29 poetas jóvenes amanecen sobre la palabra / Diana Moncada

29 Young Venezuelan Poets Awaken Over the Word

Twenty-nine poets who awaken over the word. Twenty-nine young voices who in their unease, their predictions and anomalies offer the poem amidst a world falling to pieces. That’s the wager of the anthology Amanecimos sobre la palabra, curated and selected by the poet and editor Oriette D’Angelo and published recently by the organization Team Poetero.

The selections in this anthology draw, in the words of D’Angelo, a cartography that allows us to glimpse the new means of disseminating poetry on the Internet. The twenty-nine Venezuelan poets included have as a common denominator that their texts have come to life for the first time in cyberspace and their incipient literary projects are a click away through various digital magazines that make up today’s digital ecosystem.

The anthology of young Venezuelan poets offers a journey through the most diverse registers and topics, but always under the chaotic sign of contemporaneity, the complexity of a world where utopias have failed, and the cataclysm of a dismembered country.

The name of the anthology —explains the editor in the prologue— alludes to a verse by the poet Pablo Rojas Guardia, “used as an aesthetic banner by part of the Generation of 28.” For the poet and editor the anthology is also an homage to the poet and a recognition of digital media as promoters of new literature.

The poets selected, born between 1985 and 1999, include Susan Urich, Oswaldo Flores, Liwin Acosta, Pamela Rahn, Víctor Noé, Andrea Paola Hernández and Miguel Ortiz Rodríguez, among others.

D’Angelo explains that thanks to her work as editor of the digital platform Digo.palabra.txt and to her interest in digital magazines she already knew many of the names of those that ended up forming part of the book.

“Despite knowing them, having read nearly all of them previously and recognizing their talent, I also wanted to focus on two things: the singularity of their poetic voices and that as many of Venezuela’s cities as possible be represented,” explained the editor, for whom it was important to show that the literary activities in places such as Maracaibo, Coro, Mérida and San Cristóbal are as “incredible” as those in the capital city.

The topics addressed by the young poets range from the most canonical in the Venezuelan poetic tradition, such as memory, the house, the city, the body; to those permeated by signs of the megabyte era and by less conventional structures that defy the act of reading.

For D’Angelo, “the desire to keep writing despite the lack of opportunities,” is what unites these singular voices. “All of them have interesting projects, some have magazines, participate in literary groups, organize readings and events. This generation, which includes me, ”has found it hard to start materializing their work. Very few of those included have their first book published, and it’s not because they haven’t written them, but because they depend on contests and prizes to do so,” D’Angelo assures.

The literary activities of these young poets are taking place and expanding behind computer and mobile screens. This ferment is one of the qualities D’Angelo wanted to highlight in the generation represented by the book.

She finds the interaction sparked by the Internet “interesting” in relation to poetic dissemination and creation. However she warns: “It’s quite easy to get carried away by the immediacy of the Internet. A poem getting 70 likes on Facebook doesn’t make it the poem of the century, but neither does getting 2 likes mean it’s bad. I’m not talking about those types of interactions, which are more superficial, I’m talking more about the process of dissemination, recognition and dialogue that can happen in this space between readers and writers.”

While it is an anthology, it only aims to be an “approximation” —the editor affirms—, to what’s currently happening in regards to poetry.

The book will be presented tomorrow in Caracas at Kalathos bookstore, at 12:30pm.




{ Diana Moncada, El Universal, 11 March 2017 }

Two Venezuelan Writers Among the Great Hopes of the Frankfurt Book Fair

                  [Venezuelan novelist Alberto Barrera Tyszka. Photo: El Universal]


For five days, the main publishing houses and agencies of the world gathered at the Frankfurt Book Fair, perhaps the biggest event in the world dedicated to the commercialization of rights for projects in the literary world.

Around 140,000 professionals and 7 thousand exponents from approximately one hundred countries gathered at this event where two Venezuelan writers were catalogued as great literary hopes after reaching agreements with foreign publishing houses for the translation and publication of their novels.

The Caracas-born writers Alberto Barrera Tyszka, who was recently awarded the 2015 Tusquets Prize in Spain, and Rodrigo Blanco Calderón were highly valued for their novels Patria o muerte and The Night, respectively.

International media have mentioned that the material by Barrera Tyszka was particularly successful and will be read in France, Holland, Portugal, Sweden, Germany and the United States thanks to the agreements. The novel makes reference to the Venezuelan crisis and narrates episodes tied to the final days of the ex-president Hugo Chávez.

Blanco Calderón mentions that his work was negotiated with the French publishing house Gallimard, and he expects it will be released at the beginning of 2016, close to its publication date with Alfaguara in Spain. Moreover, he doesn’t rule out the possibility that publishing houses from other countries might become interested in the translation of his book. “This week I’ll speak with my agent and will know further details, but I’m aware that other negotiations were taking place,” he declared.

According to Blanco Calderón, “book fairs of this magnitude allow a writer to reach certain areas of reading, commentary and dissemination that an author from any country wouldn’t be able to attain on his own. That’s the value of this possibility, because it allows us to open up slightly the barrier between Venezuelan literature and the world.”

Among other Latin American revelations, highlights also included the recently-deceased Canek Guevara, grandson of Che Guevara, who will publish 33 revoluciones with Alfaguara in Spain, in which he critiques Fidel Castro’s regime; and the Colombian Héctor Abad Faciolince, with his book La Oculta, to be published by Gallimard.




{ El Universal, 20 October 2015 }

Tomás Eloy Martínez, hecho en Venezuela / Daniel Fermín

Tomás Eloy Martínez, Made in Venezuela

                     [Photo: Nicola Roco]

Tomás Eloy Martínez (Tucumán, 1934 - Buenos Aires, 2010) wrote a myriad of news articles during the time he lived in Venezuela. The Argentine, a reference in Latin American journalism, practiced his career in the nation that served him as a refuge from the dictatorship in his country between 1976 and 1983. Ciertas maneras de no hacer nada, an anthology published by La hoja del norte, gathers the essential texts he wrote in Venezuela.

The first half of the book is dedicated to certain places. A theater actress who was practicing with her group in the Jesús Soto Museum in Ciudad Bolívar, a salt mine worker in Araya who nearly falls in love with his sister, a singer from Calabozo who tries to break his own father’s record of 32 children. A series of anonymous beings who offer a glimpse of Venezuela in the 1970s.

The second part of the anthology gathers profiles and interviews with figures from Venezuelan culture. Juan Liscano, Guillermo Meneses, Vicente Gerbasi, Andrés Bello, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Jacinto Fombona Pachano. Intellectuals from that era who were profiled by Martínez. Texts reflecting his passion for the arts, stories charged with a lucidity that resists time.

The following are some of the phrases spoken by the figures he profiled:

—It’s very tempting to be a leftist poet, but it’s so sad to realize how it destroys the true meaning of poetry.
(Juan Liscano, 1976).

—All poetry is political. What I reprove is that it be used as a combat instrument, as a stone in the barricades.
(Juan Liscano, 1976).

—To write: speaking our torments aloud, making peace with the dead who haven’t quite left us.
(Adriano González León, 1975).

—Maybe I write for that reason: I aspire to transform my life through literature.
(Salvador Garmendia, undated).

—One doesn’t just write for something, but also for someone.
-(Tomás Eloy Martínez, 1975).

Sergio Dahbar was in charge of the prologue and compilation of the book, which also includes an introduction by Jaime Abello Banfi. Ciertas maneras de no hacer nada, which owes its title [Certain Ways of Doing Nothing] to a phrase spoken by the novelist Adriano González León to his interviewer, closes with Martínez’s farewell to his wife Susana Rotker, who was run over by a car in 2000. A book that more than one Venezuelan journalist should read.




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 30 May 2015 }

El país en una maleta: Entrevista a Héctor Torres / Daniel Fermín

The Country in a Suitcase: An Interview with Héctor Torres

                  [Photo: Nicola Rocco]

A man who drives the wrong direction up a one way street; a young man who’s a victim of a crime on a bus; pedestrians who are forced to avoid all the obstacles on the city sidewalks; a boy who jumps from the top floor of a mall. Héctor Torres once again explores Venezuela’s national identity in Objetos no declarados: 1001 maneras de ser venezolano mientras el barco se hunde (2014), which has been published by Puntocero.

“The book complements Caracas muerde (2012). It’s another side of the same topic. If in that book I addressed the spiritual state of the citizen, here I focus on how many of us have contributed to the violence and chaos of the country. Earlier I offered a panoramic view, now I speak introspectively about how each of us participates in the disaster. I felt like I needed to finish saying things that were still unresolved from the first book.”

