in frank detriment however of the deployment of his inner worlds. The exercise of fiction, it seems, constitutes in our country a form of cultured referentiality, and in obedience, quite often, to a political mandate that assumes the writer’s role is to raise the awareness of the masses, to “open their eyes” to reality, as if people were sleeping and expectant, waiting for an illuminated figure to point the way for them or speak as their representative. Seen in this manner, it is the literary equivalent of populism, whose most recent evolution proposes one write for a “basic” reader, one who is “down to earth” and “average,” like a reading for invalids, and which in many cases is merely an excuse to hide the scarce poetic projection of the whoever is writing. I think one should distrust whoever proposes a decaffeinated literature for vacations.
The critic Carlos Sandoval critiqued something similar in a recent edition of the Bienal Mariano Picón Salas prize, when he referred to the predominance, in our 21st century fiction, of proposals that are incapable of “...overcoming the anecdotal and descriptive.” Our fictional muscle, it seems, continues to be just as weak as before, despite the fact that the unbearable social crisis, to which a political crisis has been added, already has more popular figures that concern themselves with it, such as journalists and data analysts, political scientists or pollsters, and that historical discourse, which today resounds louder than ever, remains a territory for scholars of the field and historians. So what then is the role, the place of the writer today?
There’s more than one answer. For some it’s found under the lights and cameras, in hundreds of photos tagged on Facebook, new stars of the naked king, of the writer who never writes, or in interminable lists of blogs and web pages of varied and often contradictory poetic value. For others it’s found anchored in the idea of the city, in the description of urban surroundings like postmodern chroniclers of the Indies, determined to combat the worn out rural and epic discourse of the independence era with a paradoxical exaltation of our impoverished modernity. And for a very few the writer’s place is in the dark, struggling with language in order to attempt to create a world of one’s own, an “inner meadow” –as the cartoon character Miguelito by Quino would say– that will allow him to endure (or not) Venezuela’s crushing and autonomous reality. “More fiction and less realism” was also the diagnosis of the fiction writer from Trujillo Carolina Lozada, in a recent interview, worried about the myopia with which we seem to contemplate the task of writing, a myopia that gets worse with the deficit of specialized editors in the country and which moreover forgets that the commitment of every writer is first to fiction, to poetry, to finding the answers to life in a language that is his own and autonomous, as free as possible yet believable, by which I mean, with the production of keys that can interpret not only the country and the world, but also the self: the writer’s commitment should be profoundly subjective, and it should be a priority in his life.
Maybe for thinking in this manner it’s been my role to insist, maybe foolishly, stubbornly, stupidly even, in mistrusting the excessive celebratory eagerness to which we tend to be so disposed. The recent multiplication of young voices willing to enter into the field of writing should no doubt make us happy, but not so much as to affirm the existence of a boom, or much less of a golden age for our fiction, irresponsible affirmations that simply raise the bar beyond reach, sentencing us later to settling with what exists, since as our invisible friends say, “this is what we got.” A disservice, in my opinion, for those of us who have the hope of being read, and which ends up being more painful today, in the light of the implacable recession we suffer in the editorial world. Where are they now, the voices who sang about our unstoppable advance, our golden age, our editorial flowering? It ends up being ironic, what’s more, that we celebrate a realist literature without having our feet firmly on the ground, ignoring the fact that in literary matters, one, two or three books published are little more than the beginning of a career, and not the cusp and much less the goal, and that complacency, short cuts and immediacy, conditions so in tune with our sad idiosyncrasy, once again play, just as they do in other realms of experience, openly against us. Moral: we shouldn’t want to resuscitate, like voodoo priests, that better past that our abundant ruins accuse. The road lies, instead, in the demanding maturation of our incipient talents and excellence: if we never learned how to sow our petroleum, at least we should learn to cultivate patience. Cadenas has said it: “culture is a thing of patience.”
And in this sense, I would like to close by remembering what the good Ednodio Quintero was kind enough to share with me one day, a product of his readings of the Argentine César Aira: the samurai from Los Andes told me there are two ways to become a writer, which are: to publish first and then write, a strategy that guarantees a quick access to fame, or writing first and publishing later, by which you place your wager on the rigors of transcendence. And since it will be time that decides the wheat from the chaff, we should procure to keep our feet on the ground, and in the best of cases, and paraphrasing a famous Spanish painter, let time find us writing. Everything else, I’m afraid, is new illusions.
