Between the Day and its Dreams
Between the day and its dreams,
the man, who could barely stand,
was walking alone.
He was walking in his mute desert.
Rising from the earth,
again and again,
the silence of the dead.
He was walking around and around
his own self.
A nameless exhaustion
haunted him. It insisted
circling over
his very own body.
He was carrying the prodigious weight
of an immense torture.
A dark secret made him twitch
and overshadowed his face.
It was moaning in the voice of the wind
crossing at that moment,
desolate, through the plateaus.
The man, just like
Jeremiah, was lamenting.
He looked into those
mirrors as if he were
seeing beyond the world.
He would, suddenly, reach the point
of an unstoppable gust of wind.
Now the man had just
passed through
without ever having arrived.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Eclipse, Edición de autor: Caracas, 2008 }
Showing posts with label Francisco Pérez Perdomo. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Francisco Pérez Perdomo. Show all posts
2.18.2017
Hirsutas tempestades / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Hirsute Tempests
He was looking for the first
and last time at his land.
The land that came from
within. He wanted to remain
there for all of eternity.
To be just another dead man,
among the rest of the deceased,
in the entire universe. In
repeated machine-like gestures,
he would search within himself
for something imaginary
without ever
finding it, and once again it was stirring
inside, like souls
in limbo, the portents,
and, funereal, they tormented him.
Alone, as if they were
a creaking, he might see some
fiery serpents
crossing through space.
He had lost his center
of gravity and couldn’t
find it anywhere. With his phantasmal
face, he was a shadow
amidst the shadows.
He was, likewise, whipped
to his very bones
by vertiginous lightning bolts
and hirsute tempests.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Eclipse, Edición de autor: Caracas, 2008 }
He was looking for the first
and last time at his land.
The land that came from
within. He wanted to remain
there for all of eternity.
To be just another dead man,
among the rest of the deceased,
in the entire universe. In
repeated machine-like gestures,
he would search within himself
for something imaginary
without ever
finding it, and once again it was stirring
inside, like souls
in limbo, the portents,
and, funereal, they tormented him.
Alone, as if they were
a creaking, he might see some
fiery serpents
crossing through space.
He had lost his center
of gravity and couldn’t
find it anywhere. With his phantasmal
face, he was a shadow
amidst the shadows.
He was, likewise, whipped
to his very bones
by vertiginous lightning bolts
and hirsute tempests.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Eclipse, Edición de autor: Caracas, 2008 }
4.17.2016
El insomne / Vicente Gerbasi
The Insomniac
to Francisco Pérez Perdomo
The insomniac doesn’t rest.
He closes his eyes
and keeps seeing the specter
passing through the wall
and coming back with the shining,
opaque lamp
of the dead.
The insomniac touches the cold
wooden bed
and feels like he’s sleeping
in the coffin.
The insomniac opens
his eyes
and sees the specter again
passing through the wall
with its severed head.
The insomniac puts on the severed head
in place of his own head
and starts to scream,
but he doesn’t scream
because no one hears him.
The insomniac screams, screams,
but no one hears him.
The insomniac floats
in the silence of the Universe
{Vicente Gerbasi, El solitario viento de las hojas, Caracas: Tierra de Gracia Editores, 1989}
to Francisco Pérez Perdomo
The insomniac doesn’t rest.
He closes his eyes
and keeps seeing the specter
passing through the wall
and coming back with the shining,
opaque lamp
of the dead.
The insomniac touches the cold
wooden bed
and feels like he’s sleeping
in the coffin.
The insomniac opens
his eyes
and sees the specter again
passing through the wall
with its severed head.
The insomniac puts on the severed head
in place of his own head
and starts to scream,
but he doesn’t scream
because no one hears him.
The insomniac screams, screams,
but no one hears him.
