Venepoetics

La espía / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2012-02-01T00:01:00.002-05:00

The Spy

The graduate writes a short novel of equivocations and unforeseen cases, occupying the delays of a court where he passes sentence, poorly remunerated and idle.

The graduate doesn’t spend the night in the city, but rather in the outskirts. He retires to a house with long passageways and solemn chambers, covered in whitewash, crouched in an anonymous village. The ingenuous locals notice the unpleasantness of its facade.

The graduate recovers from the tedium inventing quarrels and misfortunes. He imagines the yearnings and accusations of lovers and records them in indelible letters. He reclines, once in a while, the forehead made of parchment, full of memories, in his right hand. He prolongs the task until morning’s approach, under the dim waxen light.

The graduate abandons the pen just as dawn reveals its face like a ruddy-cheeked girl.

He proceeds to the adornment of his person in front of a Lorena mirror, of faded splendor, and when he retires the grey hairs, he observes at his back the astute skeleton of death.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

La ventana / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2012-01-30T00:01:00.001-05:00

The Window

She is seated at the window, barren of handsome men. Dressed in mourning and pensive, she requires attention from artists and demands reverence from dreamers. Faded by time, she regales and soothes afflicted souls.

She turns her eyes from the solitary street to the opposite hill, where the day disappears like an Asiatic king on a slow elephant. She observes the shade that advances with the furtive step of the beggar to some regal feast.

She shapes her disposition with the dwindling of the light; and watches how the painful cloudscapes compose a scene of holocaust, where her hope, chaste Iphigenia, succumbs amid laments.

La torre de Timón (1925)

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

La plaga / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2012-01-26T23:43:00.002-05:00

The Plague

My colleague, inspired by an equivocal curiosity and by a vehement sympathy for dejected and reprobate beings, was going around arm in arm with a lost girl.

I tried to dissuade him from such company, alleging the woman’s censurable bearing, affected by the memory of an insane brother, author of his own death.

We separated on a memorable night. Fortunes were being made and unmade in the den of the loudest uproar. The furnaces were spilling a chlorotic light and whetting the physiognomy of the gamblers. Anguish was electrifying the air of the place and suppressing the applause and laughter of the libidinous women.

A crowd of winged insects, fell, the next day, over the city and spread a contagious disease. Their larvae would domicile themselves in men’s hair and from there they would penetrate to devour the encephalon, aided by a sharp mechanism. They would toss from themselves a fibrous casing to protect them from any medicinal lotion. They would wound, in an irreparable manner, the resorts of thought and will. The infected would run through the streets shrieking.

My colleague resisted my advice of fleeing and came to perish, without news from anyone, at his house in the suburb.

The natives of the kingdom were abstaining from stepping within the environs of the cursed city. The agents of order situated at opportune places, were impeding the visits of petty thieves and were circumscribing the zone of the illness.

I braved the prohibition and managed to discover my friend’s fate.

I opened, after some struggle, the door to his house and I saw him lying on the floor, with signs of having rolled about.

Some spiders, with phosphorescent eyes and bland and tremulous feet, were jumping nimbly over his cadaver. The new breed had depopulated the city, running in pursuit of survivors.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

El emigrado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2012-01-25T02:30:00.002-05:00

The Emigrant

I was left alone with my son when the mortiferous plague had devastated the capital of the ruined kingdom. He had not emerged from infancy and he occupied me day and night.

I conceived and executed the project of settling in another city, more interned and safe. I took the child in my arms and crossed the savannah infected by the effluvia of the salt marsh.

I had to pass a small river. I found myself forced to dispute the ford with a man of advantaged stature, red hair and long teeth. His face declared desperation.

I pitied him despite his impertinent attitude and his injurious discourse.

I was able to take up lodgings at a long-abandoned house and I accommodated the child in a chamber of tapestries and rugs. He was enduring a slow fever and delirium manifested in screams.

The same inopportune man came to offer me, after a night of anguish, the remedy for my son. He was offering it for an exorbitant price, inwardly mocking my exiguous resources. I found myself in the position of dismissing him and cursing him.

I spent that day and the next without help of any kind.

I was keeping a vigil close to dawn, in the hostile night, when I felt, at the door to the street, a series of vehement loud knocks.

I looked out the window and saw only the street flooded in shadows.

My son was dying at that moment.

The man of citrine nature had been the author of the noise.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

Cita comentada: Miyó Vestrini / Gabriel Payares

2012-01-18T00:48:00.004-05:00

Commented Citation: Miyó Vestrini

“[The collectives of the 50s and 60s] were experiences full of vitality, that were never able to crystallize. We are a burnt-out, lost generation. A generation of frustrated people” (1976)

This citation by Vestrini invites me to a reflection. Maybe hers was a generation of frustrated people, as she herself says, because having had so much youth and such a wealth of literary groups, important names and revolutionary proposals of radical ideologies, in sum, a frenetic and abundant time period, the future with its drowsiness and its eternal crisis, its slow and opulent decomposition of the country and its institutions, would have represented for them the absolute confirmation of the failure of the optimists, the beginning of the era of the hopeless and cynical. Were that to be so, Miyó foresaw it, and she chose to commit suicide before languishing and becoming a fossil.

We, who today remember that “lost generation” as the inhabitants of a type of golden era or, at least, a prodigious and abundant time, are on the other hand a disconsolate generation, born of its own broken dreams and guided in life by the maxim that the latter is elsewhere. By nature desirous, we have been given the fate of witnessing how the country intends to return to its own empty shell, and how, within a panorama of grandiloquence and of the highest numbers of weekly murder rates, amid poverty and marginality and historic petroleum prices, it has been our place to know ourselves as foreigners, since every form of nationalism hides and involves –compensates– a galloping defamiliarization. Our Venezuela doesn’t belong, doesn’t apply, to anyone. We have a borrowed, portable, mobile country. We are the generation of the precipice, who look toward the future down below and with dread, while we dream with the wings of our ancestors that were broken.

“I don’t think our generation will ever mean anything, for anyone,” Miyó said, and today we’re surprised how wrong she was.

{ Gabriel Payares, Blog Caribe, 9 January 2012 }

La reforma / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2012-01-16T23:06:00.002-05:00

The Reform

The ecstatic gentleman has left through the arc of three doors, of forgotten style, of limitless lines and proportions. He observes the comet of agony and its reflection in the crystal sea.

He repugns the tournament and the conversation in the palace of the nobles, dwelling of happiness. He has embraced the penitent life since his stay in Italy, in amends for youthful pastimes. He assisted, the eve before returning, an academic festival, where mythological surnames abounded. An abbé was reading a fictitious discourse, by the light of the torches, in a hall adorned with egregious busts and in the presence of the cardinals.

The German gentleman possesses once again his serious and profound soul. He discovers, around himself and in the universe, the vestiges of original and unsalvageable evil, the ruin of the insinuating will of Satan and he doubts he will save himself by his own merits.

He jealously serves Mary, mother of Jesus, and guides, in that manner, his acts toward the contentment and satisfaction of a perfect lady, abiding by the only principle, free of censure, from the urbanity of Italy, unfolded time and again in the book of Baldassare de Castiglione.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

Persecución de la poesía / Armando Rojas Guardia

2012-01-14T16:26:00.004-05:00

Persecution of Poetry

When I was looking for you
here, in this house
where simple things
build walls around habit
and appease me, help me sleep
on a tangible floor,
solidly sustained;
when I wanted you to arrive
daily like tea,
recognizable and aromatic
like the smoke from my pipe,
calm like lamp light,
vibrant like all the insects
attracted by that glow
that protects me from the night
and makes repose sweet
and introverts it;
when you were able to be Coltrane,
erudite sax that accompanies
a frugal dinner; or maybe Rilke
read when I get up from the table
(Rilke domesticated: some verses
to take advantage of the hours for rest
as suits a laborious man);
finally, when the lethargy
that precedes the habit of sleep
led me, attentive, towards the bed
to find you oneiric and somnambulant
suddenly the certainty, even corporeal,
arrived that you existed nowhere
not even in the everything
of this orderly life of peace,
in no sensitive place
and under no comforting light
(nor in the story of dreams).
Still and insomniac in the silence,
I knew you were in back: only the reverse
of each object, only the spine
of all the words of the poem
(unreachable spine, of course,
but that magnetizes the music of the verse),
barely the void of forms
where they are unleashed, already free
to be resolved in graceful nothingness
–a sweet, compact nothingness–
around which revolve, unknowingly,
every language of man, every gesture,
the entire syntax of things,
sharp night, snow of language,
that deafens the roar of the pages
and blurs lines like this one
with which I speak the parliament
of an actor never accustomed
to the theater’s enormous muteness
when everyone has left and the curtain
is only stirred by the wind,
the frozen wind of the night,
the sidereal wind, that doesn’t applaud,
or laugh, or cry, and dissipates
stage machinery, special effects and scenes,
in other words, this decorative fiction
(pipe and tea, lamps, insects,
Coltrane, Rilke, notebook dream)
abandoned at last: useless.

Hacia la noche viva (1989)

{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }

Sin uso / Armando Rojas Guardia

2012-01-12T22:50:00.002-05:00

Unused

But today I have confidence in the task
of telling you precisely this,
without a single cause
to motivate the insignificant citation
of the eyes and letters:
to merely type seven lines for you
like someone asking for air or happiness.

Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979)

{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }

Poesía / Armando Rojas Guardia

2012-01-11T01:05:00.002-05:00

Poetry

Made of crust,
of shipwrecked images,
convex,
refractory like a blind glass.

Made only of mist
and dust clouds.

Opaque vanity, interposing itself.

Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979)

{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1993 }

Círculo de sombras / Francisco Pérez Perdomo

2012-01-03T22:26:00.002-05:00

Circle of Shades

Life for me is not
a geometric rigidity,
a formula, a rigorously
accepted custom, a page
succeeding itself day and night
with its infinite and monotonous
writing,
no, life is a whirlwind,
a vertigo of the contraries
that are ceaselessly produced, a
contradiction that grows
beyond itself
and flagellates itself
with its enormous whip,
sinks me into the void
and then rescues me
to smelt me again
in my closed circle of shades.

{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Círculo de sombras, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }

El jardinero de las espinas / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-12-27T16:54:00.001-05:00

The Gardener of Thorns

A bronze reliquary guarded, for more than a thousand years, the spoils of a Christian virgin thrown to the Tiber. I had reconstituted a few episodes from her journey in this world by means of short, linear news items from a devoted chronicle.

The church of her rest dominated a deserted way. The relics of the gardens and palaces declared the magnanimous effort of the ancients. I visited the spot in the middle of November, beneath an opal sky, naked and chilled. I stopped at the foot of a tree with unconquered leaves and persuaded them to tranquility by reciting a few augural verses by Virgil.

At that moment I divined one of the prodigies attributed to the martyred virgin. Her illusory image had consoled the days of a middle-aged exile, a sick man tossed far from mankind, impeded in his fern dwelling, and had placed in his hands the harp of Israfel. A Jew of immortal life had revealed to me the name of the first musician in the cortege of angels.

I reestablished myself from a delirious affect assuming a contemplative attitude, struggling to draw the ideal figure of the saint. I was deliberately lost in the solitude of a few burnished mountains and abandoned myself on a trail of stones. A swallow was deserting from its own in the month of the shades of Lent and created in front of me, getting tangled in my hair, the view of the deserted way and of the reliquary church in pontifical Rome.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

Textos del desalojo (fragmentos) / Antonia Palacios

2011-12-23T16:03:00.005-05:00

Displacement Texts (fragments)

They’ll take all my belongings, all the offerings. The ones that arrived lifted in garlands and branches, ones that collapsed lavishing themselves, ones that remained in suspense, ones left behind for such long fatigues, ones of learned form, stable touch. They’ll arrive battling on top of things, on top of the old approximations, forgotten approximations, rolling ruins over land, the tangle barely begun, the pearl barely mounted. They will arrive fiercely, they will arrive with hatred, they will arrive with scorn proclaiming the void. They will strip me of everything: point, gesture, voice. They will suddenly appear amid circles, angles and rectangles, hard geometries of agonizing lines, infinite parallels without possible encounters, volumes of blood. They will strip me of everything, of the air, of the reflection, of the form. The hour will be concave, the sky will be concave, the earth will open its concave crater in the final offering.

Who lifts the predictions? Who opens the mysteries? Impotent challenge this non-existent announcement, there inside, there in the depths, endlessly there, miserable precision. Who unfolds the solemn doubt? Treading from one ruin to another ruin, touching its weight, weighing even the void, arriving, arriving barely, barely sustained in the repeated forms. Who investigates the walking, the falling, the dying? Oh seized time. Oh abandonment. Who stretches over the sharp edge, in the body, over the sharp edge, over fear, consumed by fear? Its silence of a space, the spaces of silence, and waiting, listening, breathing, divided until breath, pursued, faster, faster, the tides and the quakes, the crumblings, dust whirlwinds, and the days without substance fainting. Who folds herself, unravels herself, silences herself, in doubt’s fever?

In the center, in the exact center, concentric circles, formless matter, from the center, sharpened matter, there in the center, the contour palpable in vertigo, in the vertiginous instant that leaves the center behind, occult center, protected, in the late suspense of the instant that arrives in a scattering without contour, without a center, in the highest level where shadow nests, remote center. Far from the center the fluting, the fissures, scattered in convergent contours gathered in the center, and dispersed, faded flashes explode in the center, ephemeral flight, fatigued flight battling in the center’s limits, in the center, surrounding the center, oh it’s so heavy, oh how I moan, how I abyss myself in this center that folds over, this center that consumes itself, spiral of the center, oh how it oppresses me, dilated center! In the center, already centered, in the center fixed, fixed in the center, pierced by the center, already outside the center.

Textos del desalojo (1975)

{ Antonia Palacios, Ficciones y aflicciones, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

El resfrío / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-12-21T16:33:00.010-05:00

The Cold

I have read in my childhood the memories of an artist of the violoncello, deceased far from her homeland, in the coldest spot on the globe. I have seen the image of the sepulcher in a book of stamps. An iron gate defends the accumulation of stones and the Byzantine cross. A hasty gust pours rain in the solitude.

The heroine reposes from a consecutive gallop, fright of the vile fox. The horse was about to perish in the flexible ties of a forest, in the inert mud.

The artist threw from her horse to the sordid Chinese river an ivory cup, held by means of a catch and consumed at the beginning of the cholera in the clumsy lymph. They have captured and consumed some fish that taste like dirt. The heroine used in a preferential mode the distinguished ivory, material of Roldan’s oliphant.

A sulphur sun was traveling along the floor in the atmosphere of a distant desert of sand and a sharp whistle, messenger of invisible darkness, spread a shadow of terror on the immense riverbed.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

El senado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-12-18T00:01:00.002-05:00

The Senate

The pleas of the old men were filling the confines of the building. The open air had covered it with moss and lichen.

No one was able to unfurrow the victor’s brow and persuade him to clemency. The young king was ordering the torture from a seat of stone. He would not be moved before the athletic beauty of the captives.

The executioners were cutting the noble hair and affronting it with their feet. They were enjoying themselves wounding the luxuriant cervix.

The prisoners were offering themselves to death with a proud gesture, and assigning it a semblance of fatidical beauty.

The old men prostrated themselves when the sacrifice ended. The concert of their deep voices was rising in praise of the vanquished and in compensation for invisible justice.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

El sedentario / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-12-15T03:53:00.002-05:00

The Sedentary One

In the amber morning, the straggling bat returns to the sacrilegious tower of Faust. The reprobate bird of Moses arrives from gathering in the dungeons the threnody of the proselytizers of evil. It invades the chamber through the window faithful to the desert moon and infuses a sudden dread in the image of a man, portent of mechanical art.

Faust dominates the stupor and directs a fistful of dirt at the flying depravity, using the means of geomancy. He conjectures the loss of his soul in eternity when he recognizes the scattering of the dust on the table cloth.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

Caracas, 26 de marzo de 1924 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-12-14T02:30:00.006-05:00

Caracas, 26 March 1924

Mr. Lorenzo Ramos
Maracaibo, Agencia Banco Venezuela

Dear Lorenzo,

I received your letter. I read it with the utmost attention and visited Lecuna, who is willing to leave you there and contribute to your prosperity. It is to your benefit if you live within the four walls of your house. I’m taking into consideration what you say in your last letter. I had already written to you saying that you should write with the single adornment of the exact expression and cruelly suppressing whatever might sound like a discourse. The word should always be humble and plain. One should never call attention to oneself. Avoid bad company. There are many alcoholics among them. Live alone, but be polite.
You should have in your property the following books in French versions and in prose, except for the Bible, which should be the Protestant version by Cipriano de Valera:
The Iliad and Odyssey, Plutarch, Virgil, The Edda which is to say Scandinavian Mythology (this last book can be found for you by François Jarrin, Rue des Écoles 48 or J. Gamber, Rue Danton 7), the Divine Comedy, Orlando Furioso by Ariosto, Don Quijote in Spanish, Goethe’s Faust, Telemachus, the Thousand and One Nights.
Read, even if you don’t have them:
English theater (Shakespeare), Spanish theater (Lope de Vega, Calderón, Tirso de Molina, Alarcón), Greek theater (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides), French theater (Molière, Racine and Corneille). With reading one drama by each author you have enough.
You have enough with one copy of each type of novel: Picaresque novel(Gil Blas). Novel of improbable qualities (Three Musketeers). Historical novel (Walter Scott). Typical English novel (Dickens, George Eliot who is a woman). Typical French novel (Balzac). Typical Russian novel (Dostoyevsky). Typical modern Spanish novel (Galdós, Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, the dramatist is Ruiz de Alarcón).
The best manuals of universal history are the ones by Duruy, and the best history of Venezuela is the one by Baralt which you should own.
The day you’ve read all this you will possess an enormous literary culture. As you see, it’s not necessary to read many books, but rather books that are characteristic of each age.
J. Gamber, Rue Danton 7, is more obliging and active than Jarrin; when you write to him sign your name as Lorenzo Ramos, so he doesn’t confuse you with me. Tell him you don’t want deluxe editions, just decent ones.
You should own: F. Loliée, Histoire Des Littératures comparées.
Edmond Desmolins, À quoi tient la supériorité des Anglosaxons?
Get in touch with J. Gamber, the best agent. He lives in Paris, Rue Danton, 7.
Make sure to read the books I recommend first, and don’t let yourself be guided in that point by anyone else.
I’m willing to serve you with all my powers. Write to me whenever you’d like. Be polite and live alone. Please your fellow human beings and evade them. Make each person you deal with a friend, though not an importune friend but rather a useful friend.

(Unsigned)

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

Consejos de orden intelectual para Lorenzo Ramos / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-12-08T00:01:00.005-05:00

Advice of An Intellectual Order for Lorenzo Ramos

Writing well comes down to writing exact expressions. Achieving the exact expression, requires knowing the dictionary quite well. One has to study the dictionary, know the greatest number of words and turns or phrases. Turns or phrases are learned by continuously reading Baralt. Grammar is learned by continuously reading Exposición sobre los casos y oraciones by Eduardo Benot, Hernando bookstore, Madrid, and also by consulting the section devoted to grammar in the Memento Larousse, an indispensable work that is sold at François Jarrin, Paris, Rue des Ecoles 48. Don’t confuse Memento Larousse with other works by the same Larousse. That one has small treatises on matters indispensable to a civilized man.
French is dominated by constantly studying the French Ollendorf composed by Eduardo Benot, Hernando bookstore, Madrid.
One learns English by means of the English Ollendorf composed by Eduardo Benot, Hernando bookstore, Madrid. Each English word is learned with its pronunciation and accentuation according to what is said in the Cuyás dictionary. The words are learned from Spanish for the foreign tongue: pan is bread, and not bread is pan. One has to educate the ear by reading English aloud. It seems to me that one must seek out an American or English teacher after one knows the entire Benot method.
One must read preferring the major authors to minor ones, Virgil to Villaespesa. I recommend the Historia Universal by Juan Vicente González or the manuals by Duruy, who contains the entire universal history in six small manuals about each era (Middle Ages and, etc.).
What is written should have a single adornment: that of exactitude. What is written should not cause an effect, alarm in the reader, the expression should never sound like a discourse, like declamatory and tribunal eloquence. Never, in what is said, done or written, should one call attention to oneself. That principal is the foundation of all social virtues.