Emigration is the connecting thread of Objetos no declarados. The title is a metaphor of the elements —good and bad— that Venezuelans carry in their suitcases when they leave the country. Because no matter where you go, your origins travel with you, like contraband. The paranoia typical of Venezuela’s insecurity even when you’re in the safest place in the world, the annoyance of apologizing for everything on the outside, the lack of discipline when it comes to following certain laws.

“The stories came out of conversations I had with friends living abroad. The topic of migration has become something very important. One, because of today’s polarization, two, because until now Venezuela was never a nation of emigrants. People are incapable of seeing the person who emigrates as someone who’s looking for opportunities, but rather as someone who gave up, who betrayed something I can’t even define. The very fleeting idea of thinking they escape the problem yet taking the problem with them. Just like the family, the country is a brand. You can say you’re leaving Venezuela because it’s broken but you go somewhere else and run a red light.”

Power is another topic in several of the stories that make up the book. Power reflected in a girl’s manipulation of her mother so that she’ll scold him in a subway car. Or the bad service of clerks in a store or in any institution, as if they themselves won’t be clients or won’t have to run an errand in the near future. Torres narrates anecdotes that reflect how the obsession with authoritarianism among Venezuelans is still manifested today, even within smaller confines.

“I think we have a long tradition of abusing power. First, we’re a people of caudillos, where the figure of the great father is always fundamental. We’ve grown up with the image that there’s one Venezuela who’s superior to all the rest, which is Simón Bolívar. And that contributes to us living like eternal orphans. If you read La escribana del viento, by Ana Teresa Torres, you realize that Venezuelan society in 1640 already had some of the elements we still see today: abusive, despotic power. When we enter a crisis, the true nature of a society is revealed.”

Héctor Torres nourishes his literature with the streets, with the country’s daily situations. Caracas, because of its stories, its chaos and its violence, is an ideal place for writing. Literature as a reflection of what we are, a way of interpreting a nation from the intimacy of its anonymous characters: the old man who runs a tiny stall for making phone calls, the parents who take their kids to school day after day, the different social classes in Venezuela.

“Reality allows that. Here in Venezuela the crime novel writes itself. Crime, absurdity, contaminated power, we see these every single day. One of the few enviable things about Caracas is the possibility of infinite topics for whoever wants to write. Literature slows down life. It allows us to read ourselves, to relive certain moments. Like watching a video of something we already did. Because daily life impedes us from having a critical attitude toward the events around us, more so in a city as chaotic as Caracas. People live with rules that exist but aren’t applied. According to their individual norms, every man for himself. Because of how corrupted institutions have become in the country, it’s a matter of survival. We’ve become accustomed to violence, to resolving things on our own.”

Héctor Torres has already said he isn’t trying to make an analysis or a social condemnation. His interest is simply literature. The Venezuelan writer is very clear about the fact that a book can’t change a country’s reality, that Objetos no declarados can’t do much in the face of the impunity that reigns in Venezuela. He merely shows it, points to it, exhibits it with a glance that is somewhat removed from the vertiginous rhythms typical of a daily routine.

“Literature tries to reflect reality as faithfully as possible. In the hopes it might produce something in the reader. That it might move people. David Foster Wallace said it: whoever’s calm, shake him up; whoever’s uneasy, give him some calm. It’s an epic ambition to think you can modify a city by merely writing. We’ll leave that to the politicians, to the heroes or saviors of the nation. Literature serves as a consolation. Whoever feels like a stranger in his own country can realize he’s not the only one, he can provide a slight feeling of hope. It could produce a factor, that some people might think they can live in a different manner. Literature shouldn’t ever have the ambition of producing a political change because then it becomes a pamphlet. That’s very dangerous.”




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 23 November 2014 }

Ana Lucía De Bastos: “La poesía es, en el fondo, forma” / Daniel Fermín

Ana Lucía De Bastos: “Poetry is, at its core, form”

                  [Photo: Nicola Rocco]

Ana Lucía De Bastos (Caracas, 1983) was given an illustrated version of Margarita, the poem by Rubén Darío, when she was just five years old. She liked the book so much she began to recite it by memory wherever she might be (at school, at the homes of family members). It was the first experience with poetry for the writer who yesterday presented her book Y ahora, extiéndeme al sol (Bid&Co, 2014) at the bookstore El Buscón in Caracas.

The first poetry collection by the Caracas author is a compilation of her old texts. De Bastos gathered poems that she had in folders, notebooks and e-mails. Until she realized there was a familiarity among them. The body, the skin, the spirit, the word, the verb, love. De Bastos explores these topics in his first publication.

Y ahora, extiéndeme al sol has fictional intentions. There are poems in which the author tells of certain situations. De Bastos believes poetry can always make use of other literary genres. “I use the anecdote as a vehicle that leads to the feeling, the emotion I might want to transmit through the text. Poems are, at their core, form,” said the graduate of the Central University of Venezuela, where she studied Literature.

De Bastos’s collection mentions other authors. Eugenio Montejo, Roberto Calasso, Hanni Ossott, Herberto Helder, among others (“we all have mothers and fathers in literature,” she said). There are also texts that make references to voices, to saying it all in writing. “Some people write because reality isn’t enough for them. I do it because reality overwhelms me, I do it as a means of facing it,” added De Bastos, who received a Master’s in Editing at the University of Barcelona in Spain.

De Basto’s passion for books goes beyond writing and/or reading. The poet is also in charge of an artisanal project (Alhilo Editorial), that for the moment has only published one title in its catalog (Días raros, by Sara Fratini). “I do it as an anchor to Venezuela, so I might have something to come back to,” concluded the author, who currently lives in Spain. Over there, meanwhile, she’s working on her first novel.




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 15 August 2014 }

Gustavo Valle, otro viaje interior / Daniel Fermín

Gustavo Valle, Another Inner Journey

                                  [Photo: Mai Albamonte Pizarro]

Gustavo Valle (Caracas, 1967) had his first migratory experience when he was 17 or 18 years old. That passage through the Gulf of Cariaco later served him when he recreated the landscape in Happening, which won the Multi-Genre Prize of the Sociedad de Amigos de la Cultura Urbana in 2013. A road novel about escape, abandonment, guilt.

“I think escape is a topic that interests me, it’s evident in Venezuela today. Literature doesn’t function like an escape but rather an immersion. Escape translates into a type of unknown map. You don’t know quite where you’re going, but in that movement you might find a few clues.”

The new book by the Venezuelan writer is a story in which the protagonist, a frustrated theater actor, flees after a culpable homicide. An escape that leads him to reencounter himself, his own origins. An existential thriller that is also an inner journey. Like the literature Valle himself enjoys reading and making.

“The main character of my novel confronts extreme situations and the way he finds answers is by going on a trip, or actually an escape, to a remote place. I think that during physical displacements a ferocious mechanism for psychic reflection is activated. My characters are in permanent movement precisely because in that movement they find the answers to those questions that unsettle them.”

Valle is a migrant being. He’s been in Buenos Aires for several years now (before that he spent some time in Spain). His fiction is always bringing him back to his origins. Writing in order to return to memory, to the place he left. His first novel, Bajo tierra (2009), was the product —among other things— of an obsession with Caracas; in Happening, there’s also something of that oppressive city, of that space that expels, or frightens, its inhabitants.

“Writing fiction has moved me to establish my scenes in Venezuela and to imagine the country and its people. More than a reencounter with the country I think it’s a way of surprising myself with it, and of exploring and thinking about it. I mean, it’s an exercise of permanently interpolating my own identity.”

That said, Valle doesn’t write for a Venezuelan reader, nor for any other single nationality. He merely writes, with no other intention.

“Writers simply write for their readers, and before that for themselves, since we’re the first and inevitable reader we have. Readers tend to be a mystery for the writer and writing a book for oneself or for someone else is to aim at a moving target. The best thing is to save that ammunition for the writing itself.”

Valle’s literature tends to evoke memories and nostalgias. Remembering is an exercise of construction, as one of the characters in Happening says. Seeing writing as a form of memory, or —maybe— as a means of remaining through art.

“I believe one of the great tasks of literature and art is to work with memory. And especially in our country, where we’re living through an epidemic of amnesia. But memory, once it’s evoked, modifies itself, transfigures itself, and it moves reality towards a terrain where reflection and judgment can be exercised better. When we turn our glance backwards we’re also imagining our past, which is the best way of looking forward. I mean, without a story there’s no future. But I’m not talking about history’s narrative, which is indispensable, but rather the memory that’s conceived by fiction.”

There’s another phrase in Happening that says, to represent is to be oneself not someone else. Valle thinks writing is also a means of unfolding, of putting on a mask that might be transparent. Or not.