The insomniac floats
in the silence of the Universe
{Vicente Gerbasi, El solitario viento de las hojas, Caracas: Tierra de Gracia Editores, 1989}
1.21.2015
El hábito / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Habit
What voice that isn’t my own
speaks for me in the suburbs
in theaters
wakes me when I sleep
with long ghost stories
startles me with alarms
when I approach the abyss
what hand that isn’t my own
(I study it and can’t decipher its message)
pulls my ears
and lifts me from certain depths that overwhelm me
like the victim of a shipwreck
what hand scratches itself for me
with nails that aren’t too long
drags me washes from my face
the morning’s impurities
purifies my skin in bathrooms
what steps taken at random
invade and fill my shoes with fever
what terribly fixed eyes
transfer my glances
This is my expiation
I don’t own the leisure of my gestures
You are in charge
I am your slave monster faithful brother
There is no truce in your threat
You kill me
Fantasmas y enfermedades (1961)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
What voice that isn’t my own
speaks for me in the suburbs
in theaters
wakes me when I sleep
with long ghost stories
startles me with alarms
when I approach the abyss
what hand that isn’t my own
(I study it and can’t decipher its message)
pulls my ears
and lifts me from certain depths that overwhelm me
like the victim of a shipwreck
what hand scratches itself for me
with nails that aren’t too long
drags me washes from my face
the morning’s impurities
purifies my skin in bathrooms
what steps taken at random
invade and fill my shoes with fever
what terribly fixed eyes
transfer my glances
This is my expiation
I don’t own the leisure of my gestures
You are in charge
I am your slave monster faithful brother
There is no truce in your threat
You kill me
Fantasmas y enfermedades (1961)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
1.20.2015
Confesión / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Confession
I inhabit the zone where flesh and spirit
compete like two old rivals
I survive the disasters
lulled by beautiful specters
My idol! I confide the disorder of my tongue
to the absurd force of your maxims
I speak of the illnesses that concern me
I am my only judge
I am the only auditorium that celebrates my works
The bird that laments itself in the tree of paradise
transmitting its enigma to me
only my ear languishes listening to its message
Fantasmas y enfermedades (1961)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
I inhabit the zone where flesh and spirit
compete like two old rivals
I survive the disasters
lulled by beautiful specters
My idol! I confide the disorder of my tongue
to the absurd force of your maxims
I speak of the illnesses that concern me
I am my only judge
I am the only auditorium that celebrates my works
The bird that laments itself in the tree of paradise
transmitting its enigma to me
only my ear languishes listening to its message
Fantasmas y enfermedades (1961)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
1.02.2015
S (cuento) / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
S (Story)
Leaving the pillow’s warm melody, when he was barely thirty-two, the man descended through the umbilical chord and followed the steps of his beloved down the astral alleys. A diminutive rain was falling on the inverted heads of the walkers, who would stop for moments as though they were held at their backs by an invisible hand, and then kept walking, leaving sudden statues in their places. Blind, in the neighborhood of traffickers, the woman made her way atop a chord stretched from one end to another of the abyss, evidently seduced by the force of a flute.
Originally published in Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los venenos fieles (Caracas: Ediciones de El Techo de la Ballena, 1963).
{ Juan Calzadilla, Israel Ortega Oropeza & Daniel González, El Techo de la Ballena: Antología 1961-1969, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2008 }
Leaving the pillow’s warm melody, when he was barely thirty-two, the man descended through the umbilical chord and followed the steps of his beloved down the astral alleys. A diminutive rain was falling on the inverted heads of the walkers, who would stop for moments as though they were held at their backs by an invisible hand, and then kept walking, leaving sudden statues in their places. Blind, in the neighborhood of traffickers, the woman made her way atop a chord stretched from one end to another of the abyss, evidently seduced by the force of a flute.
Originally published in Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los venenos fieles (Caracas: Ediciones de El Techo de la Ballena, 1963).