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

A Lorenzo Ramos / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-12-07T01:15:00.007-05:00

To Lorenzo Ramos

[September 1924]

[...]
by Marden and the ones by Prentice Mulford are much better. Life is like you think it; so, if you think of it badly, you go crazy with desperation. Take great care of your health; don’t get sick. I approve of you writing. For that, every day you will write a thought that is the logical consequence of the one you have printed on the previous day. Always write at the same hour. Compose with the utmost simplicity and the least amount of words. Don’t try to compose without knowing very well what you want to say. Never imitate what someone else has said, because each man is his own world, and moreover each man has within his spirit a mine where he can always find what he needs. Listen to yourself. Read Baralt, Ricardo León, Pardo Bazán, Cervantes, Mariana. Above all read Baralt very closely as though it were a book of prayers. With those authors you will learn how to handle Spanish. Constantly consult the dictionary. You can feel which adjective needs to be applied to the noun, and that’s the one that should be applied. Put original adjectives, suitable to you, that are your own opinion about what you think or see. To be original, it’s enough to listen to yourself, avoiding copying. But don’t forget that beauty comes before originality. Another thing, be very moderate when you write, don’t ever incur in exaggeration, in disproportion. Familiarize yourself a great deal with Baralt, read him every day. Every time you read a book, write your impressions, in a simple style, with least number of words, and with logic, deducing each thought from the previous one.
You need to study in depth the career you have, pay attention to finances, political economy, banks, and write about that. Don’t ever say así fue que, but rather así fue como; allí fue que, but rather allí fue donde; entonces fue que, but rather entonces fue cuando; por esto es que, but rather por esto es por lo que; tan es así, but rather tanto es así.
Writing is a thing of great patience, and it should not be omitted for a single day. One writes every day, without exception. To write well you need to have the greatest number of words and typical phrases memorized.
I repeat that you should choose a writer as a teacher, I recommend Baralt and Ricardo León. More the first.
I’m answering your letter from memory, because I can’t remember where I put it. Tell [...] that the persons he has dealt with have made him too irritable and mournful, which is to say, he practices the two defects that have killed Juan Miguel Alarcón. Tell him that irritation and lamentation can be gotten rid of with exercise. They tell me he eats too much. If you're going to eat too much you need to exercise frequently. But gluttony is always condemned, because it leads to arthritis.
I don’t think I have anything else to tell you.
A hug from
José Antonio

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

Der Alchemist / Eduardo Mariño

2011-12-06T01:27:00.002-05:00

Der Alchemist

I don’t long for any recompense. I only watch and wait.

La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)

{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }

Evaristo Jiménez se niega a enterrar su barco / Eduardo Mariño

2011-12-05T01:03:00.005-05:00

Evaristo Jiménez Refuses to Bury His Boat

Until the decrepitude of the word I didn’t know I carried such an unusual agony. Even then, I will never be able to convince myself of the futility of so much ocean.

La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)

{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }

Terraza desde ninguna voz / Eduardo Mariño

2011-12-02T00:01:00.003-05:00

Terrace from No Voice

Some hand will nervously seek the nervous company of another hand in the penumbra, one chair will slowly approach another and a silence like forbidden skin will come to swing behind the melody. I loose my eyes toward the door, distant like all doors, disquieting like my own exit, like no exit; I look outside and only guess at the rumor of your barefoot steps disturbing me in the night.

La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)

{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }

Ynés, 1993 / Eduardo Mariño

2011-12-01T00:28:00.003-05:00

Ynes, 1993

The whole house was made of stone. The coffee was sour, the kisses at the door left dry lips, the tired glance as if returning from a thousand cities.
Only your name was a synonym for astonishment.

La vida profana de Evaristo Jiménez (2002)

{ Eduardo Mariño, A la salida del fastuoso recital, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2009 }

Siboney / Eduardo Mariño

2011-11-28T23:14:00.004-05:00

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 }

Introduction for Cedar Sigo at Minor American

2011-11-27T19:28:00.004-05:00

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)

Poética / Miguel James

2011-11-26T03:21:00.004-05:00

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 }

Contra la policía / Miguel James

2011-11-21T16:48:00.003-05:00

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 }

Las otras ruinas circulares / Gabriel Payares

2011-11-20T04:01:00.004-05:00

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 }

V / Eduardo Mariño

2011-11-18T23:08:00.002-05:00

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 }

“El tema del mar es inagotable y apenas nos hemos asomado a él”: Entrevista a Rubi Guerra / Roberto Echeto

2011-11-15T00:07:00.010-05:00

“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 }

Era una ciudad muerta / Francisco Pérez Perdomo

2011-11-10T01:44:00.002-05:00

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 }

Nunca se sabe nada / Francisco Pérez Perdomo

2011-11-08T01:32:00.005-05:00

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 }

Abismos avernales / Francisco Pérez Perdomo

2011-11-07T00:16:00.000-05:00

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 }

Como velos negros / Francisco Pérez Perdomo

2011-11-05T00:37:00.007-04:00

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 }

La vi vagando / Francisco Pérez Perdomo

2011-11-03T00:39:00.001-04:00

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 }

Empujado por una fuerza invisible / Francisco Pérez Perdomo

2011-11-02T09:00:00.003-04:00

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 }

El universo literario llamado José Balza / Ximena Agudo

2011-11-01T12:55:00.009-04:00

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 }

Una voz fantasmal / Francisco Pérez Perdomo

2011-10-30T14:37:00.003-04:00

A Phantasmal Voice

It was talking and
talking in a low voice
and without stopping
and sibilant
to the winds of the plateau.
Summer was arriving.
The storm was tearing apart
the trees of the forest.
It was talking and its voice was
a very dry murmur
amid the shadows.
It was emerging, no one knows,
from what unknown place.
It was something like that, hoarse,
as if flowing
from the limitless edges
of the earth.
It was something vain.
A voice that was heard
down below
from the depths of the dust.
A phantasmal voice.
With its nails, it was scratching
the walls. Our
ghosts, said Valle
Inclán, are the noises
that are produced inside
ourselves by
our own remorse.

{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Eclipse, Caracas: Edición de autor, 2008 }

Luis Uhland / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-10-25T10:31:00.003-04:00

Ludwig Uhland

Ludwig Uhland was one of the most eximious poets of the 19th century. A sagacious critic contrasts him against the acerbic Heinrich Heine, because of the contrary character of his tender and gentle poetry; and later on explains the origin of their respective inspirations in this manner: due to the pleasures of wine Euterpe set aside her gravity, and transformed herself into a bacchant. Crazed, she descended to earth, and with a kiss communicated unhealthy inspiration to an adolescent, who eventually became the unfortunate Heinrich Heine. When she regained her serenity, the muse hoped to compensate for the influence of her funest action, infusing with another kiss and in another mortal a beneficial breath. So she descended to the country of Swabia, and rewarded Ludwig Uhland with the gift of a happy poetry.

First published in Renovación, no. 3, Caracas, 20 May 1916.

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

La ciudad de las puertas de hierro / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-10-18T00:05:00.001-04:00

The City of Iron Doors

I was combing through the vestiges of a fortress edified, three thousand years earlier, to divide the floor of two continents. The towers were rising just slightly above the walls, according to the Asiatic custom. The antiquity of that architecture declared itself through the absence of the arch.
The passage of Alexander, conqueror of the Persians, had disseminated in that country an imperishable rumor.
I observed, from a lookout in the ruins, the dispute between Sergio and Michael, two idlers of Russian origin. They were accused of having killed and despoiled a gentleman, while they were guiding him through a plateau. They would appropriate the cattle wounded by the neighboring hunters. They surpassed the perfidy of the Jew and the Armenian.
Michael retired after inflicting upon his adversary a funest blow and he locked himself in the guesthouse where I was lodged. No one else had become aware of the case.
The wounded man died the night of that very day, uttering insults and curses. Michael was unable, at such a great distance, to conciliate sleep and he would call out loud to his lodging companions to save himself from the constant hallucinations. I contributed to pacifying him and persuaded him to wait, without fear, until morning.
We left him alone when he was starting to fall asleep.
We returned to his presence well into the day. We found him drowned by some ferreous hands, different from his own.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

Rapsodia / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-10-16T21:32:00.003-04:00

Rhapsody

Juno releases, from celestial heights, the deformed son, opprobrium of divine beauty.
The fog hurries to the infant’s rescue and lays him down on the elastic surface of the ocean, moderating the impetus of the fall.
The child descends in a nacre carriage, prepared by sirens, to an apparent home, fantasy of the artists of the abyss, situated at the end of a vegetation of corals and madrepores. The shameful light of the depths circulates through the lodgings.
The infant conceives the love of beauty, proven eventually in the forging and in the engraving of resplendent jewels, in his dealings with the sunken beings, in a capricious manner. He admires the presumptuous medusa and her mane accumulated under the disc of her applied parasol.
He owes, likewise, the agreeable nature and peaceful habits, which distinguish him from his companions in immortality, to the teachings of defenseless creatures. He listens to the advice of the versatile eel, of the sedentary sponge, of the orbicular fish with a comic physiognomy.
Vulcan’s elegance smooths the afflicted face and mitigates the resounding voice of tragedy.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

El domicilio del eider / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-10-12T21:55:00.007-04:00

The Eider’s Domicile

The contaminated butter, the rancid food provisions, the fetid fish were provoking scurvy and scabies on the secret island. The natives were congratulating themselves for their longevity. I met more than one elderly person with a devoured face.
The fishermen were easing my nostalgia by pulling me away from the iron coast in their sharp skiffs, on an impassive sea.
The straggling sun, the one from an anomalous latitude, was varying the colors of the ice floe amidst a surface of cobalt and was delighting in the religious amethyst and in the opal of Byzantium.
I was returning from maritime wanderings to hide desperation in a singular home. The bones of a whale had served for its fabrication.
I was fruitlessly struggling to reconcile sleep after repeating a moaning psalm. A king had banished me from Denmark.
I would turn my mind to the maiden of my affection and celebrate her bravery in the act of encouraging myself for exile. A wart-covered frog, in the clumsy mud, was lifting his voice in honor of the moon and of the fatidic aureole of its sadness.
The maiden of my affection had attained the visions of Saint Bridget and often felt the voice of the Crucifix. Her imperishable cadaver reposes in a glass coffin, in view of some nuns with celestial souls.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

El hallazgo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-10-04T10:44:00.007-04:00

The Find

The mariners had lain me down in the sycamore coffin, fitting me for subterranean sleep. They absented themselves after testing on me an onion plant, with a nauseating smell. They made me drink the juice from its hairy leaves and its root, of the width of a finger. It was paid from the unirrigated ground and its flowers fed the voracity of a swarm of double corselet insects, stocked with an executioner’s gear.
The headache and a mild frenzy assaulted me after the cessation of drowsiness. I saw nothing but images of fright and cruelty. A bird was tormenting its child.
I have unknowingly broken the cipher of an inexpressible thought, drawn on the forehead of a monolith, and I watched a series of indignant statues, with enamel eyes, rising in front of me.
I have discarded, suspecting perfidy, the ship loosed in the neighboring river of mud, amidst a withered jungle.
I forced my steps in demand of a serene mountain, where the happy numens of the place were born and had put down the fugitive plant, once they were banished.
I discovered a memorial stone adhered to an inaccessible spot of the slope, and I reached it dragging myself and panting. It displayed, in the manner of a signal, a human figure finished in the beak of a rapacious bird. It easily gave way to a push from my hands and revealed a humid and phosphorescent chamber.
I have hidden from the unfaithful companions the secret of my inexhaustible wealth.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

Montería / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-10-01T00:01:00.004-04:00

Hunting

I had fatigued myself running after the wild sheep.
I had to alleviate my thirst in a well of salubrious water. I hoped to reestablish myself there from having been rammed. The salt had crystallized on the edges, in the form of nacre.
The young men of my age had likewise been mistreated when they chased those irreducible animals. None had been victimized or caught in a trap. They were assigned a tenacious life.
I concealed the damage received in the course of the hunt and didn’t refer it to my companions. I gathered myself in my country estate when the afternoon fell and hoped to wrap myself in the smoke of a juniper bonfire. I singularly enjoyed that perfumed firewood and had gathered a sheaf of its branches when I returned from the hazardous incursion.
The aroma exhaled from the fire inspired in me a dominant intoxication and opened in my presence an avenue of monumental statues. The stylized heads exactly imitated those of the beasts stolen from my persecution.
I recognized, disconcerted, a passage from Thebes, the city of a hundred doors.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

Los celos del fantasma / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-09-30T00:01:00.002-04:00

The Jealousy of the Phantasm

I was barely twenty years old when I finished my studies in an ancient university. I have adopted the solemnity of its cloisters.
I returned to the town of my birth, situated amid a luxuriant vegetation, upon an inundated district.
I fell in love suddenly with a candid girl, of soft epidermis.
I discovered her sitting on a stone bench, beneath the flaccid leaves of a tree lashed by the drizzle. She had arrived furtively, wrapped up in the rags of the fog.
She disappeared from my side at the arrival of spring. I have my doubts whether she died from the palustral region’s insidious diseases or if it was only an aerial phantasm.
Wanting to die, I have left my nebulous island in search of danger. I suffered the uniformity of the sea in the shadow of the arrogant sails. I have seen without passion or interest the happiness of meridional ports. I wanted to attend the mourning of irreconcilable countries, shackled for centuries amid the ruins of an august civilization.
I have joined the most arrogant army. I have seen the Byzantine sign of the crescent on the red cloth of the pavilions and on the turban of the fatalist warriors.
A despotic pasha was ruling that throng. He took with him the women of his harem, subject to a perpetual vigilance. One of them accompanied the sound of the guzla with a monotonous song. She would have satisfied my feeling for the candid girl.
I determined to abduct her in the tumult of the first armed conflict and hide her very far from her tyrant, in my nebulous island. Her affection would have cured me of the old fantastical passion.
I witnessed the army’s disaster in the first battle. The enemy officers gallantly appeared from the heart of a cloud of smoke.
I was visiting the sites of greatest danger with my hands in my pocket, dissembling my interest.
I headed, on horseback, to where the woman awaited me. She had agreed to save herself with me when the crisis of defeat arrived.
The vanquished had been desperate to save the captives. I saw them dying, rolling in their own blood, wounded with a shot to the temple.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

El enviado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-09-27T23:25:00.003-04:00

The Envoy

The bard, afflicted by senescence, would clarify for the humble ones the calendar of fortunate and unfortunate days, work of his numen. He would enunciate to them healthy precepts for life and the work of navigator and farmer. He preferred, for his discourse, the vespertine tranquility, in days distinguished by the flowering of the thistle.
He spoke of himself as alive and active over the course of various human generations and superior in age to the holm oaks.
He was intruding in the house of the magnates. He had not been able to reconcile with them, despite his success with the mountain beasts.
He was pitying the indigent situation of his adepts and took them with him, to found a peaceful establishment, facing a fountain’s stone circle.
A lightning bolt was announcing the fortuitous exit from the water and the river would take shape along the way, fertilizing a bed of rushes.
He was able to put in order the strata of the city, anticipating the motives of discord. In accordance with his teachings, an intimate force gathers and sustains, around a center, the elements of each being of natural fabrication and he pointed out the case of the star and its separate points. Speaking of this fate, he would scrutinize in his hand a grain of sand the color of pearl.
He taught them the administration of milk from the herds and how to ferment it in wooden cubes.
He imposed on them the observation of a tolerant policy toward the people of the region and allowed them to start a war if one of three arrows tossed in the direction of the sun’s rotation fell fixed onto the floor. By means of this advice his nation came to grow from victory to victory.
He disappeared to die, always attentive to hiding the smallness of his human nature, and left climbing a ruinous hill, in the company of a grey bear.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

“Donde se acaba el misterio, se acaba también el impulso de la escritura” / Carmen Victoria Vivas

2011-09-24T01:14:00.010-04:00

“Where mystery ends, writing’s impulse likewise ends”

[Photo by Marcel Cifuentes]

Whether it’s a rigorous essay, a vulgarly provocative short story, or a poem, Roberto Martínez Bachrich always displays his devotion for the precise and unsettling word. Winner of the X Concurso Anual Transgenérico, for his book Tiempo hendido, a study of the life and work of Antonia Palacios, he anticipates that publication with the awaited release of his book Las guerras íntimas (published by Lugar Común), a collection of short stories fine-tuned in their structure, with unpredictable anecdotes and characters vitiated by their emotions.

Valéry sustained that the conclusion of a work is something accidental. In the presentation for your book Las guerras íntimas you commented that you would have been able to continue, for years even, your process of correction. What is it you achieved in those short stories that moved you to decide on their publication?
More than achievement, it’s always a matter, I think, of abandoning. That abandonment is, perhaps, the heart of the accident Valéry mentions. When I felt there existed a more or less closed book, that made sense, in some way, as a totality, that was when I decided to abandon it. If I hadn’t done that, as I mentioned on that day, I could have kept on polishing it for another decade, rewriting it, eliminating or adding stories; but the ten that were left, I’d like to think, are stories that can function, that lasted, remaining in the continuous selections and rewrites, that resisted and fought back, finally, against my manias. I’d like to think they were the strongest, the survivors of the debacle of rewriting, of the perpetual intimate war that is all writing. And, as Alfonso Reyes noted, we abandon what’s written, we publish so as to not spend our lives rewriting. So as to be able to, hopefully, turn the page, move on to something else.

In “Los colores oscuros” you narrate the execution of a perfect crime, despite the absence of weapons or a detective. Do you think this story responds to the structure of the crime genre, in that it, as Borges specified, “lives off the continuous and delicate infraction of its laws”?
It’s possible, but I wasn’t conscious of what you mention when I wrote it. Maybe it’s a crime story in reverse, speaking from Borges. Not the attempt to respond to the who, what, where, when and why of a determined crime, according to the classic credo of the genre, but rather a steady approach at the hands of the characters and following a meticulous chain of lies to perpetuate a crime. That story, actually, emerged after reading Cortázar’s “The Health of the Sick.” I tried to revert the structure of that masterful story. At its heart it’s nothing more than a humble and almost invisible tribute to a monster of the short story to whom everyone, I think, owes so much.

In “Blanco” you dare to employ an obscure aesthetic, in a certain way the image of a type of cinema that delights in kitsch terror, but it’s a gesture that isn’t repeated in the rest of the book. Is this exception due to the fact that you wager in favor of a literature that disassociates itself from delighting in bad taste?
In general terms I’d say no.Although I’m not sure if this “no” sustains itself in Las guerras íntimas. I mean, I think bad taste is very important. At one time I tried, from the form of the short story, to draw a fierce praise of the vulgar, to travel the sinuosity of its landscape, bordering, naturally, alongside the “powers of bad taste.” I don’t know if at that time I achieved it or not, but I think in this book I separated myself a bit from that. Regarding “Blanco,” from a very young age I’ve been an impenitent reader of supernatural horror literature. Stories like those of Poe or Lovecraft were fundamental in my formation as a reader. And I always wanted to write a story like that, a Lovecraftian story whose center would be a terrifying scene beyond the order of rational logic. The central moment of that tale came out of an image, the decapitated nurse, which recalls those types of films you’re talking about, movies that, I confess, entertain me a great deal. From that scene and the sinister one that it unleashed came the totality of the story. I think that more than achieving a story of supernatural horror, I was barely able to reach the texture of a fantastical tale. But if we consider that it’s a fantastical tale, it wouldn’t be so alone in the book. When I reached the final version of Las guerras íntimas, I wanted to make sure that, despite the apparent variety of themes and narrative registers, each story had a type of pair, a sibling story, mirror story. In that sense, the twin figure of “Blanco” would be “Densidad de las mesas,” which is very removed from supernatural horror, but does sympathize with the fantastic and the absurd.