“Not just unpacking yourself, which requires a great deal of bravery, but also unpacking others. Even unpacking everything, if possible: prejudice, power, customs, morality. I mean, when we write we always try to open and unpack. Reality tends to present itself to us in only one of its fronts and the task of the writer is to reveal the others. Just like you on a mask, you can also pull out other ones.”




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 21 September 2014 }

Venezuelan Art Collective Wins Public Art Contest in Pittsburgh

                (Israel Centeno, writer)

The Venezuelan artists Carolina Arnal, Israel Centeno and Gisela Romero were the winners of an open call by City of Asylum/Pittsburgh and the Office of Public Art of Pittsburgh for the realization of one of three temporary art projects that will take place in Pittsburgh, PA starting in July, with an interdisciplinary proposal entitled “River of Words.”

Arnal, Centeno and Romero have formed a group that, from different disciplines, has been working together since 2002 as a critical voice in various art projects.

                                        (Israel Centeno)

                                        (Carolina Arnal)

                                        (Gisela Romero)

The project “River of Words” came about from a collaboration between the graphic designer Carolina Arnal, the writer Israel Centeno and the visual artist Gisela Romero, and it includes ephemeral, temporary and permanent art transformed into texts, words, drawings and designs. With the intention of actively involving community residents, they organized a program in which neighbors chose the words they wanted to have as guests in their streets, backyards and homes. Among many other words, there will be fragments of texts by the Venezuelan poets Eugenio Montejo, Rafael Cadenas and José Antonio Ramos Sucre.

                                        (Eugenio Montejo)

                                        (Rafael Cadenas)

                                        (José Antonio Ramos Sucre)

The main idea of the project is the artistic and everyday connection between the neighbors of the community and the Alphabet City Literary Center, within approximately eight blocks of Pittsburgh, on the northern side of the city, a historic district known as Mexican War Streets. Using the layout of contact between neurons, words and drawings, there will be connections drawn between houses, streets and backyards, creating a synapsis and materializing the contact between human beings in the exchange of energy, affection and knowledge.

The project will be installed by its creators, Arnal, Centeno and Romero.




Translator’s Note: More information about “River of Words” can be found at the City of Asylum/Pittsburgh website.




{ El Universal, 10 July 2014 }

Israel Centeno: “Venezuela hoy espanta” / Daniel Fermín

Israel Centeno: “Venezuela today is frightening”

Israel Centeno (Caracas, 1958) recreated a post-apocalyptic Venezuela in his new novel. Jinete a pie (Caracas: Lector Cómplice, 2014) is a fragmented love story that takes place in a world dominated by motorcycle riders. There are pedestrians who must survive the hunts imposed by the hordes that wield power, there are voices trying to reconstruct their past, to provide continuity for their memory.

“We are incapable of remembering things that happened just two years ago. The dynamics of Venezuela make us forget what came before. It’s a very toxic atmosphere where everything gets distorted. I see my characters as if they were licing a nightmare within a mirror where they’re reflected in multiple ways. When I look at my country, that’s the type of story that comes out, that’s the discourse I capture.”

Jinete a pie [Rider On Foot] is the beginning of a trilogy in which Centeno proposes a deconstruction of modernity in Venezuela, amid an atmosphere of Gothic realism. It takes place in the Altamira district of Caracas that, according to one of its characters, was at one point the last holdout of the resistance. “Because the country,” Centeno assures us, “is like a mystery, or a horror story.”

“Today in Venezuela rationality is being broken, fractured. We even celebrate death when it takes away an enemy. We witness the apparition of figures that blend into each other, they could be vampires, witches, politicians. The country’s reality is frightening. Much more than the tales of Gothic horror from the 18th and 19th centuries. You see rituals linked to politics. The fact that Simón Bolívar was disinterred, that Chávez and others shouted “Fatherland, Socialism or Death!” at his bones, this is all somewhat chilling. If you place all that in a different scenario it would fill anyone with fear. Imagine that all the powers in France appear and worship the ashes of Napoleon Bonaparte. That would make everyone panic. Hugo Chávez walked to his death surrounded by a bizarre mysticism. Nicolás Maduro slept in Chávez’s tomb. I haven’t seen anything more Gothic than that. There’s a castle at the foot of the mountain, a tomb in a castle. We’ve got enough elements to exploit Gothic literature for 200 years.”

Israel Centeno tries to understand the country through fiction. No one who writes about Venezuela can avoid reflecting our reality, of interpreting it, analyzing it. Because during moments of crisis, of violence, of social confrontation, of deaths, there’s not much else a writer can do.

“Literature can’t assume the role of political parties nor that of their leaders. Literature can only do what it tends to do: establish a connection and links between reality, fiction and the truth. Writing in any field is a means of resistance, it’s a political position. There’s nothing else I can do. Literature can’t save anyone, but I can keep writing. Any publication that appears in this context is a political gesture that won’t free us. I won’t land in Caracas with books, nor will I try to tell people that the more they read the freer they’ll be. You can’t expect the writer to be more intelligent than everyone else, that he construct a truth for the rest to follow. I think it’s been a curse for Venezuelans to believe in Messiahs. I don’t want that type of heroism.”

One of the protagonists of Jinete a pie says that without rights we’re all equal, that this is the only possible equality. There are many voices in the novel that pretend to own the truth. Israel Centeno believes that Venezuela today points in that direction.

“Everyone is equal in a concentration camp; everyone is equal when you’re in a supermarket with no food. When equality is imposed on you in such a manner that your rights are taken away. When you can’t have access to dollars on the exchange market they equalize you. When they kill all of us, we’re equal. Venezuelans are suffering from a flood of violence that is State policy. It’s a way of equalizing. Impunity strips the citizen of his right to enjoy public spaces. No one can enjoy those places without fearing he’ll be killed in a horrible manner.”

In Jinete a pie there was a pact between pedestrians and motorcycle riders. After multiple safaris in which they would kill pedestrians, they arrived at a pact of non-aggression against the weak. Until the rules are broken (including a curfew). And the truce, or dialogue, imposed by those in power is over.

“It’s like those acts of justice that exist in Venezuela. The Supreme Court judges dictate in favor of the murderer, which is the government. Power has become an element that persecutes, that tortures, that hunts, that lays blame on others. The Supreme Court decides when that hunt should be augmented or not. Maduro calls out for dialogue but he breaks it. That’s the reality, the suspension of the safaris is the alleged plan for peace in which they keep killing us.”

Israel Centeno finished writing this novel in 2011. It wasn’t made in response to the recent acts of violence involving collective paramilitary groups at the service of the government. The author, who once watched a group of motorcycle riders in Caracas beat up an elderly man for crashing into one of their motorcycles on the highway, isn’t trying to demonize them.

“It’s not that motorcycle riders are evil. It’s that when Maduro calls them his “gentlemen of steel” he’s giving them blank check. If I give them immunity, I turn them into a criminal arm. It’s not a possible reality to think of a world dominated by them, it’s a reality that already exists. Now the problem is to revert the situation without taking away all their rights.”

The protagonists of Jinete a pie can’t leave the zone, that destroyed Altamira that became one of the cantons into which the country has been divided. Centeno doesn’t want to sell an epic of urbanization. It is merely a vision that comes after a conflict that is suggested. There is also a love that is unable to find itself, that suffers from distrust, from paranoia, from the fracture itself that reigns over society; a pathological love that looks like hate, that alters people and tries to cure itself.

“The reading I would give is to ask, up to what point was the city made parochial to an extreme. Up to what point did each place in Caracas become divorced from the other, up to what point did it cease to be a whole and become small cantons, fragments with no connection. In the story there’s a defeated Altamira, in the shadows, in darkness, in uncertainty, as if they were mere zombies.”


More Books

• Israel Centeno has already completed the other two parts of the trilogy that begins with Jinete a pie. El cruce de los vientos [The Crossroads of the Winds] and La torre invertida [The Inverted Tower] complete the saga of a post-apocalyptic Caracas.

• The Venezuelan writer also has another trilogy waiting to be published. It is a story about Sherlock Holmes that takes place between the United States and Venezuela right during the time period when Arthur Conan Doyle made his character disappear for three years. Centeno has him solving cases in both countries.

• The Caracas-born writer has also just completed two other novels: one about a love affair and another one about social networks and the impossibility of writing. He is also giving shape to a third one about the guerrilla fighters in Venezuela during the 1970s. “I’ve written more than ever during the last few years,” said the novelist.

• Just recently a publishing house in the United States released a translation of his 2002 novel El complot. The process of bringing the book from Spanish into English was under the care of Guillermo Parra. [Israel Centeno, The Conspiracy, Pittsburgh: Sampsonia Way, 2014]




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 25 May 2014 }

El complot para matar al Presidente / Manuel Caballero

The Conspiracy to Kill the President

The conspiracy to assassinate the President exists, it’s in progress and taking place at least in the fears of the men in the Palace.


