Arrival of the Remains of José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Painful and solemn moments were lived by the family and admirers of the ill-fated and enormous writer José Antonio Ramos Sucre, at the port of La Guaira, upon the arrival of his remains. The coffin wrapped in a wooden case was transported on the shoulders of his friends to the chapel of San Juan de Dios Hospital, where it would remain while waiting to continue its journey to Cumaná, the birthplace of the artist. A man of strange and profound spiritual talents, José Antonio Ramos Sucre built an extraordinary atmosphere around himself, of an elevated aesthetic quality, that prevented him from easy and multitudinous comprehension. Few, very few people managed to cross the threshold of his intimacy and share, at his side, the noble and anguished fruition of his pondering upon beauty, upon those hallucinating perspectives he tended to digest in slow interminable gulps, from the heights of his resounding solitude. One can still find among the avenues of Plaza Bolívar, those exact syllables that composed his lanceolate and irreproachable words and which his learned tongue set to sail in the transparent air of the afternoons. His arms continue to reel, pushing nervous, frenetic gusts toward his interlocutor... On this painful occasion of his inert return to the Homeland, his disappearance pains us, once again, like a rupture. Élite reiterates to his family and especially to his honorable mother, the expression of its deepest condolences.

Arrival of the corpse in the wagon :: The coffin lying in repose
(Photos by Eduardo Lanz R. for Élite)




Translator’s Note: Thank you to Javier Prats for scanning & sending me this image from Venezuela.




{ Élite, Caracas, July 1930 }