“Sifilíticos e integrados” tells the story of a search for revenge after a heartbreak that emerges during the contagion of a venereal disease. An admirable plan whose execution depends on the complexities of those involved. Is that what interests you: an ingenious anecdote that will allow you to rummage around in damaged subjects?
I’d have to disagree a bit with you in such a reading. I don’t feel like ingenious anecdotes are my strength. I feel like in my stories these are, in general, pretty simple, very common. Maybe something in the events of “Sifilíticos e integrados” might seem obscure, but if we think about how the majority of youthful love dramas and, when the case fits, how bitterness and plans for revenge revolve around that orbit and are tinted, almost always, with those shades, the narrative loses all its strangeness or it’s not so unfaithful to the mirror of the real and the apparent. I don’t think that story and many of the others are concentrated exclusively on damaged subjects and in the evil? perverse? taste for rummaging in those wounds. I think that in the plot of the revenge, all that has failed and defeat are fundamental. And that implies and reveals a certain degree of tenderness, of human warmth in these characters. I was looking, in one way or another, to endear them to the reader. The end, as well as the rigorous choice of certain words, point in that direction: it is, in its own way, a happy ending, right? Maybe it’s true that an author is the worst reader of his own texts. But that’s also the beauty of the act, the gesture of writing. The what and why of the written turns out to be a mystery for one. Darkness, the nebulous, these always have a great weight. And I think that’s fortunate. Where mystery ends, writing’s impulse likewise ends. The “kingdom of the known,” I like to think, is fatal for a fiction writer.

{ Carmen Victoria Vivas, Tal Cual, 24 September 2011 }

Lay / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-09-23T00:01:00.001-04:00

Lay

The king permitted the beggars to make themselves comfortable at the foot of his throne, on the steps of a staircase. He attended to their requests and was pleased to discover the veiled interest in their absurd stories.
The natives of the kingdom lived disseminated in the countryside or gathered in their humble villages. The battle crow had suspended its flight in the tarnished atmosphere. It reminded the new generations of the greatness of Artus.
The clement king had regretted consenting to the refuge of the miscreants in the churches and cemeteries. They were using the guarantee of asylum to steal. He ordered their exile through the closes port and they departed, humiliated to the point of imploring charity, each of them carrying crosses.
The king was rarely mistaken in tasks of governance when he observed his own discernment. He would become delirious when he incurred in the weakness of consulting a voice born in the heart of a mausoleum. He dared not emancipate himself from Merlin’s command.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

Los 25 secretos mejor guardados de América Latina: Roberto Martínez Bachrich

2011-09-21T00:01:00.010-04:00

The 25 Best Kept Secrets in Latin America: Roberto Martínez Bachrich

“I work tirelessly because I have so many doubts: I rewrite each text in an obsessive, maniacal manner. And I publish very little, out of respect for the readers.
I’m interested in domestic, intimate universes, rummaging and imagining how in unexpected corners of the quotidian an extreme, overwhelming situation can emerge, suddenly. The monstrous dimension of certain minor, private epics is what most attracts me about writing a story.”

Biography

I was born in a warm and tranquil city. Beside a river and an hour from the sea. Affectionate parents, great siblings and multiple dogs, cats, fish and turtles, surrounded my initial voyage.

Since childhood I was an impenitent reader. And without knowing it, maybe as a natural consequence of reading so much, I got sick with writing. Today I make my living teaching literature classes and editing books or magazines. It’s the only way, up to now, of doing something related to what one likes and being able to live off it. And, meanwhile, of course, I read, imagine, write. From that work, delicious and hard, my books have emerged; three short story collections, Desencuentros (1998), Vulgar (2000) and Las guerras íntimas (2011); a collection of poems, Las noches de cobalto (2002) and an essay, Tiempo hendido (2011).

People ask me why anyone should read me. I don’t have the slightest idea. I suppose the world, in a strict sense, doesn’t need to read me. I can’t offer anything that others, with better tools, haven’t already offered to literary space. They should read Kafka and Dostoyevsky, Melville and Camus. Conrad and Flaubert, Poe and Chekhov. Reyes, Paz and Picón Salas, Cortázar, Bolaño and Ribeyro. Ramos Sucre and Gerbasi, Cadenas and Gramcko.

But from reading them so much, one ends up writing. And maybe a reader can find tributes, clues, roads plowed for the re-encounter with great voices, in what one, humbly, scribbles. Or better said, wanting to establish the fact that they’ve always accompanied me. Literature, Borges said already, hasn’t done anything new for centuries. Since the Bible, Homer and Dante, we always tell the same three or four stories. But I feel that it’s important to tell them again. Over and over. It’s an exercise in resistance and continuity: a silent tribute. Maybe, just like it’s important to keep telling these stories, it’s also important that we keep reading them. Renewed, from other angles, other visions of the world. It’s what little I can say to whomever might want, graciously, to read my papers. I wish my short stories could accompany any reader, just as so many works by others have accompanied me. The dialogue is endless. The axe keeps coming down, as Kafka requested, on the frozen sea. And that’s the happiness, the beauty, I think, of continuing to write, continuing to read.

Literary Fragment

Fragment from “Aguas perdidas, aguas encontradas.” Taken from Las guerras íntimas (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2011).

“Ricardo and Luisiana enter the vortex fearlessly. I go more slowly: I think, doubt, wait. I swim a few feet backwards and forwards. At times you can catch a glimpse of a foot or a head in the jumble. Something stops me from the other side. I take a deep breath, submerge myself, come out again. I watch the passage to the other shore slightly horrified. It would be fantastic if the sea were to calm down a bit. To go on swimming without setbacks: with no shame, no glory. But it won’t happen. I turn my back to the uneven ground. I stare at the horizon. The sea isn’t as beautiful when you’re inside, absolutely alone, separated from the shore by a swarm of furious waves. I tell myself, enough fucking around, and dive into the water, deep down, foam and shoving. Just before going in again I take another deep breath: my lungs swell and my heart accelerates. A wave passes, another one returns. One comes, another goes. I embark on that one and move my feet and hands at full speed. I need to slide from one wave to another before they break in the crash. An impossible endeavor. I feel the scream underwater. A thousandth of a second before I feel it with my whole body, I feel the scream of two waves crashing against each other. And there’s no time to assimilate the sound. My body already belongs to the wave: it’s already pushing me from one side to another, it’s already turning me into a miserable rubber doll, turns me around like a rotisserie barbecue, it makes me lose my hearing, stuns me, scares me. I’ve heard many times that you have to let yourself be dragged a while before getting out onto shore. It’s a well-processed fact, it’s almost a reflex. But I let myself be kneaded by the waves a few seconds without understanding which one’s the precise moment for escape. And my breathing starts to fail me. Then I forget my body’s flaccidity and become rigid, I start to kick the waves, to swim, seeking the surface. The sea beats me down and my race is useless. I lose all sense of orientation and swim without knowing where I’m headed. I look for the light and I think I see it to my left. I accelerate and swim, but another wave crashes over my head. I swallow salt, my mouth fills with sand. I can’t open my eyes anymore. I make another effort and start to swim desperately in any direction. And my hands suddenly touch ground, preceding my head which crashes against the bottom. That’s where I understand what fear is. I turn around and push upwards with my feet. It’s a brief ray of hope knowing that now there’s an up and a down: maybe you always have to touch bottom before being saved. I swim toward the light dazed, it seems like the surface is approaching. And right there, when the episode seems to have ended, a new wave massacres me from above. All hope drowns within me. My body loses the sky again and twirls underwater at the whim of each wave. That’s where I understand what horror is. But suddenly the noise ends. It’s a matter of seconds, but the stupefying murmur of the waves crashing one after another stops. The sea grows quiet and plunges me into the silence. It’s a thick silence, a perfect symphony of quiet. I open my eyes and the earth that mixes with the waves seems to have disappeared: the sea has become completely blue. It’s a clean, whole, brilliant, transparent blue. It’s the bluest blue I’ve ever seen. It’s a veracious, absolute blue. At that point I lose my fear and say to myself, almost with certainty, almost aloud though my mouth is sealed by the water, that I’ve died. And I understand it like you understand one plus one is two. Without fear. Without desperation. I’ve died. Like that, in past perfect. Like a real, finite, certain fact. I’ve died. And it’ll be a real shame, I think, because I’m young and stupid and I still wanted to do so many things in life. But I’ve died.”

(Feria Internacional del Libro de Guadalajara, 2011)

El lego del convento / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-09-20T00:01:00.001-04:00

The Layman of the Convent

When I traversed the roads of Italy, I had the fortune of receiving advice from Love himself, disguised as a pilgrim. No mortal, besides Dante, could count on that privilege.
He announced to me a solitary life and congratulated me for having listened to the woman with a child’s voice, without arriving at her presence. The prayer, a Eucharistic hymn, was being born in the darkness of the countryside and flying to lose itself in the immaculate ether.
I removed myself from the world and directed my contemplation to the very object of the sacred canticle. I renounced earthly applause and forgot the idle pursuit of art when my masters, the contemporary poets, were expressing the weariness of a generation decimated by the Napoleonic wars and Leopardi was gathering in his work the accent of the offended homeland.
I conserved the noble admiration for the woman from the lineage of Beatrice and came to serve in a Franciscan society, professing in her benefit holy mendacity. I imitate the incipient brother, administrator of the collections donkey in Manzoni’s perfect novel.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

El donaire / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-09-18T17:16:00.003-04:00

Elegance

The dwarfs were forging tridents for the marine divinities. They were teaching the natives of the quarry islands the art of fishing for sponges. They invented obsidian mirrors.
They occupied themselves with educating the nightingale and the kingfisher, the birds of happiness. They lived in plaster homes and only dared with the rabbits. They were exiled by a throng of caustic ants.
Aristophanes was pleased to refer, amid Homeric guffaws, the submersion of the dwarfs in a swamp after their fierce resistance in a forest of irises and saffrons.
The dwarfs would have emerged as victors without the animadversion of some cranes with incisive beaks, authors of incurable lesions.
The dwarfs ran to save themselves in the ship of the Argonauts and confessed the origin of their misfortune. They had imitated in a cheerful manner the steps of Empuse, a crippled larva, with donkey legs.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

La valentía / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-09-17T00:40:00.003-04:00

Bravery

The cleric keeps the violent mastiffs, clutched with the leash. He has gone over the pages of the epopee so as to assign them a genteel nickname. He directs the dogs to an inclement grandee, versed in the roundabouts of the hunt, emulator of the sun and obstinate in choosing it as a cypher of his vanity and sign of his shield.
The grandee is delayed in a simple village and his unsociable life and solemn ways motivate the birth and release of underhanded rumors. The mistrustful satellites live around him and under the empire of his inflexible voice.
The grandee attains a politician’s name in a seditious kingdom, in a century of monks and knights, deviating from feudal criteria. He is guarded from the assault of fortune by engulfing himself in the warnings of history’s drama and discovers solace from the pounding of the world in the images of a free romance.
The cleric marvels at the verve of the grandee, his will directed toward the domination of the earth and his affection for the unsettled of his fantasy. He deposits in his hands a fatuous legend, where he himself, author of capricious inspiration, levels conflicts by the ministry of chance.
The grandee once more displays irrepressible resolve. He suspends the interview with the cleric and steps away to suppress the sanguinary howl of the hounds, wounding them on their face with a bony hand.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

El viajero / Ramón Palomares

2011-09-15T02:30:00.004-04:00

The Traveler

I let myself look back,
drink a glass and laugh
in everything like the sky
and its toast of fine liquor over my head.

This is how I begin the delicious party
in which the fair
is transformed by my heart
pure, stripped of bad flavors
and matters of contempt.

I enter like this,
resembling the morning winner
or the bird that steals the final star.
This is my luck
and that’s how my dice turn out,
my cards amid the towels that rule chance.

A woman lights up this face
from very far.
Made by her love,
to her I owe the shine of my mouth
and the bath offered in my lips
when beauty possesses me.

Shine so tall in my praise her breasts,
may they become the immortal iris.

Friends, deserters of the leap,
escapees from the honey of the game.

In what part, disseminated,
do the little past glories
sow the years with company
and cry, from nostalgia?

At each day
the sky thickens
and the ships move slowly.

Let us extend this love
and the only dew of kisses.

A toast, a toast to you,
precious love, gone
or coming
or nevermore.

And though this red rose die
and my forehead be crowned one day by the white rose
an intimate and purified pleasure will remain in the air.

No matter how much the airs don't call me
the aroma will live
and happiness will embroider the earth.

If you don’t know my name
my name is traveler,
who am unable to be the trinitarian flower.

But today I posses you, sun,
no less than the foam
or the hidden fish.

Time has passed since my father abandoned the city,
but my presence gives him credit.
And, constant,
the high mountains demolish the light,
and the horses play over the gold
under the final sun.

Brothers, how far,
what air so different do we breathe today,
at your wedding
Were there not tears?
Was the dress not stained by dawn
and did it not rain while we slept?

Does someone think of us
now, facing the plain,
when the descent of certain birds happens?

How long the afternoon
and given to meditation.
Soon, by the tree I look at beside night
dense shores will appear
brilliant toward the sky.

Because of all this I weigh
and compare at the pace of the winds
I see I must be somewhat sad.

But in an instant I blow out nostalgia
and pull happiness from myself
like the most beautiful flower from my body.

And at the pace of stars,
dead people
and disappeared events
I toast the hidden
the unknown birds of the next detour,
telling myself I will never return.

And that’s how I begin my adventure.

1958

{ Ramón Palomares, El reino, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2001 }

Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto / Edgardo Dobry

2011-09-11T01:42:00.004-04:00

Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto

Poetry. Lorenzo García Vega (Jagüey Grande, Cuba, 1926) was the youngest member of the group led by José Lezama in the Havana of the fifties, an experience to which he gave testimony in Los años de Orígenes (1997, published a second time in Buenos Aires in 2007). A book completely removed from self-serving memories and the trickle of prestigious names: García Vega speaks there of the “baroque boogie,” of “the lie of the French,” of “the opportunistic firmness of the farcical Latin American left.” Since, residing in Miami (which he indefectibly calls “Playa Albina”) for forty years now, he had to endure the unconditional support for the Cuban revolution, that condemned the true exiles of that Latin American chimera to ostracism; and the profuse mythology surrounding Lezama and the Orígenes group, against which he took revenge in that book. At once heir to this last resplendence of great Cuban poetry and marginalized, alone, without a tribune, a press or a professorship, García Vega wrote a series of desolate and funny poems, without pity or vain commiseration. Closer to Samuel Beckett’s convulsions of pain and laughter than to any neo-baroque rhetoric in use, there we have extraordinary, extremely unique books that have been published lately: El oficio de perder, No mueras sin laberinto, Devastación del Hotel San Luis. At eighty-five García Vega publishes this book made up of two blocks –Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto–, in a hybrid genre of prose poem, a sketch of chronicles of the void, fragmentary reflection removed from all systems. To the marginality of the exiled poet, of the man stripped of his destiny without receiving anything in return, sharply disillusioned of any fantasy of redemption (for him, for the world), he now adds the resentment of old age, received like a jovial mask: “Sitting at the living room sofa, at five in the afternoon –I didn’t do anything else (if before five in the afternoon you can say I did anything).” Or this: “A sad reality of this Playa Albina where I live. Drums, knick-knacks. What finally makes no noise, even if one spends the day playing the drum.” Play the drum: write the poem. Nietzsche said: “Nihilism is a type of idleness.” But a form of humanism persists in desolation, in the uncomfortable laugh, in the histrionic astonishment of true pain. If you want to know what forms truly contemporary poetry seeks in our language it is impossible not to read Lorenzo García Vega.

Erogando trizas donde gotas de lo vario pinto
Lorenzo García Vega
Ediciones La Palma, 2011
284 pages. 13 euros

{ Edgardo Dobry, Babelia, El País, 10 September 2011 }

Divagación / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-09-09T09:04:00.002-04:00

Divagation

I had waited for the spring equinox, the traditional day for the flowering of the daffodil.
The flower of metamorphosis had been honored in the annals of a just people with contrary luck.
I wanted to visit the relics of their home and advanced through the hollow of a dry river. From the languid branches of a thicket a few birds of bothersome warbling were taking flight.
I reclined near a decapitated statue. Its right hand gripped an ash tree spear, in accordance with its usage in the Iliad, and its round shield lay on the ground, shattered in pieces. On the socle read the name of an immortal artist.
I received the reward for my efforts and for my veneration of the vestiges of a simple age. A woman, a traveler in a car pulled by lions, invited me to her side and inspired a living confidence in me. Her image, with the same apparatus and decoration of the wild animals, adorned a hidden fountain and her name was that of the country during the most fortunate centuries.
She was pointing out for me the sidereal courses and speaking of the ulterior days, reserved for the bonanza. Her discourse had anticipated the arrival of night, with a phosphorescent canopy.
She altered at will the appearance of the circle and left me at the start of a fertile plain, where the beings offered themselves by the measure of man’s exiguity and the colors of the clouds were painted with the invalid tints of the matutinal twilight.
A horse with two white feet, of solar lineage, was dominating the territory and scanning it from a height. Its bronze voice and the deep sound of its steps were determining in the distance the oblique escape of the wolf with the cursed barking.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

En días de Cartago / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-09-05T02:12:00.016-04:00

In Days of Carthage

I

The sands and the sea extend indefinitely beneath the tower, nailed like a dart. The watchtower feels that the salty gust around it is mixed with the vapors from the desert. Without moving from its place, it dominates the opposite routes, from where Carthage is threatened by the Roman fleet and the cavalry of the unfaithful Numidians.
The beautiful women rise in a noisy court to await the trace of danger. Sofonisba stands out with her strange beauty, her green eyes and dark hair. She reproduces the spell of her mother, a captive purchased in a fabulous northern island.
From her love, when it is ingenuous, hangs the fate of the homeland. According to the servant of a sanguinary divinity, the most ancient of the priests, for whom nature is transparent and the time to come frank.
But Sofonisba’s love oscillates like a weightless balance. She alternately councils her people in favor of the enmity or support of Sifaz, and of course inverts the spirit of Masinisa, his rival.
The two most divergent men agree on the object of passion. Sifaz fights through the arm of his captains, and cultivates politics in retreat. Masinisa tests the exquisite iron of his weapons in the burning and uncertain battles.

II

Carthage is bending under the disaster. Scipio threatens it with a tightened blockade. The youth have fallen with pity in Spain, the amassed and ferocious country, from whose wars there is no return. The ships idle in the port, cowed by defeat, eluding the combat they sought covered in bunting and swift. The corpses of the vanquished abound in the Mediterranean.
Sofonisba departs in a numerous cavalcade toward Sifaz, whose astuteness the republic needs. The guardians say that Masinisa does not dare withing reach of the war machines, by which the city defends its district. For some time now they have not recognized him under the new attire of his helmet finished off with a ponytail and his cloak shaped by lion’s leather.
The concourse advances toward the ambush, under the direction of a perfidious guide. A hundred men assault it suddenly from the rubble of a village. The guardians resist clumsily, struggling against the frightened beasts. Masinisa abducts Sofonisba and, amid the spears that stab tremulously, mocks the the clamor of her maidens.
Scipio applauds his ally’s move, and obsequiously praises the captive, who responds with dissembling passion. In her presence he forgets the habit of severity, changes his energetic countenance, disregards the voices of the senate.
Masinisa is sure he will irremediably lose his captive, and defrauds his rival with poison. Sofonisba dies, painlessly and in love, on a warm afternoon. That same night, the singular tumult of the winds, as it mimics the steeds’ gallop, augurs the return of combat.
The shame of having ceded redoubles Scipio’s patriotism. In front of the victim’s corpse, he praises the fortune that definitively levels his path.

La torre de Timón (1925)

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

“Quisimos ser voluntariamente críticos” / Gabriel Payares

2011-09-04T01:30:00.002-04:00

“We wanted to be voluntarily critical”

Thirty years have gone by since the appearance of the literary group Tráfico and its “Sí, manifiesto,” one of the country’s last and most cited poetic and collective shouts, arising from the heart of a society made drowsy by petroleum money during the eighties. Armando Rojas Guardia, founding poet of the group, looks back and evaluates what was undoubtedly a fundamental poetic experience in Venezuela’s literary development.

Most of the approximations of the Tráfico group coincide in seeing it as an attempt to restore a critical will of the intellectual toward power, which was lost during the years of petroleum boom. “To make more sincere the poet’s relationship with Venezuela,” stated the group’s manifesto. How do you perceive that need today?
Exactly, we emerged as a group in a historical context where that critical disposition in the face of power had become rather feeble. La República del Este represented that feebleness for us, that unnatural fraternity of a certain left with Miraflores Palace. It was the symbol of everything we didn’t want for the intellectual, for the writer and, specifically, for the poet. Seen retrospectively, however, the manifesto is saturated with a messianic voluntarism. We postulated that the poet had to go out into the street and create, write and publish a type of poetry that would approximate the average Venezuelan, and we were guilty of overlooking the fact that the divorce between poetry and the majority of Venezuelans isn’t the fault of poets, but rather obeys structural causes of a political, social, cultural and economic type. So, the idea that the poet had to go out to the ghetto, to the army base, to the factory, to the public plaza, to the parks, today sound to me like that messianic voluntarism, as if the qualitative change represented by a new perception of the poetic phenomenon and the role of the poet in society depended on the exclusive will of poets.