{ Juan Calzadilla, Israel Ortega Oropeza & Daniel González, El Techo de la Ballena: Antología 1961-1969, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2008 }
8.18.2014
Poemas seducidos por el surrealismo / Luana Cabrera
Poems Seduced by Surrealism
Francisco Pérez Perdomo was born in Boconó, Venezuela in 1930. He graduated from the Liceo Andrés Bello secondary school in Caracas and obtained his degree in Law from the Central University of Venezuela, a career that, according to his grandson Miguel Chillida who studies Literature, bored him and eventually led him to dedicate his life completely to poetry.
El hilo equívoco de los vocablos is a book published by Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana that gathers in a single volume all the work the poet and writer, winner of the National Prize for Literature in 1980 and a member of the groups Sardio and El Techo de la Ballena, published between 1961 and 2008, before his death in 2013.
The editorial criteria of the book is under the care of the essayist Francisco Ardiles, who points out the relation of the work to the avant-garde movements in which the poet from the state of Trujillo was active.
Pérez Perdomo followed the path of Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Rimbaud, artists who influenced Surrealism and who postulated the need to “widen the boundaries of the field of poetic investigations toward unknown territories,” affirms Ardiles, who identifies him as a man who moved between the edges of the lugubrious hallucination of specters and the oneiric.
The author’s poems are the reflection of a writer who tried to go against all motivating elements of literary production and replace them with horror, scandal, anguish, disgust, along with all the forms taken by the sinister.
According to the poet Luis Alberto Crespo this is the result of a language with roots in the obsessions of the German romantic poets, the exalted poetry of the demonic and the mystery related to the old symbols of epic and tragedy.
De fantasmas y enfermedades (1961), El sonido de otro tiempo (1991), Y también sin espacio (1996) and Eclipse (2008) are some of the author’s most distinguished works found in this new volume.
{ Luana Cabrera, Tal Cual, 18 August 2014 }
Francisco Pérez Perdomo was born in Boconó, Venezuela in 1930. He graduated from the Liceo Andrés Bello secondary school in Caracas and obtained his degree in Law from the Central University of Venezuela, a career that, according to his grandson Miguel Chillida who studies Literature, bored him and eventually led him to dedicate his life completely to poetry.
El hilo equívoco de los vocablos is a book published by Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana that gathers in a single volume all the work the poet and writer, winner of the National Prize for Literature in 1980 and a member of the groups Sardio and El Techo de la Ballena, published between 1961 and 2008, before his death in 2013.
The editorial criteria of the book is under the care of the essayist Francisco Ardiles, who points out the relation of the work to the avant-garde movements in which the poet from the state of Trujillo was active.
Pérez Perdomo followed the path of Baudelaire, Lautréamont and Rimbaud, artists who influenced Surrealism and who postulated the need to “widen the boundaries of the field of poetic investigations toward unknown territories,” affirms Ardiles, who identifies him as a man who moved between the edges of the lugubrious hallucination of specters and the oneiric.
The author’s poems are the reflection of a writer who tried to go against all motivating elements of literary production and replace them with horror, scandal, anguish, disgust, along with all the forms taken by the sinister.
According to the poet Luis Alberto Crespo this is the result of a language with roots in the obsessions of the German romantic poets, the exalted poetry of the demonic and the mystery related to the old symbols of epic and tragedy.
De fantasmas y enfermedades (1961), El sonido de otro tiempo (1991), Y también sin espacio (1996) and Eclipse (2008) are some of the author’s most distinguished works found in this new volume.
{ Luana Cabrera, Tal Cual, 18 August 2014 }
7.04.2014
Su voz es un largo túnel / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Its Voice Is a Long Tunnel
Its voice is a long tunnel
that crosses the ages
and communicates the extremes.
At its dark points
old skeletons phosphoresce,
bolts suddenly open
and you can often hear
the birds of death ululate.
From its peaks of darkness
decayed moans now descend,
chains grinding in the night,
the whistling of serpents
that reverse time
and make the hours dance.