Why is this novel by Israel Centeno (El complot, Alfadil, 2002) so disconcerting? In order to explain this to ourselves, we begin with what’s always easier for the lazy: its classification. It is a uchronia; what the dictionary defines as a logical construction adapted to the story of something that hasn’t happened, but could have or might in the future.

The conspiracy to assassinate the President isn’t something that has occurred in reality, but if we pay attention to the warnings, to the fears, to the terrors, to the escapes, to the bullet-proof vests, to the security circles and other such nonsense, it exists, it’s in progress and taking place at least in the fears of the men in the Palace.

A scene. Which is to say, those who suffer these fears could label this novel with another classification: it’s a simple intelligence report, the base for what the pedants and other political scientists would call “a scene.”

We could also say, with all the bad intentions in the world, that it’s a novel of anticipation, an immediate anticipation. Finally, one could, maximizing the mania for classification, say that this is a realist novel.

Israel Centeno’s text impresses us with its masterful ability to immerse itself in reality without being conquered by it. There is, throughout the text, not the least concession to the present such as it might be conceived, for example, by a reporter: the author knows how to establish here the indispensable distance between his fiction and reality, which makes this a novel and not merely an imaginary report. But neither does it distance itself from that reality (or perhaps it’s best to say, from this present) so that the novel becomes a simple game around something that hasn’t happened and will never happen.

My disorganized eagerness. By saying that El complot is a disconcerting novel, I should add that it would be much more if my disorganized reader’s eagerness hadn’t taken me years ago to a series of Irish writers, among them playwrights (The Undertaker, whose author’s name escapes me). Those texts describe the unending spiral of violence in which the characters find themselves immersed.

Of course, and this is seen still in a great part of the Irish situation, violence is a bull that once it’s released is nearly impossible to reign it back in, and sometimes it’s never achieved. The characters in Israel Centeno’s novel don’t just live with violence, they live for violence. There’s no way of escaping it, because they only know one way of life, and thus only one way out: death, given or received.

But it’s not just that, but that the worst hatred isn’t against the evident enemy, but rather against one’s own comrades and friends, always suspected of being actual or potential traitors. This is how Sergio and Gloria don’t escape by shooting their way out from the presence of the identified and hated enemy, but rather shooting against their own friends who are no longer useful to the cause, or who are simply in the way.

They remind us of Chesterton. The problem is that it’s a process that never concludes, and deep down, these tragic characters remind us of those described in a loose tone by Chesterton in his The Man Who Was Thursday; a group of revolutionaries who weren’t that at all, but undercover policemen. In the end, they weren’t spying on anyone but themselves, and if Chesterton had been of a different disposition, they would have eventually, like these Centeno characters, killed one another. Ultimately, as well, and without wanting to laugh on a stage where so much blood has been shed, there is something else that joins Centeno to Chesterton’s tradition: his entire text employs a subtle irony, mocks the frightened and mocks the obsessed, it mocks the ambition for absolute power.

Relatedly, Centeno’s novel takes us to Orwell, to the Vargas Llosa of The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta, because it too is, in his own very personal manner and with a nervous but clear style of writing, a bitter reflection on maximalist utopias. The serpent biting its own tail that they all become.

Do these characters have a destination? Yes: Centeno has reserved for them a refuge in that type of valley of the shadows where they will never know whether they’re living on this or that side of dreaming, on this or that side of death; where they will live maybe forever the life they’ve always lived: in the provisional, in the no-tomorrow.

I must conclude pointing out something that’s also impressed me in this novel by Centeno: the transparency of his prose, that continues to astonish in a text that, because of its topic and we might say its currentness, must have been written in a very short time and very recently.




Translator’s note: El complot has recently been translated into English and published as Israel Centeno, The Conspiracy, translated by Guillermo Parra (Pittsburgh: Sampsonia Way, 2014).




{ Manuel Caballero, El Universal, 28 July 2002 }

Rafael Cadenas, contestaciones: Entrevista / Daniel Fermín

Rafael Cadenas, Replies: An Interview


(Photo: Venancio Alcázares)


Before the Interview:

Rafael Cadenas (Barquisimeto, 1930) listens to the anecdote about Mario Vargas Llosa’s arrival at Simón Bolívar International Airport in Maiquetía, Venezuela.

The journalist speaks:

There were so many journalists at the airport that a bystander approached to ask:
“Dude, who’s coming?”
“Vargas Llosa.”
“The basketball player?”

Rafael Cadenas smiles. He tells his own anecdote:

“You made me recall the Spanish essayist Juan Marichal, who always received letters from people asking him to sign a ball. They confused him with the pitcher.”

The journalist smiles.

Two examples of how a writer will never be as famous as any professional athlete, that any singer or actor can have a greater impact on people than an intellectual, even if he’s won the Nobel Prize in Literature or if he has been honored for his work (Rafael Cadenas was recognized this week by the mayor’s office in the Caracas district of El Hatillo).


Interview (Cadenas reads the answers to a questionnaire sent beforehand by mail):

Years ago, you spoke of the uselessness of literature (1969), and also of the null influence of writers in a society that no longer listens to them (1981). Now I ask you: Is it worth it to write to today? Does it make sense to insist on the value of literature if it can’t prevent the world from falling apart?

It’s not useless. Writers do have an influence even if it’s a minority that reads them, but not quite for preventing events that are beyond what human beings are able to do.

Last month, a group of artists (including you) gathered at the Chacao Cultural Center in Caracas to demand the liberation of political prisoners. Leopoldo López is still in jail. Can a writer, artist or intellectual (not the work itself, but the person, the author) do something in the face of the abuse of power beyond raising his voice, establishing a position?

He can write, speak, say what he thinks, as on that occasion, when I read phrases and sayings in defense of the prisoners, the students and of Teodoro Petkoff, a fundamental figure in Venezuela, whose great contributions have been the political party Movimiento al Socialismo, his books and his newspaper Tal Cual.

I cite one of your sayings: “When the State becomes a giant in a country, its inhabitants become dwarves.” Do you think that power today, in Venezuela, steps on the people?

It’s clear that it represses brutally, even peaceful demonstrations. It already has blood on its hands, but it blames the victims for being assaulted with bullets, buckshot and tear gas. It doesn’t blame those who shoot, and it maintains armed groups that exist beyond the law. And yet, dialogue is indispensable, though the government has to depose its arrogance, because it doesn’t possess the truth. It’s actually possessed by ideas whose results we all suffer, including that part of the people that supported it and deserves respect, just like the opposition.

A phrase you read in Chacao, attributed to a dictator, says that when he engages in dialogue he doesn’t like to be interrupted. In the present context: Do you think there can be an agreement or a negotiation between the government and the opposition?

What the opposition is asking for is fair, but the government makes no concession maybe because it considers that a sign of weakness, when it’s actually an opportunity for a shift toward democracy that can save us. Because everything we’re seeing today denies democracy. The regime violates the Constitution even though it waves it around deceitfully, the public powers are at its service, the National Assembly doesn’t live up to its name. It has taken over TV and radio stations to produce propaganda day and night, it threatens the press and plans to impose on the country a way of not thinking. It also attacks the universities, particularly the Central University of Venezuela. The hatred they feel toward them could lead to the destruction of the universities, which would be a tragedy. That’s why all Venezuelans should defend the universities, however they can, always peacefully.

A phrase in your book Anotaciones says: “Poets don’t convince / nor do they conquer. / Their role is elsewhere, alien to power: to be a contrast.” What happens when a writer becomes an ally to power?

He loses the critical function, which is one of his main characteristics, and he joins his fate to that of the government. Neither of them knows how history will treat them.

And isn’t receiving a prize from a mayor’s office, to a certain degree, accepting something from power? Does a tribute in the career of an author who is already consecrated serve a purpose?

Accepting a distinction doesn’t mean allying oneself to power, because you maintain your independence (...). The recognition has a personal significance: I’ve spent half my life in this municipality, that’s why I accepted it.

In a conversation with Marco Rodríguez in 1978 you said that if you had to interview someone whose opinion you considered important you’d ask him what it means, for him, to live. I’ll take your word: What does it mean, for you, to live?

If I knew I’d say it. I can only tell you that for me it’s tied to the unreachable mystery, the one that surpasses the entirety of the enormous, important and worthy body of knowledge achieved by humanity. I’m referring to the absolute unknown that we vainly hope to know. Daily life is inserted there, in that dimension, even though most people don’t notice it.