So Black Friday and the debacle in Venezuelan democracy that began with it meant the confirmation of Tráfico’s complaints?
Of course. We were talking about the petroleum-based democracy, and in a certain way we were echoing what Arturo Uslar Pietri called “Balthazar’s feast,” that dance of the millions that materialized in the “That’s cheap, gimme two” attitude of the Miami-centric Venezuela and the urban middle class. Black Friday came to be the sign of alarm that the decadence had begun, that the feast, if it hadn’t ended, was about to end. We wanted to speak consciously and voluntarily from the urban middle class, but without identifying ourselves with the majority of their stereotypes and with a great deal of their mental universe. We wanted to be voluntarily critical regarding those stereotypes and that mental universe.

Do you think the “critical realism” Tráfico proposed is something outdated, or do your still consider it a necessary path in Venezuelan poetry?
Each thematic focus in poetry involves its own procedures. When I wrote La nada vigilante I faced an intra-psychic problem for whose treatment the procedures postulated by the manifesto were of no use to me. I wanted to write about a psychic block, I wanted to write the poem of the impossible poem, I wanted to write about the impossibility of writing. That involved a stylistic procedure that didn’t have anything to do with Tráfico. The ontologizing psychology of Rafael Cadenas, Juan Sánchez Peláez’s critique of the world’s apparent reality by means of the primordial images of poetic dream or the philosophical-aesthetic preoccupations of Alfredo Silva Estrada, for example, require their own stylistic procedures that have nothing to do with what is postulated in the manifesto. In that sense, the wager for critical realism seems valid as an option to choose; the manifesto erected it as the only one possible and in that sense it’s a dogmatic and fanatical affirmation. Miguel Márquez has just made, in his latest book, Poemas de la Independencia y del escarnio, a stylistic experiment that hadn’t ever been done before in Venezuela and for which I can only remember as an antecedent a book by Ernesto Cardenal, El estrecho dudoso. Miguel takes historical texts and chronicles from the period of Independence and subjects them to a musical rhythmic treatment that places them in new dimensions, in the same manner as Cardenal takes some texts from the chroniclers of the West Indies: Fernández de Oviedo, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Bartolomé de las Casas, and obtains from them a distinctly poetic value. This experiment is inscribed within a type of critical realism that’s perfectly valid as an option, but not as the only legitimate one. In poetry, as in literature and social life, the plural game of options must have the final word.

So, did the experience of Tráfico stray in its subsequent writing journey?
Well, Yolanda Pantin was telling me a few weeks ago over the phone that all the poetry those of us from Tráfico make at this moment has nothing to do with what we postulated in the manifesto, except, of course, Miguel’s. I’m not sure that’s true. Igor Barreto’s poetry is one that maintains a surprising fidelity, in its procedures and in its style, to what was pointed out in the manifesto. I myself couldn’t have written a poem like “La desnudez del loco” without having passed through Tráfico. The collage technique I learned in Solentiname studying Pound –because every afternoon after five hours of manual labor in Solentiname I would devote myself to studying the collage technique Pound uses in The Cantos, or that T.S. Eliot uses in “The Waste Land,” or that Robert Lowell uses in his poetry–, I later applied to some of what I consider to be my best poetic texts. The same thing happens with the revaluing, which we claimed, of narrativity and in consequence of the anecdote; facing the mostly abstract, quintessential and impersonal poetry that was being written and published in the country, we felt that one of the specific means of bringing back to Venezuelan poetry an existentialism and committed and explicit subjectivity consisted in returning to narrativity, preferably autobiographical. Although it’s a poem written after Tráfico had already disappeared, “Retén judicial,” that text of mine included in Patria y otros poemas, carries the narrative imprint of the group’s poetry. We always acknowledged a slender but true tradition in what we were proposing at the time: the poetry of Víctor Valera Mora and the one represented in Copa de huesos by Caupolicán Ovalles and, to a degree, also in Oh smog and Ciudadanos sin fin by Juan Calzadilla. Likewise, we felt an affinity for the Alejandro Oliveros of El sonido de la casa, for Blas Perozo Naveda, William Osuna and the more narrative poems of Enrique Hernández-D'Jesús. As for Latin American poetry in general, we perceived ourselves as being very close to creators like Ernesto Cardenal, José Coronel Urtecho, Juan Gelman, Antonio Cisneros, Rodolfo Hinostroza, Mario Rivero, Jotamario Arbeláez, Luis Rogelio Noguera: all of them elaborate a poetry with room for local dialects, first names, colloquial turns, conversational diction, the incorporation of conventionally non-poetic elements in lyrical discourse, the first person singular, aesthetically calculated prose, the narrative. In the same way, we recognized the teaching represented by the so-called Spanish “poetry of experience,” whose greatest exponent was Jaime Gil de Biedma.

And what happened, as you see it, to the legacy of Tráfico in the subsequent collectives and poetic tendencies?
I’ve been leading poetry workshops on a weekly basis for eight years, I’m currently teaching three of them at once and I’m in touch with a good part of what young poets write and publish in the country. I wouldn’t say that Tráfico constitutes the fundamental reference point in the work of these poets; but it’s undoubtedly an important one in their mental map. In our effort to reconnect the poet with the audience, and in that sense to give poetry a new social dimension, in Tráfico we wanted to renovate readings. The poetry reading is today a currency widely in use, something that didn’t happen in the beginning of the eighties, when it was looked down upon, considered something for patron saint festivals, for high school cultural events and it was associated with declamatory affectation; so that we proposed to resuscitate that practice for the purpose of a new connection for the poet with the audience. Another undeniable conquest by Tráfico was its insistence on a poetry that would rescue the historical and the quotidian, the collective macro-history and the individual and existential micro-history of man in his daily life. We felt that the poetic orb within modern poetry where these elements were most explicitly displayed was that of American poetry. And if today poets venture into those themes, and even more if people are studying American poetry with new eyes, all that is due to Tráfico. Collections of excellent aesthetic quality such as Harry Almela’s La patria forajida and Armadura de piedra by Edda Armas, in which the country’s historical present stirs, I don’t think these are conceivable without the experience of Tráfico having acted on their creators at least as a mental reference point. And if we focus on what the youngest ones are writing, the extraordinary homoerotic poetry of Alejandro Castro, his irreverent ease, his wise and subversive irony, within which the urban atmosphere is a tacit but also an overwhelming presence, this isn’t explainable without the antecedent of Tráfico. The same can be said of the political and urban code in the marvelous poem called “Sexto mandamiento,” by Leonardo González Alcalá.

{ Gabriel Payares, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 9 July 2011 }

Ante “la diosa ambarina” / Antonio Puente

2011-09-02T00:21:00.005-04:00

Facing “the Amber Goddess”

“I already knew that coming to Europe this time of year wouldn’t guarantee anything,” he said to break the ice, glancing at the untimely whirlwind outside the large window of his humble room in Madrid. “Well, like any other time of year and any other place,” he concluded, with his proverbial causticity, the fist at the mouth of great shy people and, as in a cubist frame, on his lean Indian face, his piercing and astonished obsidian eyes. Emilio Adolfo Westphalen –whose death occurred a decade ago on August 17th, and his birth a hundred years ago in July– at the time was already more than an octogenarian; but only the publication, a few years ago, of his brief collected poems, Bajo las zarpas de la quimera (Alianza, 1991) –a clinical title, like the eye of his poetics, since it speaks simultaneously of finding oneself under the claws of the chimera and of how depressed one emerges from it– would make him emerge from his condition of enormous secret poet.

After his resplendent books of youth, Las ínsulas extrañas (1933) and Abolición de la muerte (1935), surreal and magmatic, he kept silence for more than forty years, to come back with a laconic and hermetic poetry by which to register the subsidiary character –no more than an “astonished somnambulist” subjected to the whims of the “the amber goddess”– granted by the poet’s task. A succession of epitaphs, ludic and incredulous, chiseled by a senile boy, he composes his books of old age –above all Belleza de una espada clavada en la lengua (1980) and Ha vuelto la Diosa Ambarina (1988)–; at times, as expressive as the mortal simile of this sudden railroad stop: “The train has stopped in the opaque and echoless silence of the anonymous night. It is the arrival at the terminus –there will be no resumption of agitation, noise or anxiety.” And, on occasion, with a point of redemption regarding his complete skepticism and condolence regarding human relations: “Irreconcilably linked / At the edge of desperation / Exchanging business cards.”

Why the great analogical blackout in the intermittence of his poetry? “I would say it left in a fortuitous manner because of perhaps necessary circumstances, and it reappeared afterward in a necessary manner because of fortuitous circumstances,” he answered my question, incorrigible, while, outside, the rain has remitted from the overflow that he himself tended to use in the poetry of his youth, and acquired the sober preventative rhythm he gives it in his old age; thus, in “Error de cálculo”: “The sea has slipped in the poem as in its cave or natural shelter without taking into account the difference of proportions. When the seams give in under the weight, where will all the accumulated bluegreen end up draining?” A retaining wall and, along the way, an affectionate and melancholic palinode regarding the delusions of grandeur of the youthful poet, are promoted by his later poetry. Tightens the saddlebags of he who cannot be anything more than a humble carrier of a “pocket apocalypse”; whose task does not go beyond “underlining emptiness.” This is why he abhored (at that point he did speak at length, when it stopped raining and the summer sun filtered through his bathrobe) the “kettle drums of rhetoric,” and sustained that “erudition is the poet’s main enemy.”

Facing poetry’s exclusive domain, the poet prays: “I am not –I will never be anything but an astonished somnambulist facing the dreadful Beauty of the Amber Goddess.
Nothing exists –nothing can exist beyond the Amber Goddess and her Beauty of a dazzling and lethal Medusa.” What’s more, the poem always comes up short when it faces that omnipotence of poetry: “What might the poem be if not a castle demolished before it is erected / Innocuous work of the diligent scribe or poetaster?”

In the beauty of the Amber Goddess (supreme face of Fate) the nimbus of death and the judgment of the woman-child coincide. The old poet from Lima confesses: “Sudden and irresistible desire to bite juicy coralline damp lips –to deliberately sink (but strongly –but implacably) my teeth in a half opened mouth (...) Hallucinating rite –but an instant more lived than any image plucked from oblivion.” And he soon notices that amber has appeared with the spontaneity of a gang of adolescents “with nubile bodies and minuscule breasts,” who, by merely jumping rope, take him to the agonized awareness: “Why would it always be tender girls who would mark him with the terrible iron of amorous anguish and dissatisfaction?” In compensation, Westphalen sends into the wind the most camouflaged and imperishable epitaph one might imagine: “To aspire to become those fallen leaves that burn in the pupils of certain mulatto girls.”

Antonio Puente (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1961) is a writer, journalist and literary critic. His latest publications are the poetry collections Agua por señas and Sofá de arena (Ediciones Idea).

{ Antonio Puente, Babelia, El País, 27 August 2011 }

Por la pradera diminuta... / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen

2011-09-01T00:01:00.004-04:00

Through the minute prairie...

Through the minute prairie of a voice floating in the airs
With the easy weight of the planets worn by the flowers
Amid the ensigns of the days uprooted and wandering
On a succession of seas marvelously cultivated
With the song of the birds as bed and trench of the barques
And the tail of the peacock as nimbus of the smallest things
The transparent shells the porcelain seaweed
The lopped off fingers of children and the born thimbles
Under the crust of mushrooms in the mud flats
In the tangled hair of a girl in the milky way
In the heart itself of music stepping
With the sun against our chests deepening
Letting blood run like a good river
Because the one I receive and the one you carry are the same
And the same thickets resound in our screams
And the same doves rest on our eyes
And the same flutes traverse us to establish our domain
Turning the moons over villages
And the serpents over forests
Bringing the sky over our venture
Its foam splashing our beaches
The feverish trees continuing their life in our veins
The poplar groves leaning to the compass of our hearts
You as the lagoon and me as the eye
That one and the other interpenetrate each other
So the tree and the breeze so the dream and the world
Taking depth from the night and from the day extension
To what caves fleeing against so much splendor
Day that never moves sky that walks for us
Rivers that don’t know how to wound and barques that crowd
our chests
The mouths float like zodiac signs
The arms cross like flowers on water
The foreheads follow the currents and the eyes separate
nothing
It is the flaming glory that rests in our bodies
Lifting over the atrocious battle of darkness and light
The ensign of the holy company and the still glances
It is glory fallen at our feet
It is triumph wounded like a subterranean twilight
Changing seasons in the core of the quicksilver
Like a rose drowned amid our arms
Or like the sea being born from your lips

Abolición de la muerte (1935)

{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }

Hoy día he visto a la Diosa Ambarina... / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen

2011-08-31T00:01:00.002-04:00

Today I have seen the Amber Goddess...

Today I have seen the Amber Goddess –the same complexion as amber– her eyes of blaze and shadows –incarnation of the only and perennial Beauty.
Her splendid Ire embraced my spirit –her funest Beauty stoked itself in my blood– her disproportionate Rancor and Hate were my glory.
I am not –I will never be anything but an astonished somnambulist facing the dreadful Beauty of the Amber Goddess.
Nothing exists –nothing can exist beyond the Amber Goddess and her Beauty of a dazzling and lethal Medusa.

{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Ha vuelto la Diosa Ambarina, Lima: Jaime Campodónico/Editor, 1989 }

Las palabras... / Emilo Adolfo Westphalen

2011-08-30T00:01:00.005-04:00

The words...

The words choose you for their sarabands (or their autos da fé).
In Poetry –we know– the “medium” is entirely subject to the dictates and whims of the Word.
Even in everyday life –who hasn’t felt himself dragged to where he would not have dared or foreseen? We would go too far nonetheless were we to confuse Poetry with Fate –the half-heard Word (at times incarnate) with resemblances of Destiny.

{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Ha vuelto la Diosa Ambarina, Lima: Jaime Campodónico/Editor, 1989 }

Mira el rostro blanco... / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen

2011-08-29T00:01:00.003-04:00

Look at the white face...

Look at the white face and black body of the Night until you stop perceiving the difference between whiteness and blackness.
Since you will only know Night if you lose yourself and disappear in the Night –if you become Night.

{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Ha vuelto la Diosa Ambarina, Lima: Jaime Campodónico/Editor, 1989 }

“Yo soy lo efímero...” / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen

2011-08-28T00:37:00.004-04:00

“I am the ephemeral...”

“I am the ephemeral” –he said to himself– “I will cover myself with the poem to hide it.”
He hibernated like that for centuries and wasn’t even awakened by the indiscreet trumpets convening discredited resurrections.

{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Ha vuelto la Diosa Ambarina, Lima: Jaime Campodónico/Editor, 1989 }

Westphalen / César Moro

2011-08-27T14:38:00.004-04:00

Westphalen

Like a watering hole for indelible beasts
Split by the lightning overflowing the water
Reflects the migration of earth birds
In the night of the salubrious earth

A front door closed over a barren field
Refuge of clandestine love
An equality of stone that closes under
The drop of water that rises from the earth

Over hundreds of decapitated heads
A naked woman like a lamp

Makes the eyes of the dead shine
Like fish of trails of argentiferous little fibers
Gold and steel know their destiny
Of rotten earth the pullulating jungle
Accompanies him and pours over the shoulders
Of ghosts familiar arborescent mantles
Cascades of blood and myriads of noses

10 of January of 1938

{ César Moro, La tortuga ecuestre y otros textos, ed. Julio Ortega, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976 }

Del suburbio / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-08-25T00:45:00.001-04:00

From the Suburb

Misery had reduced us to a basement. I was suffering at each step the censure of my faults.
I conserve the satisfaction of not having offended my consort or my children when they moaned in the darkness. Vice did not deny me compassion.
They became ill and died from an indecipherable, torpid sickness. A fever, an effect of unhealthy living, suppressed their sense.
I have consoled myself recalling the agony of the surviving boy. He imagined with a great deal of vivacity the climate of that day, the first of the year, and pointed out the purple sun and the naked sky. A figure was seducing him from a quick sled, with little silver bells.
His mother had described for him a similar scene before abandoning him in this world.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

Santoral / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-08-17T16:33:00.004-04:00

Book of Saints

The monk lives in the cavern, originated from preterite assaults by the sea. The vehement water was able to practice an opening in the rock.
The jagged coast, dawn of so many waves, is the orle of the closed night’s mantle.
The creatures’ aspiration for the infinite becomes anguished under the weight of the shade. They divine and feel the circle of a captivity.
Informous beings slip through the fluid air. They are agents of evil, previous to the origin of the earth, more powerful in the changing of the season.
The monk is surrounded by the temptations of fear. He attends the midnight work, learned from a secretive brotherhood.
The sky’s succor banishes those powers that are enemies of light. It is manifested in the deep and spacious thunder, in the intermittent lightning bolt.
The monk’s face forever preserves the stupor of this night of prodigy.

La torre de Timón (1925)

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

Chávez y el nuevo arte del melodrama / Israel Centeno

2011-08-15T12:58:00.043-04:00

Chávez and the New Art of Melodrama

The president’s cancer is the theme of the latest chapter of the great Bolivarian soap opera where nothing’s missing: the trip to Cuba; truth and lies; chemotherapy and the caudillo’s epic battle against illness

Norberto Ceressole, probably the first media consultant and scriptwriter for the Bolivarian Revolution, profiled the media format of a neofascist venture. Once the media had been assaulted an intimate relationship would be established from the realms of power between Hugo Chávez and others through screens, newspaper headlines and the then-incipient Internet; the emotional tie between caudillo, Armed Forces and the people would be created. The lieutenant colonel, star of two bloody military disturbances and a successful electoral process, would assume the direction and acting of an epic telenovela.

The episodes have been innumerable. In just a decade 1,995 obligatory TV and radio broadcasts have been transmitted. The Venezuelan revolution didn’t have a triumphal entry into Caracas nor did it assault the Romanov’s Winter Palace. From the start the populist exploit was expressed live and direct in an open studio and set up for the broadcast of an eternal spectacle; scene after scene. The Pretty Revolution wins ratings and livens the melodramatic dialectic between individuals, political parties, religious believers, media owners, business executives, heads of State, housewives, military personnel, Hollywood actors and directors –Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Danny Glover, etcetera–, and with that entelechy named the people. There’s room for everyone in what’s beginning to be called the great Bolivarian soap opera.

We could highlight some of its famous chapters: The Constituent. The Treacherous Brothers. The Coup. The Return. The Strike. You’re Fired. Military Officers in the Plaza. Fidel and the Sea of Happiness. Referendum. Fraud? Bonanza. Iran and me. It Smells Like Sulfur Here. Plebiscite.

The most recent frame is titled Cancer.

Exterior daytime: the president leaves to go on tour, he waves goodbye at the door to his plane, shakes his immense humanity before the cameras. Second frame: trip through South America. Third frame: short layover in Havana to say hello to Fidel.

Meanwhile, far from the cameras: Venezuela is immersed in a disproportionate electricity crisis, shortages. Violent crimes and prison riots.

Plot in Havana: the brief visit of a few hours turns into the disappearance of the hero. The ministers go to Havana and return to Caracas, they don’t conceal a bias of worry, someone lets the word illness escape. The Minister of Information denies the rumor in the social media: “Chávez is healthy as a horse.” This affirmation is enough for the news-centered murmur about his health to respond chaotically. Some representatives from the Government party admit it, others deny it.

The first truth: Fidel gives part of it; the president commander has had an emergency operation for a pelvic abscess. Opportunely, the word cancer is filtered out of nowhere and it bubbles through all the cracks of the national show. The atmosphere resembles a trading floor. Each person has his own diagnosis: prostrate, intestine; metastasis.

Opening of dramatic comment: official denial. The president is healthy. A medical report is demanded amidst a reactive stampede. The official realm maintains ambiguity, but lets us see a dispute for the succession. Adán, the president’s brother, calls for a fight that will transcend the electoral field; the opposition points to a vacuum of power and demands respect for the Constitution; the country founders as if nothing were happening, scarcity, insecurity, the everyday as a backdrop.

Second truth and prognosis: Fidel appears on the scene once again and sentences: Hugo Chávez has cancer and he will beat it. The exaltation is generalized, no one wants to refrain from commenting, all the media platforms are activated. The enthusiasts say that for the first time in many years the country dares to think of a reality without Chávez. The pollsters sustain that the president’s media absence will damage him irreversibly. (Aside: Venezuela burns.)