Thank you very much.
Text read at the Universidad de Carabobo, in the city of Valencia, by invitation from the Jornadas de Voz Creativa 2011.
{ Gabriel Payares, Blog Caribe, 18 November 2011 }
11.18.2011
V / Eduardo Mariño
V
1.
Tomorrow, the thousandth augury, the fearsome memory, God’s remorseful urge, the moribund sacrament, the terrible gods miserably cornered at the tip of the dream; childhood decrees a spectral silence, all of this, the challenge and the awe from me a promise:
2.
Never, the sentences, the hanging moons, the hands drowning in the fog, the wax boiling in the eyes, lying, subjugating. Celaeno, evening goodbyes, inequalities in the final skin that consecrate the least of man’s rights, of the illuminated dream that drags its name and its disgrace; the walls erase all signs of names and the secret senses awaken an ironic nostalgia of seas, suns that fall, heroes, unfinished journeys, stories that turn and turn without a face, without a number, nameless, timeless:
3.
Yesterday, a sail on the horizon, a candle on your table, a cave in the sand, a bloodless conquest, packed with previous attempts. The Word names the prohibited altars and the astonishing lines of Fire. I know that the hard spiral of this immense crucible of ignominies spies on me with its terrible, black, open and restless hair, its tiny tiger’s smile and the dagger at its belt, cruelly sharpened, eternal, inextinguishable in my side, its blade, the weak gratings that occasion the misfortune of a single caress:
4.
Eternity, of whose secret songs someone has said they reveal the time and place of a revenge. With certainty I know it corresponds to its infallible condition of witness, to consider this wound a triumph, an overwhelming defeat or simply a grateful reminder for the Dharma of these hours under the sign of the Desert of Fire.
Por si los dioses mueren (1995)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
1.
Tomorrow, the thousandth augury, the fearsome memory, God’s remorseful urge, the moribund sacrament, the terrible gods miserably cornered at the tip of the dream; childhood decrees a spectral silence, all of this, the challenge and the awe from me a promise:
2.
Never, the sentences, the hanging moons, the hands drowning in the fog, the wax boiling in the eyes, lying, subjugating. Celaeno, evening goodbyes, inequalities in the final skin that consecrate the least of man’s rights, of the illuminated dream that drags its name and its disgrace; the walls erase all signs of names and the secret senses awaken an ironic nostalgia of seas, suns that fall, heroes, unfinished journeys, stories that turn and turn without a face, without a number, nameless, timeless:
3.
Yesterday, a sail on the horizon, a candle on your table, a cave in the sand, a bloodless conquest, packed with previous attempts. The Word names the prohibited altars and the astonishing lines of Fire. I know that the hard spiral of this immense crucible of ignominies spies on me with its terrible, black, open and restless hair, its tiny tiger’s smile and the dagger at its belt, cruelly sharpened, eternal, inextinguishable in my side, its blade, the weak gratings that occasion the misfortune of a single caress:
4.
Eternity, of whose secret songs someone has said they reveal the time and place of a revenge. With certainty I know it corresponds to its infallible condition of witness, to consider this wound a triumph, an overwhelming defeat or simply a grateful reminder for the Dharma of these hours under the sign of the Desert of Fire.
Por si los dioses mueren (1995)
{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }
11.15.2011
“El tema del mar es inagotable y apenas nos hemos asomado a él”: Entrevista a Rubi Guerra / Roberto Echeto
“The topic of the sea is inexhaustible and we’ve barely glanced at it”: An Interview with Rubi Guerra
The Venezuelan writer Rubi Guerra was born in San Tomé, state of Anzoátegui, in 1958. His published titles include El discreto enemigo (2001), Un sueño comentado (2004), La tarea del testigo (2007) and Las formas del amor y otros cuentos (2010). On this occasion he speaks with us about the sea, about books and about the disturbing relationship between literature and society.
What’s the relationship like between books, your surroundings and yourself? I ask because you live in Cumaná, a city we assume is closer to activities related to the sea, tourism and the happiness of living in shorts, rather than to literature.
