The author of Los ritos received the National Prize in Literature
in 1980. Sunday marked a week that he had been hospitalized.
Last weekend, death took away a veteran of Venezuela’s main literary avant-garde groups: Francisco Pérez Perdomo. After a week in the hospital, on Sunday morning the man who spent his life seeking himself in poetry died.
“I write with the conviction that as I do it I continue to discover myself and others (...) You can’t write just for the sake of pure narcissistic delight. Pure poetry is an aberration. I think poetry should definitely have a projection: it is the testimony of a human being who needs to communicate, if not, he wouldn’t publish,” he told El Nacional in 1988, during an interview for the book Los ritos.
The poet born in Boconó, in the state of Trujillo, in 1930, became known in the Venezuelan cultural scene during the decade of the sixties, thanks to his participation in literary groups such as La Mesa Redonda, Sardio and El Techo de la Ballena. Twenty years later he received the National Prize in Literature, in 1980. In the nineties he was named the director of the Revista Nacional de Cultura.
His poetry collections include Fantasmas y enfermedades (1961), Círculo de sombras (1980), El sonido de otro tiempo (1999), La casa de noche (2001), Antología mínima (2003) and Eclipse (2008).
His work was marked by the presence of the spiritual. In an interview published in Papel Literario on 6 July 1980, he was described with the phrase “the temptation of darkness,” because death, or more specifically what goes beyond the human, was his constant obsession.
“What is eternity, an abrupt cut or a prolongation of life?,” the poet asked himself in that article. And while the literary world mourns, Pérez Perdomo begins to answer the question that marked his life.
{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 28 May 2013 }
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