Third truth: Hugo Chávez appears. Little is left of the corpulent and enthusiastic commander. He’s lost some pounds and is gaunt. He’s wearing a tracksuit like his mentor; he admits he’s waging a battle against a terrible illness. The man who shouted Socialism or Death!, despite his circumstances points out that the slogan is life. I Will Live, We Will Live! (Unanimous compassion.)

After a brief period of uncertainty, of ups and downs in rumors, the compassionate unanimity is broken and Venezuela accuses unease regarding the sensation that Havana is the new seat of power. Fidel surprises and declares: Chávez is going to surprise Venezuelans. President Chávez arrives at Simón Bolívar Airport at dawn, he’s greeted there by a multitude of cameras and microphones, he goes to the Balcony of the People at the presidential palace where he is televised in front of the multitudes and tells his truth. In his narrative he’ll make each crucial moment of his battle for life coincide with the events of the Bicentennial of Independence, he’ll superimpose an individual system of symbols over the key points of the emancipation.

Thinner but energetic, he tells how on June 24th, day of the Battle of Carabobo, he’ll wage the battle for his life in the operation room; on July 5th, day of the signing of the declaration of independence, he manifests his need to live in power until 2031, because the revolution has barely begun. He replaces slogans and questions the color red as the only symbol of his revolution. The three phases of his recovery process coincide with the phases of the consolidation of the liberation process he leads. Like Bolívar in Pativilca he has decided to rise and conquer. The multitude shouts: Rest, President! The ministers cry, the celebration of the bicentennial of Independence begins, but the emancipation disappears as a central figure of the spectacle. The cameras focus on registering the epic military processions, the nationalist holocausts, the recreations of great moments of the homeland around the figure of a Bolívar reincarnated in the struggles of commander Hugo Chávez against his illness.

He returns to Havana to receive a dose of chemotherapy. Heroes and villains check their numbers. Upon returning he declares that Fidel told him: “Boy, you don’t have anything anymore, you’re gonna live.” (Ovation.) “I was scanned by a spectacular apparatus and not a single malignant cell was found.” (More ovations.) From that moment he takes to the media again (did he ever abandon it?). On an obligatory TV and radio broadcast of all national media he will perform his exercises, take his pills in the middle of pious litanies, display his fighting spirit attacking the unity of the opposition: he challenges imperialism, promotes the fight against sectarianism, tends bridges toward the middle class and fractures the logic of his adulators: “They’ve forced me to wear red and that’s suspicious.” The audience receives news, he’s “getting rid” of his hair. Two sequences later, he appears with his head shaved and shows off his new look for the empire.

Cancer becomes a terrible telenovela with universally high ratings.

A revolution that needs an epic reveals the difficulties of its caudillo. His fight against the oligarchy, coups, colic, the empire and now the olympic struggle against a terminal illness. The sick art of governance. The leader confuses the social I with his own self, he becomes the creator of reality. He breaks reason, breaks the pacts of verisimilitude without any consequence in his acceptance. Truth ceases to matter and what is of interest is what occurs around a suspended truth, a truth that will never be known, an indefinable, postponed truth. Hugo Chávez has added techniques to the manipulation and integration of messages: the caudillo rides the new communication platforms, fractures his audience’s frontal lobe and injects emotional suspense into the limbic zones of the collective brain.

Many chapters of the TV soap opera have yet to be lived. New sessions of chemotherapy and afternoons in Havana beside Fidel are to come; both of them will consider the staging of a glorious agony, they’ll comment on Nietzsche and caress the idea of Zarathustra’s rebirth. Before Hugo, truth was the first victim of absolute power, now he has shifted the paradigm, the end of the melodrama will no longer be the revelation of a truth but rather the acceptance of a lie. The truth will sit beneath the surface like a detail as long as there’s a scriptwriter and actor to trivialize and disperse it in thousands of farces.

Israel Centeno is a Venezuelan writer.

{ Israel Centeno, El País, 15 August 2011 }

Los gafos / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-08-14T13:03:00.006-04:00

The Lepers

The night was concealing the low, inundated seaboard. A few birds were crossing it on foot and animating it with their screams. They were matching the filth of the harpies.
I had gotten lost amid the cabins disseminated in an irregular manner. I was followed by an escort of sinister dogs, unfit for barking. A legend marked them as descendants of a race of hyenas.
I did not want to call at the door of one of the neighbors. They had grown ill after ingesting the corrupted fruit of the sea and earth and displayed a painless crust instead of epidermis. They would alter it with pierced drawings, of augural inspiration. The clothes were similar to a cover and they held them in place by means of bandages and strips, reproducing, unwittingly, the dressing of mummies.
The lines of a mountain ridge were pronouncing themselves in the air’s thickness. They gave room, beforehand, to the apparition of a perspicacious moon. A spasm, that of a decapitated man’s head, would animate the elements of its physiognomy.
The satellite had ceased illuminating the fishermen’s seat, likeness of a hospital. I headed to where it would appear in another time and waited for it without any result. I stopped in front of a precipice.
The sick judged themselves unhappy within the darkness and abandoned themselves until dying.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

El selenita / José Antonio Ramos sucre

2011-08-12T12:47:00.003-04:00

The Selenite

I would not know how to distinguish, in the most accurate nautical cards, where the island of my captivity was to be found. It must appear with the name of a reef.
The moon was depressing its flight through darkness and inspiring the illusion of starting from an impenetrable tower. I reclined on its pulverulent staircase and was put to sleep by a bison shepherd’s fife. I dreamed of a maiden from other ages and a vestige of her brief sojourn on the island of torrents. The relic of her step, hidden in some forgotten debris, could restore me to the heart of the civil world.
I ignore if I had awoken when I took on the chimerical demand, the path of the sierra. I did not let myself be frightened by some beautiful and irascible women, gathered in tumult and armed with nettle stalks and branches.
The spell of the fife was suspending me in the air and I was flying, changed into a light substance, over the rocks and precipices. The island was deserted and the solemn remainders of a deceased race did not yield anywhere save for the peak of the unscathed mountains.
I found a gold ring, the augured garment, amid the ruins of an alcázar, cavern home, where the boom and smoke of lightning still circulated.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

La alianza / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-08-11T14:22:00.004-04:00

The Alliance

I was listening to sobs through light and variable sleep. They could not be coming from my deserted house nor from my neighborhood disseminated in a spacious area.
I lived in front of an old plaza, submerged in the penumbra of some dry trees, of an elemental drawing. They revealed a scaly bark and their sharpened leaves of corneous tissue, similar to flaccid ribbons, had ceased to create sap.
A messenger arrived from far away, at daybreak, to tell me the new misfortune. He had devoured the distance, riding an impetuous horse, of gallant armor. I admired the stirrup of Arabic usage.
My tutor and counselor’s daughters remembered me when they found themselves destitute. Death wounded him secretly amidst the night’s thickness and the sounds of its burlesque minstrel flute revealed the disgrace and propagated consternation.
I had forgotten in a chamber of pulverulent furniture the carriage of my youthful excursions. I reached the home visited by calamity, after reestablishing the chassis and wheels in more than one spot in the dried up countryside.
The women came to greet me, solemn and emaciated in the manner of sybils. They had reserved for me the ceremony of spreading the fistful of lime over the face of the deceased, a resemblance of some rite of the gentiles in obsequy of the infernal pilot.
I was sealing in this manner the agreement of an immutable grief, without forcing my language exempt of effusion and grace. I faithfully attend the daily responsory in the family oratory and add my voice to a sad psalmody.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

Nagasaki (en el corazón) / Gabriel Payares

2011-08-08T01:25:00.006-04:00

Nagasaki (In the Heart)

for Ednodio Quintero

Man lives everything all at once, for the first time, and without preparation. As if an actor were playing his role in the show without any type of rehearsal. But what value can life have if the first rehearsal for living is life itself?

MILAN KUNDERA
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This would never have been the city I would have chosen for my old age. If some emissary of destiny had consulted me about the matter, my finger would have pointed without hesitation to the East, to distant cities in an improbable country, to places where being a foreigner and reaching maturity are, at the end of the day, indistinguishable conditions. I feel a sincere mistrust toward cities such as this one, built on the constant memory of the fall; a city where you wander with the sensation that any unexpected stumble could mean violently rolling toward hell, without anything to prevent the body from falling like a boulder. This vertigo is surely the source of the confident way of walking of those born in these mountains: they grip the asphalt closely with each step and never look back –below– unless they’ve reached their destination. Only then do they allow themselves a quick glance toward the abyss. And it’s just that their eyes, fixed on the ground, don’t seem made for looking toward the sun, but instead toward their own shadow on the earth that feeds them, the same one that will eventually receive them in its arms.

Though I inhabit my own exile amidst them, the product of bad decisions taken in even worse moments, I don’t tend to really complain too much: I’ve always been able to abandon these steep corners with the frequency and impetus of the moment, with that gesture of a human boomerang that for years pursues a distant homeland and doesn’t manage to return with anything save a few postcards and a couple rolls of film. And in the end you grow tired of betting everything on the debauchery of the trip; I often ask myself if homeland might not just be that soft ground in which it hurts the least to grow our final roots, and home the place you choose to welcome death. My problem is that I’m a descendant of a much warmer lineage than this one, conceived during the restless galloping of the plains, among distances measured with the wind and a father who would predict the drizzle with just a glimpse of the vultures in the distance. I come from a family that raised other people’s horses. I preferred to teach literature.

My classes are the only thing that give me oxygen from day to day. The passion and curiosity that once threw me headfirst into reading have been dying over the years until becoming soft embers: ideal for cooking and digesting, but of a barely notorious presence. My students, on the other hand, semester after semester exhibit the sterile flame that characterizes one’s twenties, that time when males pursue thoughtlessness and women a substitute father whose heart they might destroy. And literature, that odious and untouchable object, at once serpent and charmer, is the site from which I contemplate their epidermic passions, with a mixture of desires and emotions that I’ve preferred to think of as envy. I continue to be amazed, year after year, by the nearly identical reaction I obtain from them when reading certain poets, almost always the same ones: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ramos Sucre. Always those three, in any order. Kids are exceedingly enthused by the suffering of the figure of the poet, the daring their verses display and the tragic fate that awaits them. They love death, an abstract concept without any real ties to their existence, and they name it in nearly all their final essays. I wish you could maintain that romantic vision of fate throughout life, instead of this blind panic at the disappearance of the senses.

In class I often explain that life, were it not for memory, would barely be a brief alternative to emptiness: each daybreak would always be the last, but each verse we read would always be the first. My students pretend to understand, they nod and wrinkle their brows; but I know you need a great deal of mastery in the art of losing to understand the deceitful web of memory: what Dalí saw in melted clocks, a ductile and deceitful time that promises to leave us eternally in our own and same point of departure. We’re terrified, deep down, that death might be the only memory impossible to formulate; we’re terrified that we can’t even dream it.

“But poets can, professor,” her voice interrupts me and I direct my glance to the end of the classroom, stumbling on her face for the first time. It’s not hard, doing so: each classroom holds about thirty different kids and I’m in charge of three simultaneous courses. But among the ninety or so students that year, none has given me the first impression she does, nor has anyone ever known how to answer anything, besides repeating what I said minutes before, or at most asking impudent and insistent questions, which must be pulled out from the roots in order to proceed with the seeding and plowing. Maybe it’s my own foreignness, reflected in her citrine factions or in her elongated eyes and vowels, that immediately seduces me about her; something in her gestures seems to invite me to play, a certain ingenuousness that has already abandoned its larval stage, a pupa of future perversions, and offers itself to me with an air that is irreverent and sweet at the same time, like an angry grimace in a declaration of love. Or maybe it’s her eagerness for recognition, a veiled promise of another type of seduction. I don’t know. I immediately assent, not knowing if I’m supporting her intervention or my own ruminations, and with the cruel determination power endows I ask her to share with the class some example of what she’s saying. My inquisitorial tone intimidates her, she doesn’t know whether to back down or wave a banner. She finally traces a line in the sand: she timidly names Ramos Sucre. That would have been the appropriate instant for agreeing with her with a condescending gesture and letting her run like rain. But no: I prefer to indulge myself and contradict her for long enough to get her excited about writing a final essay on the poet from Cumaná. I tell her, as a game, that if she manages to convince me about her point she’ll get the highest grade; but otherwise she’ll have to retake my class. She accepts without a pause. I understand, looking back at the moment, that she does this under the impulse of some secret and Artemisal instance, an inner voice that convinces her she can’t lose in this wager, that it’s a game of fools, won at the very instant I formulate it.

And that’s how things happen, with a subtle violence we both seem to propitiate. Although precarious, my command of her tongue is sufficient to initiate a game of mirrors: translation implies knowing how to reflect oneself in the other and both of us seem very willing to peek into the opposite corner. A couple of timid conversations, under the excuse of coffee, leave the panorama sufficiently open for us. But reluctant to interpret the unpleasant role of a Lolita, we keep our lips as free of chalk as possible. Our encounters occur far from the academy, vertiginously sheltered in the excuse of chance and the small city, until they become nights that close in a spiral, as if spinning, falling toward my apartment and my bed.

Within a few days, her company becomes notably pleasing: she never asks about my divorce, although she often imprisons the mark of the ring on my finger between her teeth, nor does she allude to the faces on my few photo frames, despite the fact that many of them are roughly her age. I let her wander through my memory with the delicacy of a cat, indifferent to everything except my vocation for the Far East, a trait that soon becomes evident in my disorganized library and at times seems to call her attention. While she browses the bookshelves, briefly checking out one book or another with the air of confidence recognition brings, I ask myself if some of those names make her feel more at home perhaps, if her parents might have named one of them during dinner or if they read their last names aloud in the newspaper. But I don’t dare ask; youth always carries its homeland between its legs. In any case I prefer to contemplate her path with discretion, entertaining myself with her air similar to arrogance, a respect like that of the conqueror who inspects aboriginal ruins. I’m grateful for that silence to a certain degree, the false side of the coin, because it provides me with additional time for the memory: that time she still has plenty of, since she still has too many memories left to build.

We ignore each other during the day, so far from the other that her nocturnal visits seem to be the echo of fortunate dreams. And though I never dare attempt it, I have the constant sensation that the slightest gesture of indiscretion on my part would unleash a wrathful response from her, who knows if even some type of public denunciation for harassment; as if the day erased in her the naked traces of the previous night in my parquet. Her interventions in class continue, likewise, discreet and distant, playing to perfection her role of star student; sometimes I have the impression she is two completely different people. Everything about her is peculiar: she hardly shows any interest in luxury and the experiences it might be able to offer her, closed off to the perspective of traveling or going out together beyond our nocturnal hunts, or even to receiving gifts other than books or some minor detail. I’m also baffled by the absence of a young and jealous boyfriend who might make our romance difficult: after all she’s an attractive girl, endowed with an unusual beauty, contrary to the voluptuousness of the tropics; but a solitary girl above all, whom I never see forming part of a group, or involved in parties, or establishing any type of lasting connections. One would say she knows she’s transitory, indisposed to allowing herself to lay anchor among us.

As the days pass, however, her barriers give way, almost imperceptibly showing me softer zones, with the same urge of the bee that has stuck its stinger and runs the risk of tearing its own belly if it tries to fly off. Too old to not realize it, I leave the dagger at the bottom of my pocket, certain that she’ll be the one who’ll try to plunge it in first: sooner or later she’ll know who I am and where I come from, why I suffer and with what ghosts I speak while I sleep; sooner or later she will have conquered everything and she’ll grow bored with lending me her body. I know very well seduction consists in maintaining a shadow of mystery in what you reveal, in withholding a little from everything you give so as to keep the other waiting for the missing crumb; because ignorance is conducive to love as much as understanding mutilates it. But even though when you reach your fifties you resign yourself to occupying your place in the world and abandoning the youthful anxiety to resonate within it like a giant tuning fork, there are things within you that never lose their primitive force: a youthful and voluptuous glance is not something you’ll renounce without a sincere moment of doubt. So I decide to await the sword thrust; I decide to let myself be stabbed.

Abundant excursions in the world of lovers taught me to pay close attention to the minutes after sex. That pause in the fury of the senses contains the exhausted serenity of the re-encounter: with your body, with your own dimensions, with the hoarse silence of breathing. And in contrast to my usual drowsiness, she prefers to talk, almost as if something stuck in her belly has been liberated during the orgasm. Hypnotized by the scent we leave in each other, again and again I accept the distracted role of the listener: I accompany her to a childhood of wretched frustrations, to a violent relationship with a pusillanimous and manipulative father, to a painful and abusive first time at the hands of a much older cousin, silenced by the irrational fear of disgrace. Finally, she tells me about her unfinished studies in modern languages, a bridge toward a fellowship fallen from the sky to study Spanish abroad. There’s something of Ulysses in her hairless body, a certain hardening that makes me ask myself if I’ll be Calypso or Polyphemus when the adventure comes to an end. Regardless, I listen to her inventory as if through the little door of a submarine: I’ve heard it all before, in so many different faces. If people knew how similar our lives are, how indistinct we can become after a few years, like similar waves succeeding each other in a pond, sooner or later they’d reach the same exact conclusions: there are no good or bad initiations, but there are first and second times, and the only thing that can mediate between one and the other is the sieve of memory. That’s why old age consists of repetitions: memories of memories, anecdotes told over and over. A long life is like an enormous cavern: everything echoes inside it. Finally, her tale interrupts itself in search of the appropriate word and stops, excusing itself with the furious grammar of Spanish. As for me, I limit myself to assenting in silence. Soon she catches that silence.

I convince her to have dinner at my house on the following weekend. I like the idea of making her try new flavors, of silent recipes that come to mind murmured by my mother on Sundays, the only day her six children shared the house and her attentions. What remains of my mother are the seasonings and the rough skin of the plains, and at most a couple photos chewed by mice; taking a portrait, in those days, was still something exclusively for the rich. And for those of us who grew up without the support of the shutter, without being able to hold on to fragments from life, memory turns out to be a form of evanescence, a ghost you can’t depend on: faces and details blur over time, until they barely leave in their place ideas and sensations, weak erasures of the absent. Young people, on the other hand, lack this defect: they came to the world to register everything on their cell phones, to own everything that happens as if the real had always belonged to them. Eternally hungry, they’ve been promised the whole world: one so big their lives won’t be long enough to even dream it all. I doubt, for example, that my foreign lover can even imagine the place where I grew up; and that’s assuming she could understand the words I need to describe it. Not everything, as we can see, can really be shared.

Guessing my reflections, that same night she gives me the story of her most recent nightmares: she imagines herself abandoned in the inner patio of some prison or fort, perhaps an ancient deserted monastery, invaded by an invisible terror in the pit of her stomach. And though she claims to be fully conscious during the dream, constantly repeating this to herself, she isn’t able to wake up until she discovers a giant wave approaching in the distance. I listen to her with my brow furrowed, but there’s not much I can tell her; in any case, she seems preoccupied with starting each day with the same foggy sensation of disaster. She says she is suspicious of the imposing heights that surround the city: her own, she explains, rests on a coastal plain, with cordial hills like the size of her breasts, quite far from the fury of the sharpened Andean peaks. I ask her if she misses seeing the horizon, free from the green walls that prevent her from doing so, and she agrees placing both hands on her chest and directly assuming, for the first time since we’ve been together, her already evident condition of being a foreigner: “Nagasaki is always in the heart.”

Nagasaki: the four syllables of that name so distant and so well-known, so mine and so hers at the same time, repeat themselves in my lips with indifference, quick despite their consonants. Na-ga-sa-ki, just four syllables, enough to evoke an entire city I simultaneously know and don’t know, like a naked woman under my sheets: a girl engendered in horror. I ask her in a whisper to repeat that name –her name, from now on–, as if it were some spell or prayer known only by those raised in the scars of the world. And at that instant from her lips surge entire generations born of that flapping of butterfly wings: litters of children baptized with the ashes of their ancestors, raised looking toward the sky with mistrust; entire families marked from within, having more and more children deformed like mummies, living in a ruined city, a home that others give to them already broken. That name unleashes a fever within me, perhaps infected by some millenary curse locked in its round consonants, Na-ga-sa-ki, a word repeated by the children of impoverished Africa, by 15-year-old Vietnamese girls holding their babies to their chest to stop them from seeing the face of death, by men resigned to sleeping in cattle trains or in hermetically-sealed trucks loaded with families suffering the horror of a border, by the wind in small villages devastated by the fire of conquest; always the same word, spoken from the beginning of time, in primitive languages, in mournful howls, in the exhausted silence of the cemetery. Nagasaki: four syllables repeating themselves in the mouth of those who perish, a few sounds to name human cruelty. Noticing the total confusion her look professes, I’m barely able to mutter a few sweaty apologies. Her home has become a nightmare in me; her nostalgia, my violent shame. Two sides of the coin.