You can’t find too many books in Cumaná; that’s a reality that can’t be overlooked. Very few bookstores and a public library that is updated with difficulty. It is, perhaps, one of the most discouraging aspects of living here. Although, on the other hand, books are so expensive right now that many of the few that are available can’t be bought. Over time, I’ve been gathering some books that help me write, pass the time, live. Sometimes I ask myself how people can write here, in this hot, noisy, violent city with so few cultural or spiritual incentives, or whatever we might want to call them. If you head out to the city’s beaches, you’ll find people in shorts and bikinis, empanda, beer and hot dog vendors, unemployed people, vagabonds, beggars and thieves, entire families with their dogs and cats, high school students listening to reggaeton, lovers without money for a hotel, shoreline fishermen. People who live happily, unhappily, indifferently. Five thousand years ago the Guaiquerí indians used to fish on these beaches; five hundred years ago the Spanish soldiers, the Franciscans and the Tyrant Aguirre passed through here; Sir Walter Raleigh was defeated here; José Rafael Pocaterra threw two thousand rifles into the gulf here when the Falke ship was fleeing from the forces of Gómez. Many things have happened and continue to happen. So I suppose that because of that humanity –of which one forms a part– you end up making literature. Or try to.
Regarding the previous question, why do you think it is we haven’t created a literature of the sea? Are there too few works with the sea as a topic in our libraries or do the necessary ones exist?
I haven’t made a list, but I too have the impression that the sea as a topic appears very little in our literature. If I start to think about it, a limited number of books come to mind (most of them written before 1960), and it’s curious because we have an immense coastal strip. It would be logical to expect that such a fascinating landscape, to which so many human activities are associated, would generate a great literature. Obviously that’s not the case. Determining why is difficult. A disinterest in the landscape, which reminds us of costumbrismo? Ignorance? A concentration on our urban surroundings? I don’t know. What I’m sure about is that the topic of the sea, in its multiple varied aspects, is inexhaustible, and we’ve barely glanced at it.
Is there a relationship between literature and society? Do you think the books we read (whether the ones our education programs require or the ones we acquire on our own) help define us as individuals and as a society or, on the contrary, that literature doesn’t have anything to do with such delicate matters?
As individuals, we can’t stop seeing ourselves as being affected by the society we live in, by its forms of organization, its forms of exercising power, its belief system; but, at the same time, we aren’t chained to that society. Fortunately, the more or less organized forces of society are opposed by the more or less chaotic forces of the unconscious, of desire, of dreams, of impulses. Curiously, books participate in both orders: they help us form ourselves as individuals and legitimize the social fabric, but they also introduce doubt, heresy, impossible worlds, the unproductive, the capricious, the gratuitous, what is not bound to any norm. We have to be thankful for that. We are social beings in a permanent fight against the social. Members of a herd who march in solitude.
How do you perceive the opportunities for publishing being an author who lives in a province of the country? Are authors in the provinces taken into account as much as authors in the capital?
I’ve published the books I’ve wanted to publish. Living in the provinces hasn’t affected me in that sense. So I can’t complain about the opportunities. Of course, that’s my personal experience. I think I’ve been lucky. I do think my books would circulate more or would be more visible if I lived in Caracas. I’m aware that many people in the provinces find publishing to be very difficult simply because in their regions or cities there are no publishing houses, neither public or private. Whether we like it or not, Caracas continues to be the great center of editorial production and it’s also the promotional center. In a certain manner, what happens outside Caracas doesn’t exist. It would be great if this situation were different, but in order for that to happen many things would have to change: better systems of promotion and dissemination, a greater effectiveness in the distribution of books, the creation of new bookstores in the provinces, among other things.
{ Roberto Echeto, Santillana Ediciones Generales Venezuela, 14 November 2011 }
The Venezuelan writer Rubi Guerra was born in San Tomé, state of Anzoátegui, in 1958. His published titles include El discreto enemigo (2001), Un sueño comentado (2004), La tarea del testigo (2007) and Las formas del amor y otros cuentos (2010). On this occasion he speaks with us about the sea, about books and about the disturbing relationship between literature and society.
What’s the relationship like between books, your surroundings and yourself? I ask because you live in Cumaná, a city we assume is closer to activities related to the sea, tourism and the happiness of living in shorts, rather than to literature.