Post Interview:

Send Mario Vargas Llosa my gratitude, as a Venezuelan, for everything he’s doing for the country.

*

Related Note: The Poet Who Wrote About Sports

Rafael Cadenas was a sports journalist in the 1950s. He worked for the daily Récord, run by Carlos Luis Barrera (“a great democratic fighter”), alongside the poet Ida Gramcko and her husband José Benavides. He was just a university student who read Marx and watched baseball. His experience only lasted a few months before the newspaper was closed.

The Venezuelan poet used to write articles and reviews, always with the help or advice of Segundo Cazalis. “The veteran journalists were those who covered baseball. They’d send me to write pieces about basketball or tennis, sports I didn’t know very well,” recalled Cadenas, who is a fan of the Cardenales of Lara baseball team.

Rafael Cadenas still enjoys watching the Big Leagues. Also the final days of the Venezuelan season. The writer played baseball when he was young in his native city. “I remember there was an enormous stadium in which the home runs never left the field because no one could get the ball past the fence.”

Back then, the writer from the state of Lara didn’t enjoy basketball. He preferred baseball along with literature. “The passion for soccer in Venezuela is very recent. When I was a kid you rarely saw someone playing it. It wasn’t practiced much in schools,” he added. Journalism today would enjoy his writing.




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 27 April 2014 }

Presentan biografía del poeta José Antonio Ramos Sucre

A Biography of the Poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre Will Be Presented

A biography of José Antonio Ramos Sucre, valuable for both experts as well as those new to his work, will be presented on Saturday, February 1st at the bookstore Kalathos in the cultural center Los Galpones in the Los Chorros neighborhood of Caracas, at 11 in the morning.

José Antonio Ramos Sucre: Creación y vida, written by his descendant Alberto Silva Aristeguieta, is an equally diaphanous and profound outline of the history of the life, actions and suffering of the most universal Venezuelan poet of the first half of the 20th century.

With the initiative of this book produced by the Rosa and Giuseppe Vagnoni Foundation, through Fundavag Ediciones, Alberto Silva explores Ramos Sucre’s life starting from his birth on June 9th, 1890. The book is also a collection of revelations about the 40 years of this erudite man from Cumaná, of testimonies by his contemporaries and letters to his friends and family.




{ El Universal, 27 January 2014 }

Alba Rosa Hernández redescubre a Ramos Sucre

Alba Rosa Hernández Rediscovers Ramos Sucre

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

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

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

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

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


{ El Universal, 24 August 2013 }

Elogio a la libertad: Entrevista a Guillermo Sucre / Daniel Fermín

In Praise of Liberty: An Interview with Guillermo Sucre

“Literature has always been a revelation of great human or social problems.” “The intellectual should stand against all dictatorships. And what we have is a form of dictatorship,” assures the writer Guillermo Sucre.

[Photo: N. Rocco]

Guillermo Sucre (Tumeremo, 1933) knows about dictatorships: he was detained twice by the regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez. On 23 January 1958, when the caudillo fell, the Venezuelan writer was in a Ciudad Bolívar prison alongside the journalists José “Chepino” Gerbasi and Ramón J. Velásquez. Today, at 80, the author fights for democracy with the word, with books such as La libertad, Sancho: De Montaigne a nuestros días, which was recently published by Fundación Valle de San Francisco and Cooperativa Editorial Lugar Común.

The essayist’s new work is a compilation of essays by writers who suffered political or religious conflicts in specific periods. The Frenchman Étienne de La Boétie, who wrote “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” (“It is not necessary to pulverize the colossus but rather to stop sustaining it and you will see it fall from its own weight and break into pieces...”); the Dutchman Baruch Spinoza who said, in his Theologico-Political Treatise, that the “the most violent State will be the one in which each person is denied the freedom to saying and teaching what he thinks...”; the Venezuelan Mariano Picón Salas, who during the Pérez Jiménez era analyzed the word “revolution” in a text; or the Englishman Isaiah Berlin, who in “The Decline of Utopian Ideas in the West” warned: “that subjection to a single ideology, no matter how reasonable and imaginative, robs men of freedom and vitality.” All were selected with a commentary by Sucre himself, who wrote the prologue.

The volume of essays, that gathers texts from eight writers, was born from the courses Sucre gave for the Certificate in Liberal Studies at the Fundación Valle de San Francisco. The professor would share the work of the authors who are in the book with his students. “I began to realize there was an intelligent democratic consciousness in those writers Not a frivolous democracy but a profound and creative one (...) It’s good for young people to connect with a variety of thoughts, although it’s also clear that I’m not going to include a tribute to a dictatorship or a caudillo,” said the winner of the 1976 National Prize for Literature.

Guillermo Sucre believes that Venezuela today is close to being a totalitarian regime. Upon reading this book one inevitably finds similarities with the country’s current situation. One asks if history repeats itself or if human beings never change. And La libertad, Sancho is a way of marking a stance. “It’s like a silent but well-organized protest by means of authors with an important philosophical value (...) We don’t have complete freedom here, it’s a partial freedom (...) Picón Salas said that one must always maintain a certain amount of skepticism and hope.”

It was Michel de Montaigne who wrote that regarding the liberal arts, one must begin with the art that makes us free. Fiction, according to Sucre, can bring us closer to that freedom. “Literature has always been a revelation of great human or social problems. With the rise of revolutions, there emerges a committed literature that transforms revolution into an absolute truth that can’t be criticized. And literature is the exact opposite: a search for diverse points of view. Miguel de Cervantes, for example, writes in praise of liberty. He says we don’t owe it to anyone but that instead it’s a product of ourselves. Man by nature is a free being.”

The Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, another one Sucre cites, said that utopian thought becomes malignant when it’s in the service of tyranny. The same happens with writing as an instrument of power. “I think it loses its richness. The writer diminishes his work because it lacks that type of neutrality, of impersonality, that an author must have in order to see reality in all its aspects,” added Sucre, who warned that one must be careful not to go to extremes (“One can become a fanatic. All extremisms, on the right or on the left, lead to dictatorship...”).


The Role of the Writer

La libertad, Sancho includes phrases that should be cited by more than one politician or thinker today. Another example to highlight: Albert Camus, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, said that the writer cannot be at the service of those who make history but rather of those who suffer it, that the task of his generation, in postwar Europe, was not to remake the world but to prevent it from coming undone. The task of the intellectual today continues to be the same as then: to resist or preserve. “Whoever tries to change the world arrives at failure. (...) Without freedom there is no morality. The intellectual should stand against all dictatorships. And what we have is a form of dictatorship. The last elections revealed that this is a very divided country. There’s no transparency. An intellectual has to stand against forceful regimes in which a military influence is very evident,” said Guillermo Sucre, who before the elections of 7 October 2012 wrote an article entitled “Democratura. Chávez, el camino de la dictadura” [Democra-tatorship: Chávez, the Road to Dictatorship].

There was a time when the Venezuelan essayist had drifted away from political activity. With the arrival of so-called 21st Century Socialism, he once again manifested his position. “Starting in 1998, I confess that I do act with a certain concern for the country’s fate. (...) People should have an interest in politics so that it’s not resolved by only a few. You don’t necessarily have to be an activist, but you should have an awareness of what’s happening. (...) Freedom implies a responsibility. I can’t use it to harm someone else. Freedom is what makes judgment and morality possible and it gives us a fuller sense of life. You have to struggle constantly. Thinking that we attain freedom and it lasts forever is false. Eternal is what totalitarian regimes try to become.”


—And if today you were the same age you had in the days of Marcos Pérez Jiménez, how would you defend freedom?

—I would do the same thing as before. I would have been at the university, at the protest they held recently. But you also have to use your intelligence and skills. You have to have a clear mind, a certain serenity so as to not be clumsy and become hysterical.

*

Venezuela Today

• Regarding the current Government: “Everything comes down to threats, to fear. This is a militaristic Government and that’s reflected in the country’s budget: it spends more in the Ministry of Defense that in those of Public Health, Education or Agriculture.”

• Regarding freedom of speech: “Censorship or self-censorship exists. The opposition newspapers have to publish the information the Government disseminates, but the newspapers aligned with the Government never publish what the opposition states.”

• Regarding politics before the arrival of Hugo Chávez: “Until 1998 there were discrepancies between all the political parties, but there was a shared truth, which was to be opposed to a dictatorship.”

• Regarding political prisoners: “Freedom implies there will be no unjust prison sentences, and in Venezuela there are unjust prison sentences. Judge Lourdes Afiuni was only recently granted conditional freedom, which is shameful. There should be a type of amnesty for those prisoners.”




