Trova / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Ballad

     The dwarf envied the fortune of Amadis and deliberately mistook him for the knight who was robbed and sacrificed at the foot of the tree at the crossroads. He would run through the drowsy roads, backwards and riding the dirty goat, the one who screamed, and he would disseminate horror to the far reaches. An acrobat had drawn the mount on a card.

     The idle dwarf directed himself in such a manner to a mountain pass, a place distinguished by the death of a maiden, and solicited from a false creature the punishment of Amadis and his nymph. An old woman concealed her Gorgon mouth, a buckle with a single tooth and imitated the noble appearance of Oriana. Her dexterity couldn’t manage to reproduce the eyes of celestial vagueness, lifted in mute thought, afflicted by the paladin’s absence.

     I came to the presence of Oriana and gave her good tidings, throwing myself at her feet. Her enemy didn’t come out ahead imitating her gesture and Amadis was to be found far away and was not one and the same with the gallant man sacrificed at the foot of the tree, at the intersection of thoroughfares.

     The foolish witch and the despicable dwarf wasted the scheme in separating the chaste lovers and fell out with Satan and denied him the shameful tribute. The master of the celibates and of the egoists, censor and falsifier of human effects, had provided succor, inert. He reduced the accomplices to secrecy, wounding them and twisting their cervix, humiliating them with the treatment inflicted upon poultry yard birds.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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