You can’t find too many books in Cumaná; that’s a reality that can’t be overlooked. Very few bookstores and a public library that is updated with difficulty. It is, perhaps, one of the most discouraging aspects of living here. Although, on the other hand, books are so expensive right now that many of the few that are available can’t be bought. Over time, I’ve been gathering some books that help me write, pass the time, live. Sometimes I ask myself how people can write here, in this hot, noisy, violent city with so few cultural or spiritual incentives, or whatever we might want to call them. If you head out to the city’s beaches, you’ll find people in shorts and bikinis, empanda, beer and hot dog vendors, unemployed people, vagabonds, beggars and thieves, entire families with their dogs and cats, high school students listening to reggaeton, lovers without money for a hotel, shoreline fishermen. People who live happily, unhappily, indifferently. Five thousand years ago the Guaiquerí indians used to fish on these beaches; five hundred years ago the Spanish soldiers, the Franciscans and the Tyrant Aguirre passed through here; Sir Walter Raleigh was defeated here; José Rafael Pocaterra threw two thousand rifles into the gulf here when the Falke ship was fleeing from the forces of Gómez. Many things have happened and continue to happen. So I suppose that because of that humanity –of which one forms a part– you end up making literature. Or try to.
Regarding the previous question, why do you think it is we haven’t created a literature of the sea? Are there too few works with the sea as a topic in our libraries or do the necessary ones exist?
I haven’t made a list, but I too have the impression that the sea as a topic appears very little in our literature. If I start to think about it, a limited number of books come to mind (most of them written before 1960), and it’s curious because we have an immense coastal strip. It would be logical to expect that such a fascinating landscape, to which so many human activities are associated, would generate a great literature. Obviously that’s not the case. Determining why is difficult. A disinterest in the landscape, which reminds us of costumbrismo? Ignorance? A concentration on our urban surroundings? I don’t know. What I’m sure about is that the topic of the sea, in its multiple varied aspects, is inexhaustible, and we’ve barely glanced at it.
Is there a relationship between literature and society? Do you think the books we read (whether the ones our education programs require or the ones we acquire on our own) help define us as individuals and as a society or, on the contrary, that literature doesn’t have anything to do with such delicate matters?
As individuals, we can’t stop seeing ourselves as being affected by the society we live in, by its forms of organization, its forms of exercising power, its belief system; but, at the same time, we aren’t chained to that society. Fortunately, the more or less organized forces of society are opposed by the more or less chaotic forces of the unconscious, of desire, of dreams, of impulses. Curiously, books participate in both orders: they help us form ourselves as individuals and legitimize the social fabric, but they also introduce doubt, heresy, impossible worlds, the unproductive, the capricious, the gratuitous, what is not bound to any norm. We have to be thankful for that. We are social beings in a permanent fight against the social. Members of a herd who march in solitude.
How do you perceive the opportunities for publishing being an author who lives in a province of the country? Are authors in the provinces taken into account as much as authors in the capital?
I’ve published the books I’ve wanted to publish. Living in the provinces hasn’t affected me in that sense. So I can’t complain about the opportunities. Of course, that’s my personal experience. I think I’ve been lucky. I do think my books would circulate more or would be more visible if I lived in Caracas. I’m aware that many people in the provinces find publishing to be very difficult simply because in their regions or cities there are no publishing houses, neither public or private. Whether we like it or not, Caracas continues to be the great center of editorial production and it’s also the promotional center. In a certain manner, what happens outside Caracas doesn’t exist. It would be great if this situation were different, but in order for that to happen many things would have to change: better systems of promotion and dissemination, a greater effectiveness in the distribution of books, the creation of new bookstores in the provinces, among other things.
{ Roberto Echeto, Santillana Ediciones Generales Venezuela, 14 November 2011 }
11.10.2011
Era una ciudad muerta / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
It was a dead city
It was a dead city
inhabited only by ghosts.
The past was whispering
in the door latches
and running freely through the streets.
The moan of the wind
was dragging somnambulant beings
through the patios.
Walls from other centuries were speaking
and yawning in the dust.
Wrapped in their big ears
the bats were sleeping
in the eaves of the archaic houses.
Through the open holes
in the stone parapets,
the old men simulating enormous beetles
appeared, lengthened themselves
with their canes and hobbling reached
the center of the plaza.
The melody of the canal and the bell tower
of the ancient church
with their scales were lifting them in the air
and swinging them through the ages.
{Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los ritos secretos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1988 }
It was a dead city
inhabited only by ghosts.
The past was whispering
in the door latches
and running freely through the streets.