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 7 July 2013 }

“La poesía es una forma de vivir” - Entrevista Luis Enrique Belmonte, poeta / Daniel Fermín

“Poetry is a way of life” - Interview with Luis Enrique Belmonte, Poet

(Photo: Enio Perdomo)

One morning in the 90s, Luis Enrique Belmonte (Caracas, 1971) skipped an exam at the Escuela de Medicina to read César Vallejo. This is how the doctor began his relationship with literature, which opens a new chapter with the publication of Compañero paciente, a collection of poems that’s nourished by his experience as a psychiatrist in order to assume an empathetic view toward suffering. Proof that poetry can also be therapeutic.

The Venezuelan poet took a few elements from his job and applied them to his verses. “I realized that psychiatry is related to writing. Not on a thematic level, but in terms of other tools. Clinical observation, for example, is something that has elements of the poetic. As well as attentive listening,” said the writer, who has published six previous books.

The author of Inútil registro sees literature as a psychedelic experience, as a form of revealing the mind’s content. However, he doesn’t assume it as self-therapy. “People say that poets don’t need psychoanalysis. I understand that it can be, at certain times, a means of exploration, but it’s not therapy. I think it can be, actually, a risky career. Poetry is sometimes nourished by states of psychic turbulence,” added the writer.

Belmonte’s last book was Salvar a los elefantes, a short novel. That incursion into fiction perhaps led him to the prose-like verses that predominate in his most recent book, which was published by Lugar Común. “The collection has a tone that leans toward fiction. I don’t know if it was because of that novel. Many of my poems have those registers. I make a more communicative, more discursive poem. I’ve always had an approximation to prose.”

The author himself had already said that Compañero paciente is one of those books that he’s enjoyed writing. “I really liked how, unconsciously, it’s very oriented toward the more fraternal aspects of life. That seemed pleasant to me. To think of a book that’s about the fraternity of beings, with friendship amidst the circumstances the poetic subject encounters.”

In the book he offers a portrait of the solidarity that exists among patients (“He says that when things get bad / one forgets they can get worse,” page 25), or the life of an anatomist (who is “dying several times without finally dying,” page 41). He also offers a section in which he gives advice to street dogs (“Don’t complain so much about hunger: keep looking, you always find something,” page 83, or “Read Cervantes in a kennel,” page 81). “I think there are many processes of healing tied to this book. I think we can conceive of poetry as a means of preparing for life. And life is tied to death. Poetry is a way of life,” explained the winner of Spain’s Adonais Prize for Poetry in 1998.

Belmonte also won, in Venezuela in 1996, the Fernando Paz Castillo Poetry Prize. And in an old interview he said prizes can interrupt the course of a budding voice. It happened to him. “It distracted me a bit. Suddenly you’re no longer anonymous, you begin to receive accolades that don’t let you focus on the process of writing. The ideal condition for a writer is solitude or anonymity. Or the anonymity that solitude grants.”

Since then he publishes very little. Or much less than before. It took him five years to write Compañero paciente. “It has to do with a more mature awareness of the responsibility of saying. And one still doubts. I corrected this book until the day it was sent to the printer (a copy in his house has corrections marked with a pen). That’s when I understood you never finish a book, but instead say goodbye to it,” concluded Belmonte. Poetry requires patience.




{ Daniel Fermín, El Universal, 6 July 2012 }

Dayana Fraile ganó el VI Premio de Cuento Policlínica Metropolitana / El Universal

Dayana Fraile won the VI Premio de Cuento Policlínica Metropolitana


The writer from the state of Anzoátegui obtained first place for her short story “Evocación y elogio de Federico Alvarado Muñoz. A tres años de su muerte.” Delia Mariana Arismendi and Miguel Hidalgo Prince also received prizes.

The fiction writers Dayana Fraile, Delia Mariana Arismendi and Miguel Hidalgo Prince were the winners (among a total of 214 participating texts) of the sixth edition of the Premio de Cuento Policlínica Metropolitana para Jóvenes Autores, according to a unanimous decision of the jury composed of Victoria De Stefano, José Luis Palacios and Luis Yslas.

The first place in the contest fell on the short story “Evocación y elogio de Federico Alvarado Muñoz. A tres años de su muerte” [Evocation and Elegy for Federico Alvarado Muñoz. Upon the Third Anniversary of His Death] by Dayana Fraile (Puerto La Cruz, 1985), “for being a story that successfully articulates diverse narrative verbal tenses, maintaining an efficient tension, while also making use of poetic images that enrich a prose without stridency that is also an elegy for a failed experience.”

They gave the second place to the story titled “Mondadientes,” by Delia Mariana Arismendi (Barinas, 1989), for “possessing a narrative rhythm that doesn’t falter at any time, due to her employment of a simple but effective language that recreates a story of atypical solitudes that come together in the singular figure of a cannibal.

And lastly, they awarded third place to the text entitled “A medio camino,” by Miguel Hidalgo Prince (Caracas, 1984), in which “there exists a sober writing, stripped of ornament, that recreates the story of a geographical and psychological detour, through a fluid and convincing narration that incorporates dialogues of accomplished effectiveness.”

The members of the jury also awarded mentions to the following texts, listed without order of valoration: “Las propiedades curativas del fuego” (by Dacio René Medrano Arreaza), “Hacia una metodología del desecho” (by Noraedén Mora Méndez), “La visión de los lobos (by Enza García Arreaza),” “Erika y Berenice” (by Katy Civolani), “¿Cómo cae un poderoso?” (by Juan Carlos González Díaz) and Sin título, 2010” (by Martha Durán).

The winners will receive a cash award of 8,000, 4,000 and 2,000 bolívares, respectively, as well as appearing, alongside the finalists, in an anthology corresponding to this edition of the prize.

It is worth noting that this edition of the Premio de Cuento Policlínica Metropolitana para Jóvenes Autores took place completely without using any paper, since the convocation and reading by the jury were accomplished by means of digital media, contributing to ecological awareness and increasing the possibilities of the population of young people to which the contest is geared.

The awarding of the prizes will take place on May 31st this year, in the installations of the Policlínica Metropolitana medical center in Caracas.




{ El Universal, 1 May 2012 }

“Que me reconozcan me hace sentir vivo” / María Gabriela Méndez

“Being Recognized Makes Me Feel Alive”
Renato Rodríguez, Premio Nacional de Literatura

He was born on July 3rd, reason enough for him to get the idea into his head that the coincidence of sharing a birthday with Franz Kafka was the unequivocal sign that he was the reincarnation of the Czech writer: “I was often penetrated by his style, wanting to be like him,” says Rodríguez, who has received the Premio Nacional de Literatura. In Al sur del Equanil (1963), his first novel, one of the characters talks about the conflict with his father.

Although at the time of its publication his work – El bonche (1976) and La noche escuece (1985) – didn’t have the best reception among critics, today his prose is considered one of the most prodigious. He still remembers clearly the critiques of his first book, as he laughs: “A friend wrote an article that said: “If it was well written, the dirty words in it would shine like brutal images.” ”

He also recalls what Julio Miranda wrote: “Too little, Renato Rodríguez, and too late,” he repeats with a harsh tone that turns into a laugh.

But those comments about his novel didn’t bother him: “I had the sensation of having done what I needed to do. Criticism is sometimes fickle and it often measures itself by means of established parameters. Criticism evolves.”

But if a National Prize was far from his aspirations nowadays, it was even further away back then. “I think I’ve already accomplished my cycle. And now that they gave me that prize, it’s like a colophon. Not because one has to aspire to that in life. No, that’s banal. I mean that a group of people recognize one’s existence. That’s like coming into life, like feeling alive.”

He still doesn’t know who postulated him, but when an acquaintance announced the news to him, he laughed about his hunch coming true: “I had had a stupid fall and I thought: “Some compensation will come my way. I think they’re gonna give me the Premio Nacional de Literatura.” ”

It could seem strange that a nomad who traveled the world and lived half his life outside these borders would end up taking refuge in the mountains of Aragua state, in Tasajera. but he didn’t choose that place: “That simply happened. ”




{ María Gabriela Méndez, El Universal, 9 September 2006 }

El Nadaísmo y El Techo de la Ballena / Juan Calzadilla

Nadaísmo and El Techo de la Ballena

[Photo: Verbigracia, 2002. El Techo de la Ballena in 1963, L-R: Juan Calzadilla, Salvador Garmendia, Zonia Asparren M., José María Cruxent and Adriano González León.]


In what ways do El Techo de la Ballena and Nadaísmo identify or distance themselves from each other, in terms of their proposals, influences and their actions in common? On principle, I wouldn’t ask myself this question if I wasn’t sure that the similarities that joined us together are greater than the differences that might emerge from studying the two very different contexts in which both groups moved. A social context on the Colombian side and a political context on the Venezuelan side.

