Alba Rosa Hernández redescubre a Ramos Sucre

Alba Rosa Hernández Rediscovers Ramos Sucre

Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio didn’t have any idea who José Antonio Ramos Sucre was in 1978. It was during a seminar given by Guillermo Sucre that she discovered the work of the poet from Cumaná. She liked it so much she decided to write her master’s thesis on the deceased Venezuelan author. That led to the study Ramos Sucre: La voz de la retórica, a book that has just been published again in a new edition by Monte Ávila Editores

The work, which was first published in 1990, is an analysis of the writer’s oeuvre. Hernández explains how Ramos Sucre arrived at the prose poem, his evolution, his different stages until he found the definitive form of his texts. The new edition was published just as she wrote it nearly three decades ago, without major modifications or corrections.

The Venezuelan essayist, in her moment, wanted to rescue or rediscover the poetry of the man from Venezuela’s Oriente region. Hernández believes that even today Ramos Sucre’s work needs to be explained. “He will always be a difficult author. Ramos Sucre, like certain authors, is one of those who require a key to decipher them. And I think the book offers details to help understand him,” said the native of Ciudad Bolívar, who won the Andrés Bello Research Prize, Social Sciences category, from Simón Bolívar University with La voz de la retórica.

José Antonio Ramos Sucre’s oeuvre transcended his time period. Hernández still works on the poetry of the writer who committed suicide in Geneva in 1930. “Ramos Sucre was our great contribution to the renovation of poetry, he was the one who placed Latin American poetry at the cusp of universal poetry (...) Ramos Sucre forces you to discover the language, to search in the dictionary, to think about the words. He revalues them. He renewed the language from its roots, he was in opposition to the avant-garde,” added Hernández, who also studied Classical Philology at the University of Florence.

Alba Rosa Hernández reads Ramos Sucre every day. And she would like for the poet’s work to be consumed by many. “When I feel bad I open his poetry at random so that his words might help me. I have him as a fetish author (...). What I hope the book might accomplish is that people read Ramos Sucre more. He doesn’t need critics but rather readers,” concluded the Venezuelan author. Monte Ávila Editores has placed her contribution in bookstores once again.


{ El Universal, 24 August 2013 }