The moan of the wind
was dragging somnambulant beings
through the patios.
Walls from other centuries were speaking
and yawning in the dust.
Wrapped in their big ears
the bats were sleeping
in the eaves of the archaic houses.
Through the open holes
in the stone parapets,
the old men simulating enormous beetles
appeared, lengthened themselves
with their canes and hobbling reached
the center of the plaza.
The melody of the canal and the bell tower
of the ancient church
with their scales were lifting them in the air
and swinging them through the ages.
{Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los ritos secretos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1988 }
11.08.2011
Nunca se sabe nada / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Nothing is ever known
Death,
like love,
is a recurring
theme in poetry.
The enigma
of the ignored,
or the unknown,
has touched the
most lucid and
wisest writers of
all the ages on earth.
For Novalis,
an enraptured mystic,
poetry would often
reveal itself through
sleep and the night.
Rimbaud, in his famous
letter of the seer,
sought poetry
in the atmosphere
of the unknown.
Sartre inverted, in his novel
Nausea and the short stories
of The Wall, the Cartesian
axiom of I think,
then I exist.
And Camus didn’t like
to think that death opened
another life. “For me
–he sustained–it’s a closed
door.” All
the religions
of humanity, for a long
time, have occupied themselves
with these insoluble
enigmas. Each sacred
book offers conceptions
of the most diverse sign,
which suggests
that none of them
have the absolute truth.
There are many discrepancies.
The fight against the ignored,
or the unknown,
in the end always
turns out to be perverse.
There are no possible exits.
No one is known
to have returned
from the other world to tell
the events of his death.
Life is a prospect
without return. No one
has been able to tell
its actual story.
All the religions
offer us dreamed
paradises, so sublime
as to never
believe in them.
Nothing is ever known.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Con los ojos muy largos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2006 }
Death,
like love,
is a recurring
theme in poetry.
The enigma
of the ignored,
or the unknown,
has touched the
most lucid and
wisest writers of
all the ages on earth.
For Novalis,
an enraptured mystic,
poetry would often
reveal itself through
sleep and the night.
Rimbaud, in his famous
letter of the seer,
sought poetry
in the atmosphere
of the unknown.
Sartre inverted, in his novel
Nausea and the short stories
of The Wall, the Cartesian
axiom of I think,
then I exist.
And Camus didn’t like
to think that death opened
another life. “For me
–he sustained–it’s a closed
door.” All
the religions
of humanity, for a long
time, have occupied themselves
with these insoluble
enigmas. Each sacred
book offers conceptions
of the most diverse sign,
which suggests
that none of them
have the absolute truth.
There are many discrepancies.
The fight against the ignored,
or the unknown,
in the end always
turns out to be perverse.
There are no possible exits.
No one is known
to have returned
from the other world to tell
the events of his death.
Life is a prospect
without return. No one
has been able to tell
its actual story.
All the religions
offer us dreamed
paradises, so sublime
as to never
believe in them.
Nothing is ever known.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Con los ojos muy largos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2006 }
11.07.2011
Abismos avernales / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Avernal Abysses
He spoke with a cold
and wretched voice
that seemed to surge
from the depths
of water.
Hairs stood on end.
He came, at that time,
as if to know
the secrets
of nature,
that, regardless, were
unknown
to human beings.
Everyone ignored them.
No one could know
those secrets no matter
how much they toiled. No
person could know,
with certainty, anything
about them and, at the same time,
give himself to the useless
enterprise of deciphering them.
Now they hesitated
in the most profound silence
of endless things,
emerged from the avernal
abysses.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Eclipse, Caracas: Edición de autor, 2008 }
He spoke with a cold
and wretched voice
that seemed to surge
from the depths
of water.
Hairs stood on end.
He came, at that time,
as if to know
the secrets
of nature,
that, regardless, were
unknown
to human beings.
Everyone ignored them.
No one could know
those secrets no matter
how much they toiled. No
person could know,
with certainty, anything
about them and, at the same time,
give himself to the useless
enterprise of deciphering them.
Now they hesitated
in the most profound silence
of endless things,
emerged from the avernal
abysses.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Eclipse, Caracas: Edición de autor, 2008 }
11.05.2011
Como velos negros / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Like black veils
Like black veils the clouds were floating.
Below the hunched
man was clumsily walking.
A great silence weighed on his head.