This peak I refer to should be understood keeping in mind that the Nadaísta movement remains active, even if hidden, and has now moved into a retroactive phase that surprises us with the boom of its editorial activities, not just in the present production of its living representatives, but also the launching of new work, always under the banner of Nadaísmo, while far from resigning itself to succumbing, it continues to generate polemical information, year after year, as a corollary to a long collective history of processes, that its most radical apologists, Jotamario, Eduardo Escobar and Armando Romero, are committed to defending until the end. This is how Nadaísmo has become not only the literary group with the longest history in Latin America, but also the most prolific in actions and in work collected in books.

A History in Fragments
The history of El Techo de la Ballena is shorter and more elliptical and can be contained in a work that gathers seven or eight months of battle, viscous humor, acts within jurisdictions and non-conformist challenges, as can be seen in an austere and stingy work of criticism that, in the absence of a more exhaustive and complete publication, continues to be the anthology by Angel Rama (Fundarte, 1987), the most consulted text and practically the only example of value-driven matter to be written about the group. And yet as an anthology, it is an enormously minor publication. The editorial luck of El Techo de la Ballena is not a limitation that can be attributed to the group not being very productive. On the contrary , we all know there’s plenty of material in magazines and newspapers, or still unpublished or that hasn’t been gathered into a book, particularly those of graphic or testimonial nature. And I provide as an example the profuse, intransigent, and very singular work of Dámaso Ogaz, today scattered and at risk of being lost in experimental magazines edited by mimeograph in an artisan manner by Ogaz himself, during his long via cruces in the Venezuelan provinces. Or the extensive autobiographical poetry of Caupolicán Ovalles, delicately published in the form of bricks that, in order to oppose other more traditional publications, Edmundo Aray called tubular editions, throwing them into political events and exhibits.

The good critical fortune of Nadaísmo is explained in part by this movement’s continuity, since its foundation in 1959 until today, throughout what has perhaps been the most dynamic and controversial chapter of modern Colombian literature. In this sense, the fact that its central chroniclers are its most polemical members, has helped Nadaísmo attain greater unity and guarantee, despite the ravages of time, desertions and death, coherence with its first propositions, which is to say, an attack against bourgeois morality, the use of daring humor, subversion against the clerical institution and preaching anarchy as a subversive form.

The same does not happen with El Techo de la Ballena, whose trajectory was more brief, so it makes sense their dedication was more circumstantial, or if you’d like, more factual with events, although no less corrosive and transverse than the position Nadaísmo took in relation to Colombian reality. And if the former’s brevity does not serve in detriment of its importance, it is no less true what Angel Rama said when describing El Techo, in the prologue to the cited anthology, that “it was the product of a historical circumstance that moves while this circumstance transmutes, loses its characteristics and gives in to the most traditional forms of creation: the book, individual tasks, art.” According to Rama, “it was the confirmation of the failure of a defeat after which began the current every man for himself phase.” Although we can highlight the debatable content of this last affirmation, the truth is that El Techo was stopped by the loss of impulse to continue existing beyond the disappearance of the adverse conditions that were stimulating it.

It is evident that in the absence of leadership like that exercised by Gonzalo Arango in Nadaísmo, the cohesion of El Techo de la Ballena depended much more on the coherence of its transitory proposals and the challenges posed by them, than on weak generational connections, whose absence for the same reason contributed to members of the group having a more heterogeneous and open conception of the literary act and a less interdisciplinary one than what defined Nadaísmo, a matter that can be noted by comparing the Ballenero conception of the poem with the colloquial, narrative, unabashedly realist or descriptive tones that serve as common factors in the poetics of Gonzalo Arango, Jaime Jaramillo Escobar, Jotamario Arbeláez, Eduardo Escobar, Eduardo Zalamea and Elmo Valencia, and without taking away anything from the personal tone each one of these poets fiercely maintained. The diversity of styles and thematic registers in the poets of El Techo, aside from corresponding to formal or generational differences, indisputably carries with it an ingredient of anarchy or indolence that contributed to the group’s dispersion.

This common element of rejecting traditional lyricism on the part of the Nadaístas and the Balleneros remits, in both movements, to a recourse to Surrealism, or if you will the tradition of French poetry, just as Jotamario himself recognizes when he writes that “we practically dug up Lautréamont, the surrealists, Rimbaud, in our effort to change life” (this “to change life” is taken from Rimbaud and Jotamario thus underlines it). Although the surrealist precedent in El Techo de la Ballena can also be seen at a certain point as being defined by subscription or militancy, such as with the anti-clerical manifesto “Para aplastar el infinito,” and as could be observed in the use of automatic writing to compose their principal texts, as for example with Los venenos fieles or Dictado por la jauría, one has to say however that fantastic invention or the appeal to the absurd, to the unusual metaphor and to black humor as resources of speech placed in the service of writing in its goal to hyper-sensitize events, all this not the result, as one might think, of a mere adoption or copying of surrealist language, but rather it was a consequence of the development of imagining forms (or metadialectics, as linguists would say) inherent to radical expressive behavior, in tune with our realities, and surging as a reaction to the medium in which both groups had to move for impact and, as Aray used to say, with no gloves on. If we can speak of a model borrowed, as was the case with Surrealism, nothing stops us from accepting that what passed into our language from this model was a transformation of poetic speech.

We would have to add to the search for a foundation in other linguistic traditions, that Jotamario opposes to Spanish lyricism and the local traditions of it, the numerous affinities that filter quickly through the visceral body of Beat poetry and especially that of Ginsberg, Kerouac, Corso and Ferlinghetti, influences or maybe affinities who might have more consistency among the Nadaístas than in the language of the Balleneros, with the exception of Caupolicán Ovalles who, it turns out, face to face with what we’re recounting and if we compare his poetics with the rest of his companions from El Techo, was the one closest to the unabashedly colloquial spirit of the Nadaístas, as can be seen by his poem “¿Duerme usted señor presidente?” (1961).

Amid those attuned components, inspired by poetics from other languages and articulated toward our own, we find the recuperation of orality that proceeds from a few poets of the Colombian tradition, such as León de Greiff and Barba Jacob, in the same way they incorporate to the poetic language the profanities of common use in ghetto slang, as primarily glimpsed in the work of Mario Rivero, who somehow became for the Nadaístas, or for a few Nadaístas, the equivalent of what the work of Ramos Sucre or Juan Antonio Vasco indisputably meant for the Balleneros.

Literary Genres
Another type of investigation around the relationships between both groups could lead us to a consideration of the genres in which they wrote, which implies saying that the innovative aspect of their proposals, in terms of the forms themselves, is sustained in a radical opposition to social realism that continued to be written or painted in both countries around the time those groups emerged. And naturally this opposition, which saw clearly the importance of watching out for form in writing, didn’t result in El Techo de la Ballena or in Nadaísmo to be a perfectionist preoccupation and without even asking about the problem of style, but instead actually mocked everything that could seem too literary, cold, rhetorical or formally sacrificed to freedom for the sake of doing anything they wanted to with literary genres.

Regardless of whether Nadaísmo was a predominantly lyrical movement, or in whose origin we find poetry, we musn’t forget the narrative attempts their representatives more or less take on, as in the case of Jotamario, who fortunately for those of us who follow his poetry, confesses that he’s a frustrated novelist, the author of an epic poetry organized in blocks sewn with tailor’s thread. Gonzalo Arango, without abandoning poetry, presents himself as a precursor to crime fiction in Colombia, while Armando Romero and Elmo Valencia continue to ambidextreously produce poetry and stories. Jaime Jaramillo Escobar, the most metaphysical and marble-like of the nadaístas, is like a herald of the Colombian apocalypse erected in a statue barnished by the Roman moon of one of De Chirico’s plazas. Jaime has been in charge of petrifying the gestures of a real parody that’s not very well-constructed until he’s able to displace history for a puppet theater. Armando Romero, the youngest of the group, crossed Nadaísmo’s borders to wander like a hippie, backpack on his shoulder, through many countries, before settling in our Mérida, where he became the protagonist of the most corrosive farce that any writer has told in order to unmask, in a hilarious novel like La piel por la piel, the terrors and miseries of the Venezuelan university.

Common Origins
Nadaísmo and El Techo de la Ballena were groups that challenged, surging almost simultaneously in Colombia and Venezuela amid and as an expression of violent ruptures and historical cuts that shook the sociopolitical structures and the cultures of both nations.