I explain there hasn’t been a more cruel gesture in the history of humanity than that second atomic bomb, dropped just three days after the first nuclear massacre ever was perpetrated. But if Hiroshima meant the awakening of humanity to its own moral failure, like a child who opens his eyes for the first time, Nagasaki then was its first blink, its first moment of doubt, first repetition of a mistake already made, of a nightmare that recurs from then on and consequently its greatest sentence of eternity. Were the horror and shame of the first detonation not warning enough, so as to prevent the second one at all costs? Fooled me once, shame on you; fooled me twice, shame on me, goes an English proverb, since reiterating mistakes is the most human of all traits. Nagasaki is at once a human gesture par excellence and a total failure of the moral existence of mankind: the second chance wasted, the reprise that allows itself to happen so as to stupidly repeat the first. Nagasaki is the negation of experience and apprenticeship: it is what we decide to relive. Good and bad intentions don’t exist; only first and second chances.

I’m about to retract my words, ashamed, sure that I’ve brutally trampled the sensible fibers of her native land, when she merely shrugs her shoulders. The atomic bomb and its horrors belong to a remote past, a life she not only didn’t live, doesn’t remember and doesn’t understand, but also one she probably knows through the same photographs as me. And with that gesture I confirm the abyss that unites and separates us: we are, at the core, just as foreign to each other, both of us from an alien world; lost adventurers, like Gulliver, in a completely unrecognizable world. With just two phrases, she avoids the topic at full speed, something she manages to do without much effort: a small grimace, a barely perceptible movement of her face are enough for her to awaken in me the parts made drowsy by the horrendous panorama of the bomb, and in a few moments my lips silence the possible responses from hers. I let her do it, abandoning myself to her as always. Nagasaki falls asleep amidst damp sheets.

Now I understand that we’ve associated our women and cities for a specific reason. Determined for the world to go into decline and die like us, we’ve wanted to see the aging of the former in the decadence of the latter; that’s why each new generation has a better city to remember in its childhood, and a reality that’s a little sadder to live: nations are founded in the shadow of their own nostalgia. The ruins of the bombing for which we were born too late, the war in which we didn’t participate, the economic debacle we never witnessed, everything we missed without knowing it and which occurred before we did, denies our memory of a lost paradise, of the better time it sealed: the Garden of Eden is barely someone else’s memory, a loan, an impossible inheritance that dies with our parents. And home, then, is that place where we play at repeating their gestures: we have descendants, we offer them a world and we tell them how it’s barely the shadow of what we were given. “You got here late,” is the welcome we give them.

Doubting, at that instant, the sincerity of her ignorance, I insist on discovering the details my student forgets, in asserting others I’m unaware of and asking about the many I’m already clear about: I’ve never been to Nagasaki, but there are masks of eloquence. Something unhealthy in me, I now realize, wanted to take her by the skin and chest and open her up, like a leather sack or a child’s lunchbox, and stretch her out on the same bed in which moments before I had crumbled grunting between her thighs. But my odd games soon disconcert her, or bore or intimidate her, I don’t know what’s worse, and from that point on she measures her answers, pretending to forget certain words or to not understand my questions about her country, her parents, her grandparents charred in a fraction of a second. She denies me her home, and with it the possibility of repeating it in others like her: she wants to be unique, all of them want it. Spanish, she says as an excuse, is an irregular and capricious language, and my accent is quick and serpentine. I acknowledge she’s right, even though I don’t believe a word she says.

Thus we submerge ourselves in a prolonged state of mourning from which neither of us is able to gain an advantage: the fearlessness of youth compensates for the calm cynicism of maturity, which lets one glimpse much stronger blows in the past. Assuming that sensual combat, I postpone for as long as possible the instant of giving in to her lean and ferocious flesh, to her bony hands as if made of wood; I know very well once I’m inside her my resistance won’t last long, and that the only thing left for the vanquished is the honor of a long battle offered. And yet, the Cold War doesn’t last too long: a few days later she disappears, without explanation, from my class and my bed and from all our places in common. She doesn’t answer my calls or my messages, as though she had never existed. And after a couple days of patience, I resent her silence in silence.

But there’s little I can do, besides abandoning the classroom each day looking back over my shoulder, like Lot’s wife, fearing I’ll leave her forgotten face amid the crowd. And it seems as though what’s been lived is made to be seen in this manner, like someone who flees from a beast that pursues him and he twists his neck to make sure he still keeps a certain distance between them. Finally, already defeated, I ask her classmates about her, disguising my interest as mere academic preoccupation, and they respond vaguely, evasive, parricidal accomplices whom I start to hate immediately. How many of them know about what I thought was a secret between us? How many laugh, behind my back, about the emptiness my questions reveal? The worst tortures, however, are inflicted by my own hands: day and night I imagine her in younger, fiercer arms, that make make mine seem like weak and emaciated bundles in comparison; and though the frown of jealousy is present at every thought, at every suspicion, little by little routine imposes itself again.

I’ve given her up for good, when one afternoon she knocks on my door, hidden behind the enormous eye of an instant camera. I observe her for a few moments, hidden behind the peephole, tempted to leave her out there and in that way enact a stupid vengeance. But acknowledgment has its own laws: the two cyclops smile at each other. I let her in without saying a word and she steals a few playful portraits with the Polaroid. I don’t know whether to welcome her, like the prodigal son, or if I should try to demand some explanation; I opt to smile in silence. “They’re so I can take you home with me,” she responds to my surprise at the unexpected gesture of possession. I ask her who she plans on showing them to, and she says there’s no one awaiting her return. So then I ask her for the camera and we switch roles for a few moments: there’s no doubt this was her true intention, to be photographed. She came to leave me her portraits, to endure in my memory and to say goodbye. She wants to be the only one, just like all of them do.

Her first portraits are lugubrious and distant, as though she had suddenly been left without batteries; so I turn my attention to other parts of her body: strong white thighs, breasts barely noticeable beneath the blouse or a neck dotted with red freckles, until I finally convince her to model for me. Initially with timid poses, full of smiles and adolescent expressions, or false gestures of seduction. I let her exaggerate at will, since only a few clicks of the machine are enough to reach the living light inside her: a nipple hidden between the fabric, a glimpse of her pubic hair or a completely naked back. Her body is offered to me in pieces, and the plastic squares that contain them flutter around us, falling onto the pieces of her clothing on the ground. I imagine her like a naked tree, prostrate on her knees, staring at my only open eye while her hands rise to liberate my sex. The image is nearly religious. The camera functions at full speed, and I photograph her devouring me, given over to her cannibal caresses until she extracts the last drop from me. She rises licking her lips while I collapse, now a felled tree, and then, victorious, she announces the imminence of her departure.

My offers to accompany her to the airport are politely rejected: no love, or desperation, or passion; politeness, like someone who thanks you for a seat on the bus. And with a chilly cordial gesture, Japanese. Her only goodbye gift consists of the pile of photos I took of her: breasts, legs, lips, hands, dissociated segments of her body, sometimes mixed with mine, without lipstick traces, or the bold handwriting of a tenebrous oath of love. Only fragments of a very brief collage, that I keep in my coat pocket. I don’t see or hear from her again.

I spend the following days in a rare solitude, trying to listen to certain inner echoes that have been stirred by her second departure. It’s a cliché to say life rarely gives us second chances: actually it’s made up of them. A debut is appreciated only when you see the piece performed again, a recipe is verified after having tried it for the first time in someone else’s hands and an abandonment is truly suffered to the degree it echoes previous ones; every second time alienates the spirit of the first, pursues and claims it: it demands we ignore what we know and pretend we don’t see, that we look the other way instead of sounding the alarm. The place of second chances is always the same as the first: always identical, always unprecedented, second times are the moments we spend realizing it’s déjà vu, what we decided, in one way or another, not to foresee.

Seduced by these ideas, I lose myself in my dusty encyclopedias and wander about for hours on the computer, tracing an unknown path until I unwittingly penetrate previously veiled territories: forbidden drawers, notebooks sentenced to ostracism in some cabinet, dedications torn out of books given as gifts or thrown away. I pursue some answer to the enigma of Nagasaki in my old notes for class, in my research journals, in the letters I should have thrown in the trash or in that timid collection of poems I chose to never publish. Everything returns to my eyes, traveling backwards in time, backwards in lost faces: love is the eternal promise of a new attempt, of an impossible second chance composed of forgetting and forgiveness. All lovers are in Nagasaki. I go through so many lines written by a now distant I, in hopes of finding in my own handwriting the answers to recent questions: some type of alchemy that will turn the painful past into a magic key to the present, because what value does it have if not memory, that expanded memory with which we keep notebooks, books and ledgers? What’s the purpose of tolerating suffering, if not as a promise of peace in experience?

“Poets can, professor,” the memory of her whispers in my ear. Poets can work that alchemy. Beauty will save the world. I laugh, finally, at my own reflections, dictated in class with such grandiloquence for those who see the world for the first time: if every second time is cruel, it’s because in it memory and experience are tested. And the repetition of the mistake is the very proof of its nonexistence, the final triumph of the abyss: growing old means making the same mistakes over and over again, being mercilessly conscious of them but desiring youth’s tragic freshness. All old age insists on the mistake, we are exhausted echoes of ourselves.

I pull out her photographs and one by one I place them, savoring their familiar sweetness, behind the glass in my old photo frames, on the shelves of my library, on the little table in the dinning room. And quietly giving up everything else, I take up my routine again, smiling sadly, traveling through this city both foreign and my own, this path I’ve taken so many times. Traveling, in the end, has lost any purpose: wherever I might find myself I will always be looking over my shoulder at the end of the day, languidly waiting to see it happen again. Wherever I might go, I tell myself with a bitter smile of resignation, I’ll always find myself, again, in Nagasaki.

Winner of the 66th edition of the El Nacional short story contest. Published on 5 August 2011, in the anniversary edition of the newspaper.

Gabriel Payares (London, 1982) is the author of Cuando bajaron las aguas (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2008). He lives in Caracas and writes a blog called Blog Caribe.

{ Gabriel Payares, Las Malas Juntas, 6 August 2011 }

Novela y revolución: Ana Teresa Torres / Gisela Kozak Rovero

2011-08-05T11:07:00.007-04:00

Novel and Revolution: Ana Teresa Torres

Literature has testified to the strength of the socialist revolutionary myth in Venezuelan consciousness since the sixties in the 20th century until today. This violent passion has been incarnated in the Bolivarian Revolution but its roots are found in the 19th century, in the wars of independence, the civil wars and in the caudillos of rural and patriarchal lineage. Two great novels have explored this historical continuity between 19th-century militias, caudillos and guerrillas: País portátil, by Adriano González León, and Los últimos espectadores del acorazado Potemkin, by Ana Teresa Torres, recently reprinted by the prestigious Mexican publishing house Fondo de Cultura Económica. The extraordinary literary quality of both texts places them among the peaks of the novel in Venezuela and there exists between them a secret dialogue whose pertinence to the national present we must highlight. If País portátil took the pulse of our revolutionary myth as a desirable horizon, Los últimos espectadores del acorazado Potemkin reveals its tragic scars, its radical failure reflected in the mirror of our decadence as a country.

A man and woman without names, solitary regulars at a dive bar, engage in a dialogue about individual and collective pasts, a colloquium that combines with autobiographical text, a story with overtones of a romance novel with mythological and historical implications, love letters and interventions of journalistic and psychoanalytical style. The protagonist’s brother was a guerrilla fighter, with a brilliant amorous resume and a cinematic life, who begins with his admiration for a rural caudillo fallen on hard times, the general Pardo, an admiration moreover accompanied by a contemptuous view of his own father, a successful, orderly and hard-working immigrant. Toward the end of his life, this guerrilla embarks on a plan to assassinate the president.

The narratives that make up the novel correct and contradict one another. The grandiloquent autobiography of the guerrilla fighter, “La noche sin estrellas,” is questioned by his younger brother. The novel La segunda muerte de Eurídice is confronted with the protagonist’s version regarding the disappearance of his wife. The short story “Los subversivos” foreshadows the assassination attempt. A doubt corrodes this entire novel, the radical doubt of the characters regarding the revolutionary myth, national salvation and undeniable truths. This unredeemed left represented in the character of the guerrilla fighter today governs our country with the consequent institutional destruction and the contempt for the achievements of civilian life from the independence to the present. La herencia de la tribu, the title of a successful essay by Torres, emerges once more. In such difficult times for our country, a reading of Los últimos espectadores del acorazado Potemkin imposes itself as much for its literary quality as for its historical and social discernment.

{ Gisela Kozak Rovero, Tal Cual, 5 August 2011 }

El cautivo de una sombra / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-08-02T00:12:00.002-04:00

The Captive of a Shade

I would not attempt to leave the city, of infertile surroundings, submerged in the coastal sand. I was suffering, in the manner of my compatriots, the sorrow of decadence. I would help them with my admonitions and with the example of an arrogant poverty.
I hurried to welcome them at the foot of the stairs to my ancient house, when they returned from losing an unequal combat. I consoled them in the name of my ancestors.
The setbacks diverted me from reality and persuaded me toward disdain. I lived absorbed in the contemplation of the empty port. The vessels would avoid the indigent country.
A maiden of my affection, destined to accompany me, did not survive the evaporation of my dreams. The red hair and white countenance were in harmony with the violaceous afternoon, hour of our appointment. She turned up, the last time, with a branch of oleanders and with a mirror in the form of a moon, symbol Diana’s fierce chastity.
I endure the retreat with my head sunken in my hands and without exhaling a voice. Misfortune roots me once again in the soil of my birth. After her death, a suspicious figure divines the meaning of my steps.
I have lit a lantern over her grave, at the foot of a rough mountain, and it is visited by the birds of rain and stagnant water.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

Libros made in Tijuana / Heriberto Yépez

2011-07-31T22:33:00.012-04:00

Made in Tijuana Books

I will go over five recent books of literature from Tijuana.

Outside Tijuana few people know that for many years the work of Luis Humberto Crosthwaite was being read alongside that of Roberto Castillo Udiarte (1951), an emblematic poet of border literature. Nuestras vidas son otras. Antología personal 1985-2010 (Aullido Libros-Nortestación, 2010) gathers some of his poetry, which like his prose has the tone of a neighborhood guy, warm and informal. Castillo is a border classic.

Tijuana: crimen y olvido (Tusquets, 2010) by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite (1962), like other novels by him, is fragmentary and has a northern accent. Crosthwaite is usually paratactic and playful; in this book he decided to be more syntactic and dramatic. It would be simplistic to read this book only looking for a plot; one has to read it like a look-out post for narrative structures.

Tijuana writers have been influenced by English, multiculturalism, music and new technologies. Their rhetoric remixes. From Spanglish to the blog, Tijuana literature was born far from Mexico City; dreamed in casinos, currency exchanges, lines to reach the other side and nightspots, it took on its own form. Teejay style.

From this clique of synthetic writings we can still find the derivation of Señora Krupps (Static Books, 2010) by Javier Fernández (1971). More than short stories, machines of heterodox prose. The text of Tijuana distinguishes itself piece by piece through its framework. It conceives the page as menu, jukebox, Foreign Club and maquila factory.

Along with Crosthwaite’s, another book that circulates nationally is Confesión de un sicario. Testimonio de Drago, lugarteniente de un cártel mexicano (Grijalbo, 2011) by Juan Carlos Reyna (1980). Reyna grew up reading Crosthwaite, Castillo and Saavedra. His book is a journalistic application of the resources of Tijuana literature. The testimony of an assassin? Yes, but also a dose of Zeta magazine and Nortec. Reyna created the context for the drug dealer to be transcribed by border literature.

Crossfader 2.0. B-sides, hidden tracks & remixes (Nortestación, 2011) by Rafa Saavedra (1967) is the fifth book from this post-everything freelancer; the voice in off of a radiant desperation. Those who know how to read note that this post-literature is an open bar of verbosity. Noise and voices in clubs and parties. Page music. Pessoa plus pop.

Tijuana literature is made up of code-making, fusion and utopizzas.

Maybe it’s already over: the city that gave it a form is gone. Tijuana literature is a collection of postcards from its entropy.

TJ is a minor literature –Deleuze dixit– made by a minority within a bigger language. A defense of difference denied. Gregarious, over-codified, ironicized.

Except TJ doesn’t deterritorialize itself but rather, hyperterritorializes itself.

Tijuana didn’t write to continue Mexican Literature but instead to narrate a un-national city. To assemble literature, bi-tongue and music. Cool corrido: an other identity.

hyepez.blogspot.com

{ Heriberto Yépez, Suplemento Laberinto, Milenio (México D.F.), 30 July 2011 }

Derrota / Rafael Cadenas

2011-07-31T01:50:00.037-04:00

Defeat

I who have never had a trade
who have felt weak facing every competitor
who lost the best titles for life
who barely arrive somewhere and already want to leave
   (believing that moving is a solution)
who have been denied in anticipation and ridiculed by
   the most able
who lean against the walls so I won’t completely collapse
who am a target of laughter even for myself
who thought my father was eternal
who have been humiliated by professors of literature
who one day asked how I could help and the answer was a
   loud laugh
who will never be able to start a home, nor be brilliant, nor
   triumph in life
who have been abandoned by many people because I barely
   speak
who am ashamed of acts I haven’t committed
who have needed little incentive to start running down
   the street
who have lost a center I never had
who have become the laughing stock of so many people for
   living in limbo
who never found anyone who would put up with me
who was omitted in favor of people more miserable than me
who will spend my whole life like this and who next year
   will be mocked many more times for my ridiculous
   ambition
who am tired of receiving advice from others more lethargic
   than me (“You’re so slow, get with it, wake up”)
who will never be able to travel to India
who have received favors without giving anything in return
who traverse the city from one end to another like a feather
who let myself be pulled along by others
who have no personality and don’t want to have one
who muffle my rebellion all day
who haven't joined the guerrillas
who haven’t done anything for my people
who don’t belong to the FALN and all these things and others
   whose enumeration would be interminable make me
   desperate
who cannot escape my prison
who have been dismissed everywhere for being useless
who actually haven’t been able to get married or go to Paris
   or have a serene day
who refuse to acknowledge facts
who always drool on my story
who am an imbecile and more than an imbecile from birth
who lost the thread of the discourse being executed within me
   and I haven’t been able to find it
who don’t cry when I feel the desire to do so
who arrive late to everything
who have been ruined by so many marches and
   countermarches
who desire perfect immobility and impeccable speed
who am not what I am nor what I am not
who despite everything maintain a satanic pride even if
   at certain hours I’ve been humble to the point of
   bringing myself to the level of stones
who have lived in the same circle for fifteen years
who thought I was predestined for something beyond
   the everyday and have achieved nothing
who will never wear a tie
who can’t find my body
who have perceived my falsehood in lightning flashes and
   haven’t been able to topple myself, sweep away
   everything and create my indolence, my flotation,
   my wandering a new freshness, and obstinately
   commit suicide within arm’s reach
I will get up off the ground even more ridiculous to keep
   mocking others and myself until the day of final
   judgment.

1963

{ Rafael Cadenas, Antología, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1996 }

XVI / Manón Kübler

2011-07-29T00:01:00.003-04:00

XVI

we were a secret squad that year, a retinue of men and women with the character of astronauts or teachers. a mysterious confederacy, a brotherhood of daily communions, the die cast, the apology or the peculiarity overwhelmed in ordinary and pathetic states of being. we wanted to grow with the glory of hardcover editions, magic biographies. we belonged to the frugal readings of borges, to reverón’s paintings, to russian cinema, to polish theater. we aspired to the names another might find perpetuated in eminent figures, on some city wall, in some mysterious and damp newspaper. we made no man’s land in the city of commons; we engendered repeated anecdotes in cafes that disappeared a hundred years ago, with the death of their tongues, perhaps. we deposited credits and tributes in prophets of “culture” with poor mouths because we were an excess of frozen ideas, of insipid gestures accompanied by citations. the baroque standing with artaud and freud walking hand in hand, it was said. we were undoubtedly inclined toward vanguards, a mockery of the true center, periphery of nothingness, for an episode of efforts and leaps, a spitting in the face of the anonymous who make their ideas collapse in the ministries and in managements. we nourished a lexicon of spent and unknown words. we were the fashion and have already passed.