He opened and closed his sunken eyes
and glanced upwards occasionally.
Distant lightning seemed to dazzle him.
Infinity spoke to him in a very low voice.
He was abandoning the outside world.
Elusive, overwhelmed by secrets,
he returned to his room
barely illuminated by a reddish light.
His mind was burning amid virtual fires.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los ritos secretos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1988 }
Like black veils the clouds were floating.
Below the hunched
man was clumsily walking.
A great silence weighed on his head.
He opened and closed his sunken eyes
and glanced upwards occasionally.
Distant lightning seemed to dazzle him.
Infinity spoke to him in a very low voice.
He was abandoning the outside world.
Elusive, overwhelmed by secrets,
he returned to his room
barely illuminated by a reddish light.
His mind was burning amid virtual fires.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los ritos secretos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1988 }
11.03.2011
La vi vagando / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
I saw her wandering
I saw her wandering
amid the trees that swayed
and fanned her pale beauty
as if emerged from a print.
Magically her tunic
seemed to dissolve through the air.
I directed toward her from the depths
of my memory beautiful and silent
words. The words crossed
time and tremulous
they arrived at her ears that listened
to my eulogies in the rumors of the past.
She kept a hermetic silence. An ambiguous
smile covered her impenetrable semblance.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los ritos secretos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1988 }
I saw her wandering
amid the trees that swayed
and fanned her pale beauty
as if emerged from a print.
Magically her tunic
seemed to dissolve through the air.
I directed toward her from the depths
of my memory beautiful and silent
words. The words crossed
time and tremulous
they arrived at her ears that listened
to my eulogies in the rumors of the past.
She kept a hermetic silence. An ambiguous
smile covered her impenetrable semblance.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los ritos secretos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1988 }
11.02.2011
Empujado por una fuerza invisible / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Pushed by an invisible force
Pushed by an invisible force
he traversed the hours of the night.
He moved with agitated steps.
He went back and forth
restlessly parting the branches.
With the needle he sought at the foot of the tree
what the tree with human roots
refused to reveal to him.
He was escorted by a black dog.
In the clandestinity of the shadows
an owl screamed and appeared.
A cold wind was blowing.
He looked to the east.
Until the break of day
he turned and turned in his closed circle.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los ritos secretos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1988 }
Pushed by an invisible force
he traversed the hours of the night.
He moved with agitated steps.
He went back and forth
restlessly parting the branches.
With the needle he sought at the foot of the tree
what the tree with human roots
refused to reveal to him.
He was escorted by a black dog.
In the clandestinity of the shadows
an owl screamed and appeared.
A cold wind was blowing.
He looked to the east.
Until the break of day
he turned and turned in his closed circle.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los ritos secretos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1988 }
11.01.2011
El universo literario llamado José Balza / Ximena Agudo
The Literary Universe Called José Balza
The bookstore La Bonilla, a warm and obsequious reading space, made the presentation of Red de autores, ensayos y ejercicios de literatura hispanoamericana (2011) by José Balza a special occasion for a gathering and conversation among a distinguished group of Mexican and Venezuelan intellectuals.
Red de autores, the new work by José Balza, recently published in Mexico, joins Las Semanas del Jardín, a collection nourished by Adolfo Castañón, the prominent Mexican poet, as well as essayist, translator and editor of numerous works of literary criticism. He was one of the event’s hosts, along with Benito Artigas, from the publishing house Bonilla-Artigas, who co-published the book, and Josu Landa, poet, philosopher and professor in the Literature Department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who has no doubt that in Mexico “those who are interested in good literature are already familiar with a great deal of José Balza’s work.” Which is why the appearance of this publication, co-published under the imprint Iberoamericana, “puts in the hands of the Mexican reader another opportunity for an incursion and a stay in the literary universe forged and woven by José Balza, throughout decades of copious and persistent labor.”
Red de autores is a book, as Landa points out, that “contains the knots and threads of a considerable part of the great dialogical web that Balza has been putting together since his youth... So that each one of the texts included in this volume evidence a style without equal, as an expression of an gracious tact, a tone that harmonizes sensibility and thought, passion and reason, pleasure and value, poetry and idea, aesthetic commitment and ethical conscience.”