Starting in the sixties – as Jotamario Arbeláez wrote – all of America was a great poetic commotion. Cuba was a focal point of suns over the hope of the new man. All the poetries founded movements and magazines that carried the airs of renovating language and the overwhelming sensibility of the moment that was this century. That’s how it went in Colombia and in Venezuela, this country we love as if part of it were ours, that miracle of challenging expressions, with all the violence of a perfidious humor and a butchering confrontation, that in Venezuela was called El Techo de la Ballena and in Colombia Nadaísmo.

It’s true that El Techo could claim for itself a larger portion of compromise facing the political violence that operated from power, an even a larger dose of utopian delirium and of stubborn experimentalism to the utmost, but in poetry we never reached in Venezuela, neither then nor later, to a derangement of the senses of such virulence as the one provided by the Nadaísta tribe of an unrestricted and unrestrained cult to insensitivity and situations at the limits.

Plastic Arts or the Informalist Insubordination
Another important analogy is the passion for plastic arts and the energy with which both movements moved to integrate them to the program of intellectual subversion. If this characteristic is more blatant in El Techo de la Ballena, for whom painting played a decisive role in the innovative proposals. But it would be better to explain. We founded our group at a moment when the avant garde in the plastic arts were reaching in Venezuela a tense and unbearably hypocritical atmosphere. The fact that several of the group’s activists were painters and art critics precipitated even more, by means of manifestos and exhibits, the alliance between literature and art in order to accomplish a result that would have never reached such a burning and radical moment if each discipline had marched separately, or if they hadn’t complemented each other in the way they did; the integration of both manifestations, literature and art, can be appreciated from the start at the group’s launch in March of 1961, through the exhibit “Para restituir el magma,” whose purpose, more than showing the work, even if they were of an experimental nature, was to provoke a scandal.

El Techo de la Ballena and Nadaísmo were polemical movements and it was precisely polemic that mostly nurtured the disaffection with the system that moved them to achieve higher objectives which when translated to literature and art produced innovative and subversive work. That its main enemies could have been found among the people who proclaimed themselves with the title of true revolutionaries, is nothing more than a formality which both groups knew how to take advantage of so as to point out with foresight that with Nadaísmo and El Techo de la Ballena an end was being imposed on the history of literary groups, but also on the reign of utopias.




{ Juan Calzadilla, Verbigracia, El Universal, 16 November 2002 }

“Sí soy un poeta de la revolución” / Ana María Hernández G.

“Yes, I’m a Poet of Revolution”


[Photo by Nicola Rocco for El Universal]

The journalist and poet Luis Alberto Crespo, president of the Casa Nacional de las Letras Andrés Bello, is in charge of reorganizing the foundation he directs in order to fit the socialist profile outlined in the recent Decree 6,102. Additionally, if Crespo doesn’t explain what will happen with the law restricting the importation of books to the country, at least he gives us his opinion.


– What will be done in the Casa de Bello?
– What we’ve done is a restructuring so that the processes move more efficiently and so that we can work on promoting books, attracting talent, articulating links with other programs, and right now, the importance of books, how they arrive and what’s needed.

– Are books reaching the entire country?
– Yes. The National Book Distributor is beginning. It has made progress but not one hundred percent. There are 52 locations for sales in Venezuela, the process of distribution continues to grow, we have more than 12 trucks, we are working with great interest. If books are not distributed, how can we work?

– In light of these assessments, how then do you interpret the measure by the Ministry of Light Industries and Commerce that restricts the importation of books?
– I’m learning more about that, trying to understand that part better. There are a series of technical reasons regarding the market for books, as regards the private distributors. What I am certain of is that the measure doesn’t serve the purpose some people are saying it does, which is to restrict, prohibit, place limits. I don’t believe that. What I believe is that there are a series of technical reasons that can be explained, and Minister Farruco (Francisco Sesto) himself has more authority than I do to tell you about it and with terms that are exactly more valid.

– What’s happening is that the Minister doesn’t appear…
– On principle, I don’t think it’s a mistake. Look what the president of the Republic just did with that Law (of Intelligence and Counterintelligence). There are mistakes, because I don’t think one has to be restrictive when it comes to culture. I believe we will never be able to retain or impede any books we might want to read from circulating in Venezuela. I think it’s a fundamental debate.

– Regarding the second paragraph of Decree 6,102, which points out that the Casa de Bello “will promote measures that guarantee the direct participation and active shared responsibilities of the masses in the formulation, execution and control of its management oriented towards the construction of a socialist society,” what are those measures?
– That’s fundamental. What does it mean? There are two systems of life, two dreams. The one we know, which was the previous one, and which some call neo-liberalism. But there exists a system of life, that has had practices which have failed successively, but that exists within the dreams of men, which is to invent a society of equals. That’s the greatest of utopias. Why not demonstrate that it’s possible, at least in part? It’s a lie to say that tomorrow we’ll wake up being socialists. We’re a capitalist society, we have petit bourgeois tastes, who doesn’t? To invent, to have ideas, to dream a system that aspires towards a society that’s less broken up by inequalities of all types is noble, and it’s worth finding a definition for it, at least our own, but within a socialist base. This is a capitalist society, but one that wants to move towards another concept of social, political and economic life. That’s what’s being worked on. Is it 100 percent realized? Definitely not. Are there defects? Many. Is it difficult? Extremely difficult. Is it impossible? No. While we have the will, while this remains a democracy, we will continue to debate that problem. That’s a consultation. We have a consultation coming up in November, there was a consultation on December 2nd. For now, in the case of culture, I think we’re doing something: the distribution of books, making them more affordable, distributing them around the country; being able to count on people knowing how to read and write, and deepening that knowledge which is basic and maximizing that achievement, these are all part of this cultural policy. To the degree that it becomes a whole and gains efficiency, and that it be effective and have fewer mistakes. Because it’s not easy to get things right all the time.

– What is the Casa de Bello doing or what will it do to accomplish that goal?
– If we have a program directed towards the country, if we have writers’ networks and the regional cabinets, I think there will be a change. I’m not going to say that those who were in charge before didn’t do this. I think they did and in many ways they did it well, but not in a national, general sense. Now, the important thing is to know who we can count on. If we don’t have a solid cultural policy there will be no progress, and that’s what we’re building. With interest, with fundamentals, with confrontations, with criticism, much of it inhumane and petty.

– How do the administrative changes in the Casa de Bello translate?
– It doesn’t mean areas of study will disappear or anything like that, but rather that there will be more efficiency in the procedures of the projects, and what before was handled by a single person will be amplified: the focus areas will continue, such as the indigenous, children’s literature, regional or local histories, orality, poetry, theater, the Andrés Bello Seminar, and we’ve created the Alberto Arvelo Torrealba Seminar for telluric literature, and we’ll be opening three regional houses.

– Which ones, initially?
– The ministry wants there to be 24 houses, but that’s an uphill struggle, and in order to know what possibilities exist for putting them into practice and seeing how they function, we’ll start with the cities of Barquisimeto, Valera and Puerto La Cruz.

– What does telluric literature consist of?
– For example, José León Tapia, or Julio César Sánchez Olivo, the chronicler of the state of Apure and author of song lyrics, corridos of poetic writing, of those songs you hear every day. The authors of décimas. It’s that poetry that remained completely segregated. The idea for the seminar is to give these specialists an academic credential, since up to now they’ve done their work in an intuitive manner, with lots of love, but without any academic support.

– Do you feel like a poet of revolution?
– I am the poet, me. I’m the poet who likes poetry, I love poetry and my function, if it’s for the sake of revolution… in the scheme of its unfolding I end up being pretty inadequate. Look at what I’m interested in: the desert, midday, oblivion and above all the little turtledove, which for me represents the world’s soul. What I think is that if I participate in this revolution, because it’s a matter of reforming the bases, at least I have the will to participate from my area. My great concern is, what is all my knowledge worth if I can’t share it with others? So then yes I am, if that’s what it means to be part of the revolution. But I’m a very solitary poet, and in a world that’s more than anything a desert, very spiritual and maybe slightly religious.

– The V Festival of World Poetry recently took place. What tangible benefits were obtained?
– The balance is interesting. To say it was a total success would be lying, because there’s always room for improvement. We always make mistakes. Not everything turned out well, but 80% did: it’s not easy to have it take place throughout the entire country, but the result is satisfactory for us. We paid homage to Gustavo Pereira this time, and for next year we want to propose to Juan Calzadilla that he be the one honored. We haven’t spoken with him, but I think he’ll accept.

– In concrete terms?
– It’s interesting, because with the incorporation of the regional cabinets there are more people showing up, the incorporation of young people is impressive. It’s not that I want to underestimate Venezuelans, but I think poetry was considered a type of reading that was done by a few people, something that’s not understood and it was very strange to see the lines of people who went to listen to other people. A bewitchment of poetry in human beings.




{ Ana María Hernández G., El Universal, 18 June 2008 }