{ Manón Kübler, Olympia, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992 }

IV / Manón Kübler

2011-07-28T15:39:00.003-04:00

IV

i suppose today’s risky ascent through the inveterate walls of euphoria will soon lead me to an indescribable abyss. let’s say this is of no importance to the degree that you and i might be able to waste the creature of lack, as would be done in the best german poetry, where indolence ends up being a form of doubt and tragedy for the most immune of men. i lament being so distressingly moral and expecting that i must say so much to you in order to touch just one of your breasts.

{ Manón Kübler, Olympia, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992 }

II / Manón Kübler

2011-07-27T01:29:00.002-04:00

II

i no longer am. i disappear in the confines of this room. alone, postponed, in the absurd belief of the child. foreseeing a threat that might keep me in mind. diminished. abrupt in the implements of doubt. as though tomorrow were to provide me a more intense health. but i’m an old woman in this room. i’m covered by the platonic response to suicides. i know nothing about myself even though i find myself again every day.

{ Manón Kübler, Olympia, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992 }

I / Manón Kübler

2011-07-26T00:37:00.004-04:00

I

let us you and i take a long journey through the house of the living. of those exemplars who, well conserved ask about you and me. let us pause along the way on your bed so as to know ourselves alive, that we are the part that looks like the rough lines of night, the ones we don’t see, the ones we won’t ever try. give me the part of your body, that shore no one knows, not even the intimacies of your bathroom nor the discreet modesty of your mirror. i want to sleep with you at this hour so i know i have you beneath my hand, knees on your kidney, your back divided.

{ Manón Kübler, Olympia, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992 }

La cábala / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-07-25T00:15:00.001-04:00

The Kabbalah

The gentleman, with a famished face and savage beard, was crossing the old bridge suspended by means of chains.
He dropped a carnation, passionate flower, in the insalubrious water of the creek.
I was surprised to see him alone. A horseman with a faithful visor had been preceding him before, waving a banner on the vertex of his spear.
They had been arguing at every moment, despite the solid friendship. The man had immersed himself in the science of the rabbis ever since his visit to secular Toledo. He would illuminate his lodgings with the seven-branched candelabrum, removed from the synagogue, and he had received it from his lover, a Jewish beauty seated on a tapestry from Smyrna.
The servant resolves to save the gentleman from permanent seduction and persuades him to traverse a distant sea, where the names of the Italian admirals sound and the Cyclades, Horace’s refulgent islands, imitate the vocal chorus of the Oceanides.
Cervantes recounted for me the incident of the gentleman restored to health. He reestablished himself when he discerned in a crowd of strollers the only dark-skinned maiden in Venice.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

Isabel / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-07-21T13:21:00.008-04:00

Isabel

I had received from the sky the present of an unfortunate beauty. Her benign eyes opened, full of fright, to the wonder of the world and a star of matutinal light, enchantment of hardened archangels, was extinguished at that same hour in the infinite. I was keeping a vigil at the margin of her crib and conceiving happy thoughts to brighten her future.
I admitted her and kept her in my arms for the purpose of saving her childhood from the examples of the earth and from then on I directed her fervent voice to sing the agony of the Via Crucis and the resistance of the martyrs.
I would retire on the vortex of a hill to watch over and defend her leisure in a recondite valley. The elegant lily of the parabola would alternate with the rose bush born and flowering in the same night on the tomb of Isolde.
I followed her to an interview in the dawn hour, near a transparent river. She was enraptured when she focused on the discourse of an old man, a doctor or gentleman in the celestial kingdom, and got lost in the admiration of the sign of the cross, painted suddenly in the air. The hymn of some virgins was inviting her with instancy from a shining vessel.
She spoke my name amid praises and promises before transfiguring and losing herself in space and in this manner she was able to incorporate me from the floor, where I had been toppled by the feeling of her absence.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

La vida mortecina / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-07-20T15:12:00.004-04:00

The Moribund Life

An involuntary glance had awakened passion. Affect returned from its lethargy in the manner of a fantastic being, of everlasting life and subject to a rhythm of activity and inertia.
My house stood on the extreme end of a despoiled road. I lived far from diversions, engulfed in laborious thoughts. I was especially tending to the health of the soul and studying a lugubrious print, in which the angel of a prophetic threat dominates the solitude of abolished worlds.
A memory was interrupting and wasting the unpleasant meditation. We had boldly saved ourselves from the calamity that took place in a carnival party. I took the extraordinary woman in my arms and pulled her to the shore of the old river, full of mud, where the ship of clamor burned.
She was warning me now, by means of a confidante, of her project to visit me. I was preparing myself to receive her, in the secret of night, dressing according to the pageantry of the century. I had retired from the wardrobe the sword, the blue doublet and the mortarboard incarnate with a black feather.
I awaited her sitting on the balcony and in the open air, until the moment the day broke. The humid air and the darkness increased my unease. I distinguished the woman’s profile, faint amid the sendals of dawn, on the line of the horizon.
The confidante came soon afterward to ask me about the course and fate of her mistress. I could not find the means to answer and calm her impatience.
The fruitless vigil had disheartened me and brought me back to remorse and tyrannical devotion. I discarded the gallant clothes and chose the mourning suit and the rosary to expiate the velleity of the interview.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

El nombre / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-07-18T21:39:00.004-04:00

The Name

One of King Solomon’s navigators was celebrating his adventures in a diaphanous sea and displaying the pearls and corals of the abyss. He didn’t move from his shoulders a bird with a human voice.
Some lions threatened the ship from a burning coast. The seafarers were able to distinguish them amidst the glare and wounded them with fierce arrows.
An old man with sharp features was governing the journey by night after humiliating himself in the presence of a red moon, reduced to a skiff. He belonged to a race of light customs, experienced at prospering from war, acquiring captives to resell.
The sailors became frightened when they heard his vile discourse and presented him with his hands tied to the mouth of wild animals, where they roared most gravely.
The old man was directing the ship to the gardens of oblivion lotus.
The bird with human voice showed up soon afterward to guarantee the fortune of the navigation. A passenger tried to bring it down with his ivory bow. But he was dissuaded by the unanimous scream of the rest.
The bird perched itself on the shoulder of the Hebrew navigator, author of the story. It was enunciating at every instant its owner’s name and retained in its wings a dressing room’s perfume. Happiness is the constant appellative of princesses in fantastical kingdoms.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

La suspirante / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-07-05T11:18:00.004-04:00

The Sighing Girl

The beautiful girl has returned from very far away. She locks herself in her inaccessible chamber again, satisfying herself with the svelte sofa and the exotic trinket. She imposes the memory of a stately era, surrounding herself with the successive scenes of a tapestry.
The beautiful girl loses herself reading of extravagant events, occurring in imaginary kingdoms, and narrated with the semblance of parody. She returns to a burlesque passage, where a pastor alternates with the buffoon expelled from the court.
The contemptuous lady engulfs herself in the peripeteia of an incomparable tale and suspends the entertainment when a battle begins between gentlemen with illustrious surnames.
The reluctant lady, an aficionado of the chimeras of imagination, dreams of fleeing this world for another illusory one.
No one would be able to investigate the direction of her escape.
The beautiful girl flies over the roads blinded by snow and a solitary owl sounds the alarm in the night fascinated by the full moon.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

El cristiano / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-07-04T17:02:00.003-04:00

The Christian

I would see him every day sitting at the door of his shack and with his head in his hands, sunken in an intense reflection. He would appear in that position close to nighttime, when the region’s equal sky would alter itself slightly with thin clouds of amber and violet.
He had lost the most fertile years of life in the suffering of prison, as a result of an unjust accusation. His honesty had been preserved intact and had redeemed him at the start of old age. His superiors had allowed him to build his house in an open field. He had insinuated himself in the friendship of his companions and had softened the law of his destiny, clarifying for them the promises of the Gospel.
I would visit him with frequency and follow him in his pilgrimages to the edge of the sea of whales and ice floes. He had substituted his real name with a false one and justified himself alleging his humility and his intention of resembling the wave merging in the sea.
He taught me charity with animals. Before his death, he found me worthy of protecting his two closest friends. I moved to my house, on my shoulders, the furnishings from his and sent ahead of me a blue polar fox and a silken hare.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

Del ciclo troyano / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-06-22T00:33:00.000-04:00

From the Trojan Cycle

Polydorus, last son of Priam, too young for military duty, lived far from the communal homeland in the court of a false king, where he had been relegated by the affectionate zeal of his own.
He knew nothing of the fateful siege, or its terminus in the night of lamentations, ink in flames, when it fell under the steel of its guest, moved in support of the victor.
His tomb, shaded by a rugged tuft that emits a compassionate voice, arouses fear in Virgil’s pilgrims.
The prince was withered by the effect of a monologue full of sighs. He was thinking of Iphigenia, who escaped amid the sacrifice and at the edge of death, sheltered among the Sarmatians, whose indefatigable steeds injure a ground of marmoreal snow. He had encountered the tacit virgin, of reposed countenance and pliant step, in one of the insular sanctuaries, where the neighboring peoples would establish friendships, separated by the personal grievances of their kings. Clytemnestra would animate the passion of the children; but her husband forbade her in the interest of politics and the insinuation of the priests, who were in need of a regal victim.
Clytemnestra saves her daughter with brave deceit, and mediates revenge for continuous years.
She awaits in her lioness den during the decennial of the fatal conflict, divided between advantages and setbacks: more than once the regal husband, comfortable and arrogant, despite the weight of splendid weapons, rebukes the hordes of his own people, terrified because a tempestuous thunder crosses the heights, and Hector throws the camp into disorder, redoubling his furious gale attack.
Clytemnestra arranges the death of the royal consort, in reparation for her ignored will, in compensation for her vile submission, characteristic of captives won by the spear; and the crime takes place the very night of the return and secretly, amid the anguished clamor of the nocturnal birds, of absurd and wavering flight.

La torre de Timón (1925)

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

El páramo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-06-21T00:01:00.003-04:00

The Plateau

The orphans have been educated in the free meadows. They only execute the velleities of their fancy.
They have discovered the secrets of rustic medicine, watching the customs of the animals. They reflect on the specimens of the forest, from the cedar to the hyssop, in the manner of Solomon, the happy monarch. A bear has ceded his cavern to them, using the graciousness of a grandfather. A strident bird teaches them how to forecast the rain.
They sing in the night’s retreat and the dark green frog dances on two feet in front of a mortal moon.
They dissipate the visions of shade and fear stirring in the air a branch of Celtic verbena.
They abstain from lighting a fire on days subject to an iniquitous constellation. A bloody figure, dressed in the cassock of the tortured, divides the fauces of the earth and declares itself their progenitor.
The orphans drive it away directing unworthy nicknames at it, reserved for the mole and other creatures of sordid homes.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

El desahucio / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-06-20T00:01:00.007-04:00

The Eviction

The courtesan had arrived from London and cloaked herself with its fog. She was alone and ill.
I hurried to defend her from uncertainty and received her in my improvident room. She climbed the staircase leaning on my shoulder.
I stirred the fire to reestablish her from the chill of the cold. The joy of the flame tinged red the velvet curtains, a residue of my fortune saved from the claws of the creditors.
She came from the island of meadows, complaining about the shamelessness of the gendarmes and bitterly sobbing when she declared the ruin of her health and prestige.
She settled in the rosewood bed, enriched by bronze panels and encrusted with silver, in accordance with the style of Pompeii, and got lost amid the sheets abandoning herself to the mercy of her diseases. She could not resist the crowd of her aches.
I consumed the rest of my assets in her exequies and incinerated her with the artistic furniture, risking the final departure with the gesture of a Sardanapalus.
I could not pay the rent for the home and threw myself into the street in demand of the dangers of the open air.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

Recuerdos de Ramos Sucre / Julián Padrón

2011-06-18T00:15:00.002-04:00

Memories of Ramos Sucre

Last Friday the 13th marked 15 years since the death of doctor José Antonio Ramos Sucre, a writer of chaste style and deep thought whose books La torre de Timón, El cielo de esmalte and Las formas del fuego constitute one of the most original and profound oeuvres in Venezuelan literature.

I owe him these memories. He was my Latin and Greek roots professor at the Liceo Andrés Bello, and one of my first literary confidants. He was of short height, of thin complexion, with penetrating blue eyes, of nervous temperament. I can’t forget that emphatic voice, nor those incisive words, nor that dry laigh, with which he’d finish the emphasis of his phrases. He had the figure of a syllogism in his three propositions for life, love and literature.

My academic and literary adolescence had to receive an impression from that austere and wise man from Cumaná. I started taking notes from his comments in class and in conversations outside school in a notebook with the rules of Latin grammar that he taught us, a notebook I now deplore having lost along with other school notes. But since I owed him these memories I’ll try to recall those notes in order to weave this account of the interesting days when the cordial paths of that teacher and this disciple crossed.

Ramos Sucre gave his Latin lesson from 2 to 3 in the afternoon, the most stifling hour in the tropics, and yet his was one of the most pleasant classes in the school, because he didn’t limit himself to making us repeat by rote the declensions and conjugations, but instead applied a practical method for teaching them through the analysis and translation of selected excerpts from the Latin. Graeci troyanos, equo ligneo, dono pernicioso, superaverunt. Moreover, he enjoyed livening up his classes with stinging comments on the most varied topics and events, and with the reference of anecdotes regarding facts and characters he was the first to celebrate with that dry laugh that we his disciples would chorus.

It is doubtful that saying a writer writes like he speaks is praise; but it is high praise to affirm that Ramos Sucre spoke like he wrote. Among us there was a classmate, whom I have lost track of since the school benches, who liked to bother him with those childish pranks students employ against teachers. That classmate was tall, physically strong, ruddy and with his adolescent face covered with pimples, and to make more noise he wore thick-soled shoes like the ones worn by poor seminary students. That classmate’s jokes consisted of scandalously chorusing Ramos Sucre’s laugh, in entering the classroom loudly stamping his shoes on the floorboards and in asking him too many unnecessary questions and pointlessly debating his answers. One day when our classmate entered class later than usual, making his shoes stamp the floor more loudly and deliberately so as to interrupt the teacher’s lesson, Ramos Sucre couldn’t stand the impertinence, and before he took his seat he said to him with that full and emphatic voice, as though wanting to pulverize him: “Listen, kid, you’re nothing but an annoying and insipid German!”

Regarding that occurrence, and without any other proof to say so, Ramos Sucre seemed to harbor a certain animosity for some characteristics of German culture, which perhaps originated in the love he felt for Greco-Roman culture. Once, he interrupted class to make one of those comments with which he liked to illustrate his lessons.

“The Germans,” he concluded with that voice that took joy in the correct pronunciation of words, “are a people who have no knowledge of human dignity. In Germany a learned man writes a library in order to defend an unjust crime.”

On a certain occasion another classmate, today a reputed medical professional in Caracas, and in reference to those mischievous student pranks, moments before class placed on his desk a copy of “Fantoches,” in which the writer was mocked for one of his prose poems published in those days. Ramos Sucre arrived, sat down, grabbed the newspaper and threw a quick glance at the comment marked in red ink, and glancing beyond the students, ordered, undoubtedly addressing the author of the prank: “So-and-so,” and stopping after an accusatory emphasis on his last name, “go to the chalkboard.”

In the Greek roots class, he was writing on the chalkboard a list of Spanish words derived from the Greek, while at the same time explaining their respective etymologies. One of the classmates, by all signs a budding poet, pronounced from his seat: “Glauco, sir,” and Ramos Sucre, turning around quickly, as if stimulated by an electric discharge, defined him with his emphatic voice: “You are a silversmith.”

***

My literary encounter with Ramos Sucre is also one of the unforgettable moments for me. At that time I was secretly writing avant-garde romantic poems which later on ended up being so detestable to me that I still feel the embarrassment of having published them. This explains why I would read with admiration the prose poems Ramos Sucre published frequently in El Universal, and I paid attention to his words when he would reflect on literature during passing remarks in class. As a consequence of the word silversmith [orfebre], for example, after teaching its etymology, he would use the occasion to offer a friendly dissertation on silversmithing, in the worst sense of the word, among the majority of Venezuelan writers.

“The writer should be original,” he would conclude. “Originality consists in expressing oneself with clarity, accuracy and precision. He who has nothing to say writes one word after another with the goal of filling up the emptiness of his thought. Silversmith, in the worst sense of the word, is the writer who writes making cornucopias and garlands.”

At the time, Ramos Sucre’s renunciation against employing the word que [that] was very well-known, and even greater was the aversion he felt when someone used the verbal locution a base de [based on]. Once, I asked him the reasons for his aversion.

“The word que is an insignificant term,” he answered. “As for a base de, it’s a very tasteless phrase used by writers with a suspicious pharmaceutical flightiness.”

These pronouncements by Ramos Sucre made me admire his singular temperament. Young writers always try to be original and such an inclination is a good vocational symptom when originality isn’t attempted at the expense of the pedantry that nourishes the ignorance of youth. Ramos Sucre distinguished me with his regard and deference toward a student eager for knowledge, but he didn’t know I was committing unforgivable sins against literature. One time, I dared to confess my faults and expressed my desire to show him a few things. He made an appointment for me to visit him at his office in the Casa Amarilla [offices for the Ministry of Foreign Relations] at 5 in the afternoon that very same day.

With all the adolescent audacity that wasn’t overcome by a beginner’s timidity when faced with the severe writer that was Ramos Sucre and with a punctuality that was most un-Venezuelan, at the agreed upon hour I went up one of the staircases that lead to the second floor of the Foreign Ministry. When I knocked on the door indicated to me by the clerk in the front room that faces Plaza Bolívar, the teacher’s emphatic voice invited me to enter. He was organizing a big pile of books that were lying on the floor. He stood up with a volume in his hands and began to speak to me about the initiation of the writer, of the tremendous vocation of writing and of the suffering and joy of the literary art. I gave him the original copies of some poems and he took them, abandoning the book, and began to read them quietly, strolling through the room with a tiny yellow pencil behind his ear.

“Leave them with me,” he said after a long and embarrassing silence. “We have to talk. You can come every afternoon at this very hour. Plaza Bolívar is my home. Whenever you want to see me, you can find me here.”

That same afternoon we walked around the Plaza and afterward I accompanied him toward El Panteón while we talked. He did the talking. I listened and asked questions. Frequently, he would interrupt the chat to let his glance wander toward the beautiful women who walked by. Then he would raise the chape of the cane off the ground and the stroll and chat would continue.

On several afternoons afterward I accompanied him in his stroll around the Plaza and in his walk toward El Panteón. But that first time, after he conversed deliciously about literature, when he had already said goodbye to me and advanced a few steps, he suddenly turned around.

“Ah!” he called. “Listen. You have to read a few books. It’s not necessary to read so much, but rather to do so well and only the best. The good books are not that many. It’s enough to read the main classics of universal literature. However, it’s preferable if you can read them in the original language. And always with a good dictionary at hand.”

***

The personality of Ramos Sucre’s style has been pointed out and some have noted that he was dark and that his prose poems reveal an exotic spirit and a temperament touched by eccentricity. It would be curious to examine the imaginative world of Ramos Sucre in relation to the creations of the surrealists so as to discover, with the astonishment of the Rilkeans, that Ramos Sucre’s prose poems were the first to be written here under the vision of a subconscious world or an ancient world. And to notice that his first book was published in the year 28, when among us the movement known as vanguardismo, and which wrongly appropriated him, was at its peak. The formal characteristic of Ramos Sucre’s style is the precision and synthesis of the straight line, and in that line words exhale the profound meaning of the original, pristine, virgin term taken from etymology itself, when language was in its origins. But words start to lose their primitive style over time, and through the use and the different mentality of a people in their historical transformation. When we write the term virtud [virtue] today, we attribute to it the sense it is given in the latest edition of the Diccionario de la Academia. When Ramos Sucre wrote it he attributed to it the genesial meaning of man’s condition or way of being. Because his deep knowledge of the matrix languages of Spanish kept him in touch with that first meaning the word had at the birth of the language. There was in him a bit of rhetoric, but the good rhetoric that is given by the possession of the instruments essential for the creation of a literary work.