Landa emphasizes, on the other hand, that José Balza’s way of being current finds its projection “in his fertile link with the great figures of the Spanish Golden Age, particularly with that of Baltasar Gracián, and the one he has maintained for decades with an ample catalog of his contemporaries, among whom we might mention Octavio Paz, Guillermo Sucre, Rafael Cadenas, Eugenio Montejo, Sergio Pitol, Julio Ortega, Alejandro Rossi, Eduardo Milán, Juan Villoro, Carmen Boullosa, Gustavo Guerrero... just from those that inhabit this book’s pages.”
As for the boundaries of his own country, Landa points out that “José Balza’s creative glance fixes on a textuality populated by human shades without relief, interlined with the threads of silent, intra-historical dailiness: a world without totemic dictators, without colonels of scabrous pasts, without true or mediocre epic heroes, without magical daydreams, without marvelous mirages, without ‘great occurrences,’ and convulsions that float over the hard and grey lives of common people.”
Beyond the meaning of the pages in Red de autores that refer to the political and literary homeland of José Balza, regarding which, moreover, as Landa affirms, “he has known how to interweave, in a long string of more or less brief novels and short stories, the intra-history of a vertiginous and ‘oily’ human reality... there are many others in this book that reflect quite well his posture when faced by the expressions of art and culture in Latin America (...) Balza places himself in a continental perspective, without the least trace of chauvinism, a stranger to the folklore and customs that color with ridiculousness the undeniable cultural specificity of Latin America.”
{ Ximena Agudo, Tal Cual, 1 November 2011 }
The bookstore La Bonilla, a warm and obsequious reading space, made the presentation of Red de autores, ensayos y ejercicios de literatura hispanoamericana (2011) by José Balza a special occasion for a gathering and conversation among a distinguished group of Mexican and Venezuelan intellectuals.
Red de autores, the new work by José Balza, recently published in Mexico, joins Las Semanas del Jardín, a collection nourished by Adolfo Castañón, the prominent Mexican poet, as well as essayist, translator and editor of numerous works of literary criticism. He was one of the event’s hosts, along with Benito Artigas, from the publishing house Bonilla-Artigas, who co-published the book, and Josu Landa, poet, philosopher and professor in the Literature Department at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), who has no doubt that in Mexico “those who are interested in good literature are already familiar with a great deal of José Balza’s work.” Which is why the appearance of this publication, co-published under the imprint Iberoamericana, “puts in the hands of the Mexican reader another opportunity for an incursion and a stay in the literary universe forged and woven by José Balza, throughout decades of copious and persistent labor.”
Red de autores is a book, as Landa points out, that “contains the knots and threads of a considerable part of the great dialogical web that Balza has been putting together since his youth... So that each one of the texts included in this volume evidence a style without equal, as an expression of an gracious tact, a tone that harmonizes sensibility and thought, passion and reason, pleasure and value, poetry and idea, aesthetic commitment and ethical conscience.”
Landa emphasizes, on the other hand, that José Balza’s way of being current finds its projection “in his fertile link with the great figures of the Spanish Golden Age, particularly with that of Baltasar Gracián, and the one he has maintained for decades with an ample catalog of his contemporaries, among whom we might mention Octavio Paz, Guillermo Sucre, Rafael Cadenas, Eugenio Montejo, Sergio Pitol, Julio Ortega, Alejandro Rossi, Eduardo Milán, Juan Villoro, Carmen Boullosa, Gustavo Guerrero... just from those that inhabit this book’s pages.”
As for the boundaries of his own country, Landa points out that “José Balza’s creative glance fixes on a textuality populated by human shades without relief, interlined with the threads of silent, intra-historical dailiness: a world without totemic dictators, without colonels of scabrous pasts, without true or mediocre epic heroes, without magical daydreams, without marvelous mirages, without ‘great occurrences,’ and convulsions that float over the hard and grey lives of common people.”
Beyond the meaning of the pages in Red de autores that refer to the political and literary homeland of José Balza, regarding which, moreover, as Landa affirms, “he has known how to interweave, in a long string of more or less brief novels and short stories, the intra-history of a vertiginous and ‘oily’ human reality... there are many others in this book that reflect quite well his posture when faced by the expressions of art and culture in Latin America (...) Balza places himself in a continental perspective, without the least trace of chauvinism, a stranger to the folklore and customs that color with ridiculousness the undeniable cultural specificity of Latin America.”
{ Ximena Agudo, Tal Cual, 1 November 2011 }
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