One proof of his formal conception of style as a straight line is produced by the analysis of his poems. They are all made with the greatest economy of the primordial elements of the sentence. At one point he maximized this idea in an article shorter than the author’s own signature. The article contained only three lines: the title above, the signature below and in the middle the thought: “Conservatives are liberals” [Los godos son liberales].

***

How did Ramos Sucre react to the Venezuelan environment of his era? A spirit of his intellectual heights could not live harmoniously amidst an environment of hostility and ignorance and the subversion of spiritual values. At one point, I can’t recall whether responding to allusions to his small physical stature, or thinking of the first chapter of his autobiography, I heard him say: “A man must be small and have been born at the edge of the sea.” The Venezuelan writer begins to be appreciated among us when he brings from abroad the letter of recommendation and acknowledgment of his worth. For that reason or for health reasons, Ramos Sucre obtained a Consulate to leave the country and breathe more propitious airs. In the year 1930 he died in Europe. His close friends can surely remember his caustic phrases against the hostility and meanness that prevailed in the atmosphere of the homeland that we have yet to overcome in regards to the appreciation of our cultural values.

I can’t forget that dry laugh that seemed like the act of reading, with his emphatic voice, from the engraving of laughter. Nor that allusion to human dignity he later condensed in a prose poem, not included in a book, regarding religion. I recall it began like this: “Dostoyevsky, that anomalous Russian, preached the religion of suffering.” And it concluded: “The best religion is that of human dignity, without clerics or altars.” And yet, Ramos Sucre died of suffering, of physical and spiritual suffering. His close friend Pedro Sotillo, who wrote one of the best studies of his work, read to me after his death a few of his letters. They are the most harrowing confessions of a man who was a good and wise Venezuelan writer.

Obras completas, Aguilar S.A. de ediciones, México, 1945, pp. 85-93.

{ Julián Padrón, Ramos Sucre Ante la crítica, ed. José Ramón Medina, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }

El vértigo de la decadencia / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-06-16T16:25:00.001-04:00

The Vertigo of Decadence

I assist in the Roman coliseum the sacrifice of the sublime martyrs. They have gathered in the center of the stadium and suggest the case of a decimated cohort, sensible to the commandment of honor.
The wild animals loosed from their jail surround the pitiful mob, speeding up for the assault. The flexible spines undulate voluptuously and the sharp claws, planted in the ground, throw up sleeves of dust.
The crowd of spectators, animated by a festive cruelty, breaks into a savage clamor. It reproduces the roar of the ovation.
The sovereign of the domesticated orb notes the accidents and details of the party, watching it through an emerald, the stone best qualified for the adornment of divinities.
The wild animals fatigue themselves dilacerating the unarmed group and respect the inanimate remains and a virgin of prophetic gesture.
A voice condemns her to the torture of fire and provokes unanimous assent. The crowd assumes an indivisible responsibility and loses itself in the delirium of its evil, wounding innocence.
The bonfire gives off a fatidic light and draws, on the most restless ones, the face of a cadaver.

El cielo de esmalte (1929)

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

Wave / Roberto Martínez Bachrich

2011-06-14T00:01:00.012-04:00

Wave

Agora eu já sei
da onda que se ergueu no mar
e das estrelas que esquecemos de contar
o amor se deixa surpreender
enquanto a noite vem nos envolver.

Antonio Carlos Jobim

We’re young and thoughtless, Verónica and I, and we’ve always been proud of it. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t too hard for us to lie to our parents. Verónica assured my mom we wouldn’t go to the beach, that not for anything in the world would it occur to us –with the signs of that horrible storm approaching the coast– to go to the sea, no way, we’d stay at her aunt Carmelina’s house in Coro, and spend the weekend visiting the colonial center and getting to know the city. Likewise, I promised Verónica’s dad he didn’t need to worry, we’d stay with my aunt Dulce and my cousins, no beach for us, because the truth is I hate the sun and the sticky sand, besides, those beaches there are full of jellyfish that time of year and I can’t stand those slimy things, but more than anything the possibility of hurricane Sabrina hitting the coasts of Falcón terrifies me too much (I often have nightmares about that). So, we said, Vero and I have our whole lives in front of us and don’t plan on taking stupid risks and ruining our future with any old carelessness. Our parents were absolutely convinced and relieved, so Verónica and I hit the road.

As soon as we arrive at the guest house in Adícora, and after dropping off our things, we put on our bathing suits and take the road to the beaches on the north end of the peninsula. The weather seems perfectly normal: the same thick heat as always and the salty breeze typical of any coastal zone. I ask Verónica whether Playa Blanca or Saledales, it’s her turn to decide, because I chose the guest house. Vero checks me out from head to toe and decides Playa Blanca, arguing that sand dunes ending in the sea are profoundly romantic and beautiful. It seems perfect to me, but not only because of Vero’s reasons, but also because Saledales always has too many people and that means submitting ourselves to prudence and chastity, such undesirable things when considering Verónica’s erect and recently operated breasts. I blush foolishly and quickly return to my color. I know it: desire is duplicated at the sea. There’s something in the sea breeze that tears off all the layers of habit: the salt water seems to irremediably induce the games of the body, the sea makes us sensual. And this becomes pure delight when things go just beyond a pair of perfect breasts: it’s love, ardent as a Guadalajara blood sausage sea urchin, sweet as a Viennese pastry cream dolphin, tasty as a piña colada octopus, big as a eucalyptus whale. Yes, the marine air duplicates the endlessly reformed and cloying syntax of silly love.

We stop at a liquor store to stock up on drinks. It’s my turn to decide, so I choose gin and orange juice, though I know Vero would have preferred vodka with lemon, but everyone knows that lemon on the beach stains and I imagine the corners of Verónica’s lips darkened can’t be too appetizing. Then we keep going and she discovers, along the way, a little restaurant she finds very picturesque. She suggests we have lunch there and I tell her it’s better on the beach, in any kiosk by the shore, but she looks at me severely and says it’s her turn to decide the fate of our next lunch. I accept, slightly annoyed, because honestly I’m dying to lay her down on the beach immediately and kiss her, caress her whole body, lick every single bit of her and make love to her until night falls to finish counting the stars in her eyes; but following the interpolated decisions has always been the single law of our relationship and, besides, that gives me the power to decide exactly what we’ll do when the beach is finally in front of us.

We eat lunch without too much appetite because the food isn’t that good and the buzzing of a noisy radio whose signal comes and goes keeps the only waiter in the place occupied, completely lost in the news of the storm. Afterward we continue with our route and, just up ahead, some National Guardsmen stop us trying to make us turn back and wanting to warn us about the hurricane. I tell them we’re headed to find my poor aunt Dulce, who lives alone in the next village and is probably really scared –she’s an elderly woman, you understand– about the approach of Sabrina. So they let us go through and a couple miles up the road, Playa Blanca appears in front of our eyes completely solitary and paradisiacal. I park the jeep at the edge of the road and we cross the dunes that separate us from the sea on foot. The salty storm has grown slightly and the sun seems too drowsy for it to be midday. Verónica starts to say that maybe it really is dangerous, wondering if it might not be better to turn back and leave the beach for another day, since anyways we have our room at the guest house where we can have fun together in the sweetest way, but I plant a long, warm kiss on her mouth and assure her there’s not the slightest reason to worry, she’s with me, nothing’s gonna happen to us and the sand on Playa Blanca is much more comfortable than our sad cot in the guest house. My effervescent animal desire, however, won’t last very long. As soon as we’re facing the sea the sun seems to hide completely in a thick, dark cloud. The sea is choppy and the storm has become a gale. We stop and Vero holds on to me scared. The wind keeps gathering strength and in a matter of seconds the last dune before the water starts to move toward the point where we’re standing. Verónica sinks into a strange trembling and I’m invaded by a deep and paralyzing confusion. The water stirs furiously and each minute a new immense wave is born that crashes a few feet from our paralysis. Vero demands that we leave and a few tears the dust clouds make disappear within milliseconds flow from her eyes. We try to go back, get to the jeep, but the effort is useless. The dunes have decided to merge into the sea and run in the opposite direction of our escape. We advance three steps and a great shapeless dune in perpetual movement returns us to the same spot. Verónica starts to cry in panic as her glance is disfigured. We keep trying, panting, and it’s all useless. The sea convulses ferociously, the waves –each time more voluminous– crash into each other and produce a horrific din. My car, which can barely be seen through the sand in the air, suddenly disappears buried by a dune. Verónica holds on to me with that superhuman strength despair grants us. And we stand there, amid the slaps from the sand and the terrible rumor of the waves. The chorus is now joined by dozens of thunderclaps that tirelessly burst in the celestial vault. And suddenly a rain storm explodes that seems to fracture the firmament and tear it apart in liquid pieces. Then the sea seems to open up, the waters rehearse a horrible contraction and drain toward the sides, leaving in the center of our visibility a distant and mysterious small blue island that makes a sinister silence coagulate in the wind. At that instant we realize: it’s the wave that grows. An enormous, monstrous wave that marches full speed toward us and seems to scratch the air as it moves producing a dry and clamorous sound, an unbearable roar. It’s the same wave I’ve dreamed of so many times before, it’s the same recurring nightmare, that repeats itself with a rigorous and macabre perfection in reality: myself, hugging the body of a woman with firm breasts (in the dream the woman was faceless, I couldn’t have known it was Verónica), watching the wave approach, both of us terrified, paralyzed in front of the final horror. Then I know this time I won’t wake up. And it’s my turn to decide how all this will end: either letting us be dragged, crushed and drowned by the wave or handing ourselves over to the sepulcher of the immense white dune moving furiously from the other side. “I’ll pass,” I think, but it’s too late for me to tell Vero.

Translator’s Note: This short story is included in the new book by Roberto Martínez Bachrich, Las guerras íntimas (Caracas: Lugar Común, 2011).

{ Roberto Martínez Bachrich, Prodavinci, 3 June 2011 }

El desagravio / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-06-12T20:20:00.000-04:00

Amends

I have witnessed the cavalcade directed toward a meridional kingdom, under the command of an agreeable lady. I saw the imitation of spring and of her bizarre escort.
Each man was on foot in front of the palfrey of his chosen woman, leading it by the right hand, and was listening to some mirthful or gallant tale from his companion. In this manner they were driving away melancholy, following the instructions imposed for the journey by the sovereign of the retinue.
I had retired to a barren wilderness, where I was simulating the fulfillment of a penance assigned by the lady of my devotion, discontent with my eccentric ways.
The ladies of the retinue heard amid laughter the story of my mistake and decided to take me with them, in the hopes of attaining my absolution.
I joined the company of nobles and adopted their delirious happiness, mounted on a recalcitrant ass.
I fell on my knees in front of my lady, while the others persuaded her in a noisy chorus. The most beautiful of all of them meanwhile was adapting a paper crown to my head.
The lady of my thoughts lifted me from humiliation, stretching out her right arm to me.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

Roberto Martínez Bachrich: Me siento lúcido frente a un cuento / Michelle Roche Rodríguez

2011-06-11T00:11:00.007-04:00

Roberto Martínez Bachrich: I feel lucid in front of a short story

While his short stories are shrouded with the quick intensity that drags the reader toward the final effect, Roberto Martínez Bachrich’s modesty captivates. Wary of interviews, or false stage lights, he only feels comfortable when talking about the writer’s work. For him, literature is what others do; his own work is merely “an irresponsibility.”

But since every mania has its cure and and each writer his editor, the new imprint Lugar Común presented last night Las guerras íntimas, the most recent collection of short stories by the author born in Valencia in 1977.

A relationship that unravels, two vengeful nephews, a man with an aversion toward tables, a pair of reckless youths, the feline perversity of a woman who uses her lovers, the journey of a family of Italian immigrants or the ghost of a decapitated nurse, these are some of the anecdotes about small daily passions that parade through the book.

(Re)writing. Martínez Bachrich finds the best of his literary experience in the constant editing of his texts, even to the point of paroxysm. For example, the first version of Las guerras íntimas was finished in 2001 and it was a collection of 16 short stories. But, in the process of correcting it, only the title and five stories remained. Between 2002 and 2007 he created a dozen more and after the task of rewriting he was left with the list of 10 stories that have just been published: “My first short story collections were published very quickly and I try not to repeat those errors any more.”

The most evident trait of his prose is a return to the classical forms of the short story, which once represented the vanguard of the style of Julio Cortázar’s Historias de cronopios y famas (1962).

With cohesion as a premise, not a single phrase in his stories is extraneous. “Surprise is a pillar of the classic short story and in these texts I’m working on the idea of attaining it, thinking of the knock out Cortázar discusses,” he points out before emphasizing the real weight of the symbol in the short story: “The image can be a point of departure, but the arrival passes through the necessity of a story that’s autonomous and well-rounded, that works.”

Other short story collections by the same author are Desencuentros (1998) and Vulgar (2000). Nearly a decade ago he published the poetry collection Las noches de cobalto, but he prefers not to talk about that genre, though he hasn’t abandoned it: “I feel lucid in front of a short story because I can defend it and I understand where it comes from, which doesn’t happen to me with the poem.”

Now, as he enjoys or in his case, rather, flees from the brief flashes of celebrity that touch those who present a book in Venezuela, he is also finishing the last details of his biography of Antonia Palacios entitled Tiempo hendido, which won the tenth edition of the Concurso Transgenérico de la Fundación para la Cultura Urbana last year.

{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 4 June 2011 }

Farándula / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-06-08T14:37:00.006-04:00

Show Business

The drama begins with the altercation between an impetuous young man and a courtesan of withered age. The controversy is transferred to the presence of the king and falls under his arbitrage.
The progenitor of the irascible young man has perished, years earlier, in a nocturnal ambush. He was leaving a splendid dance and challenging his enemies leaving behind him and at a great distance the entourage of his horseback pages and torch carriers. He was rushing ahead to the encounter with death, when his minions were composing a nuptial theory for him, in accordance with Hellenic usage.
The people’s rumor accused the most cautious and ambitious courtier, the rancor of the orphan recrudesced and enabled him for the martial arrest.
The king discharges the dissidents and sends them off to disparate kingdoms, prohibiting them from reconciliation before a marked lapse.
The young gentleman has struck up a casual conversation with the politician’s daughter and dedicates himself to following her steps and to pleasing her caprices and thoughts. In this manner the veto of the monarch is frustrated and the convention occurs in the City of Master Singers.
The young man and the destitute minister confer on the successive perfidies of the king and clarify the homicide of the arrogant magnate, madly in advance of his men the night of the celebrated festival.
The two return triumphantly from exile when the sudden death of the king occurs. The people’s voice insists that he was suffocated by his stewards.
The wedding of the impetuous young man with the daughter of the ancient relative of the sovereign is verified in the hall of the deplored dance.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

El ensueño del cazador / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-06-07T15:40:00.003-04:00

The Hunter’s Dream

I had become a citizen of a remote country, where the auras of the skies ran free. I recall the contentment of the inhabitants and their customs and their innocent diversions. They lived in tall and frank mansions. They would entertain themselves amidst the countryside, at the foot of dispersed trees, of ascendant height. They would run to the encounter with dawn in flowery ships.
They called themselves docile to the council of their divinities, agents of nature and they felt at each step the effects of their invisible presence. They had to abominate the dictates of pride and invoke them, humble and scrupulous, on the occasion of a birth.
They were pointing out the daughter of the magnates, forgotten from the ritual invocation, and her lover, the rebellious hunter.
The young man had imitated the customs of the neighboring country. He renounced traditional employment in favor of the randomness of hunting and was challenging, confident in himself, the viciousness of the bison and the wolf.
He forgot the graces of his beloved and the temptations of youth, thanks to an extravagant dream, ghost of a warm night. He was pursuing an arrogant animal, with a rough hump, with a choleric growl, and leaping with laughs and clamors over the repose of an immaculate fountain. A woman was emerging from the heart of the waters, barely distinguishing herself from the limpid air.
The hunter awoke when he fixed his attention on the tenuous image.
He withdrew from mankind to dedicate himself, without hindrance, to an extravagant meditation.
He was anxiously tracing the marks of an unprecedented beauty.

La torre de Timón (1925)

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

Del destierro / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-06-05T21:11:00.005-04:00

Of Exile

I carry in my spirit the desolation of the landscape, nature is in mourning; the mountain communicated its immobility to the fog that envelops it; the air is orphaned of aroma and song, melancholic trees, sleepily agonize under a leaden sky, in an asphyxiating atmosphere. In this place full of silence, it seems as though my heart only lives on encouraged by a memory, by a dead sensation.
I remember the morning, when she passed me, incarnation of tempting beauty that would torment an ascetic’s dream: arrogant stride, disdainful gesture; from the depths of her eyes’ perverse glance occult love was throwing its arrows; on her face, living silk a mole like a diminutive muffled star; with a blonde head she was placing a smile of light a festival sun...
In divine ecstasy, wanting to make that instant eternal, I contemplated her as she walked away with my tranquility through the astonishing avenue of trees, whose leaves whispered with murmurs of very still voices.
From that moment shame is my host, I live consecrated to her, whose absence kills me; that memory that torments me like a claw sinking made its nest in my chest.
We live off pain and the past, dispelling sadness, making black thoughts flee, the memory of that woman makes my heart palpitate, the only being who seems to live in this place of silence nature, tired of activity and anxious dies.

Translator’s Note: This text, Ramos Sucre's first publication, appeared in the Cumaná literary magazine Ritmo e ideas on 15 December 1911.

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

Alastor / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

2011-05-22T21:03:00.005-04:00

Alastor

The army of the Athenians had suffered deplorable setbacks in the confines of Syracuse and the order to retreat was necessary. The ships in charge of facilitating it had been lost in a fight reestablished several times. We the survivors envied the happiness of those who were sacrificed. The bonfires consumed the dead and their spectacular military accessories and were marking the route of our day’s journey.
The army was moving slowly and with difficulty. The wounded, abandoned on the floor, broke into lamentations and thought they had fallen into the hands of the victor.
My companion in the field tent sat up from where he was succumbing and clung to my shoulders. We had grown up together in imitation of heroes and had agreed to help each other. He was frightened of dying amidst the abuses and even more of surviving only to end up in captivity.
I threw him down in front of me and took his life with a dart penetrated by infernal aconite and reserved for myself in case I was imprisoned.
I have blindly inflicted upon him the mortal wound. I have turned my face and covered my eyes with the other hand.
Unlimited compassion barely serves to alleviate my crime of having anticipated the necessary day for him. I describe without respite the event where my inquietude begins.
His soul did not drift away indignant.

Las formas del fuego (1929)

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

Nuevos poemas: XX / Reynaldo Pérez Só

2011-05-21T00:02:00.001-04:00

New Poems: XX

it refuses
to come out into the sun anymore the shadow
is warm and covers

it can’t
it must wait a little more

words threaded to a nonexistent sun

it’s made of shadow
it’s only made of shadow.

Translator’s note: Reynaldo Pérez Só (Caracas, 1945) will be the poet honored this year at the 8th Festival Mundial de Poesía 2011, next month in Caracas.

{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }

Nuevos poemas: XVII / Reynaldo Pérez Só

2011-05-20T01:55:00.004-04:00

New Poems: XVII

a minute ago
death did not exist

well it stood on the corner
and stopped traffic
took a left and had
its body thrown against the wall

now is an instant but
a minute ago eternity went in circles

and it will make a minute
and again death poses
its form on the scale
and combines the finger

the lady queen defeats herself
and the game begins.

November 1970

{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }

Nuevos poemas: XIV / Reynaldo Pérez Só

2011-05-19T00:07:00.002-04:00

New Poems: XIV

stone you can’t hear me
and it’s best
we don’t understand each other the northern hill
is big
the southern hill
is big

stone
another summer arrives
and the swaying wind
would be so similar but the dead one does not exist

the northern hill
carries another river

the northern one where I don’t
fit
always the hill

knowing so much is of no interest

crossing a street
is pure eternity.

January 1971

{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }

Nuevos poemas: XIII / Reynaldo Pérez Só

2011-05-18T00:45:00.005-04:00

New Poems: XIII

the thick door face
of the water that falls

the last

crying
who detains me in
the question
and strikes the blow?

with death one has
a black lapel
the wind is the same

the table is set
like a table.

{ Reynaldo Pérez Só, Nuevos poemas, Valencia: Universidad de Carabobo, 1975 }