So the past and the future
alternate with no transition,
move in their immobility
and exacerbate their infinite circle.
El sonido de otro tiempo (1991)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
Its voice is a long tunnel
that crosses the ages
and communicates the extremes.
At its dark points
old skeletons phosphoresce,
bolts suddenly open
and you can often hear
the birds of death ululate.
From its peaks of darkness
decayed moans now descend,
chains grinding in the night,
the whistling of serpents
that reverse time
and make the hours dance.
So the past and the future
alternate with no transition,
move in their immobility
and exacerbate their infinite circle.
El sonido de otro tiempo (1991)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
7.02.2014
Estoy fatal / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
I’m Deathly Ill
“I’m deathly ill,”
the old woman was saying to me
curled up into a ball
huddling in her cot,
in her cave,
in her rat’s nest,
she looked like a wreck,
like rubble speaking
through the darkness of the room,
in her lodgings
with filthy and cracked walls,
with holes that opened into eternity;
she was stirring in bed,
breathing with a whistling noise,
she had returned
from her remote time
to a fetal life,
to the origins of the world
and from the nearby cemetery
sharp and hollow voices were calling her
in their language of shadow and sobbing,
they were summoning her
to their secret houses,
their sighing houses
in the countryside and the rain
and the windstorms
that never ceased
blowing through the streets,
and there she was on the cot
knocked down by the years,
circling her memories,
parched, cracked
like the earth
that sustained the longevity
of her naked steps,
her bare feet,
rough, breaking thorns
and leaving a trail
along the dry and crumbled bushes;
a confusing call
from the depths of the town
was crawling to her ears
with an aureole of death,
it was plunging her into sleep
and a decayed horseman with no head
above his skin and bones
was riding a yellow steed.
Ceremonias (1976)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
“I’m deathly ill,”
the old woman was saying to me
curled up into a ball
huddling in her cot,
in her cave,
in her rat’s nest,
she looked like a wreck,
like rubble speaking
through the darkness of the room,
in her lodgings
with filthy and cracked walls,
with holes that opened into eternity;
she was stirring in bed,
breathing with a whistling noise,
she had returned
from her remote time
to a fetal life,
to the origins of the world
and from the nearby cemetery
sharp and hollow voices were calling her
in their language of shadow and sobbing,
they were summoning her
to their secret houses,
their sighing houses
in the countryside and the rain
and the windstorms
that never ceased
blowing through the streets,
and there she was on the cot
knocked down by the years,
circling her memories,
parched, cracked
like the earth
that sustained the longevity
of her naked steps,
her bare feet,
rough, breaking thorns
and leaving a trail
along the dry and crumbled bushes;
a confusing call
from the depths of the town
was crawling to her ears
with an aureole of death,
it was plunging her into sleep
and a decayed horseman with no head
above his skin and bones
was riding a yellow steed.
Ceremonias (1976)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
6.30.2014
La depravación de los astros: 16 / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
The Depravity of the Stars: 16
You look at yourself in the mirror. In the glass orb. You do yourself up. You get your neck together, your tie. You touch up your hair. You observe your own image from all angles. Head on, from the sides; from the water, from the fire and the air. With curiosity. You watch time. You consult the abyss. You speed ahead a thousand years. You live. You return. You look at yourself in the mirror. In the glass orb. You do yourself up. You get your neck together, your tie. You touch up your hair. You observe your own image from all angles. Head on, from the sides; from the water, from the fire and the air. With curiosity. You watch time. You consult the abyss. You speed ahead a thousand years. You live. You return. You look at yourself in the mirror...
La depravación de los astros (1966)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
You look at yourself in the mirror. In the glass orb. You do yourself up. You get your neck together, your tie. You touch up your hair. You observe your own image from all angles. Head on, from the sides; from the water, from the fire and the air. With curiosity. You watch time. You consult the abyss. You speed ahead a thousand years. You live. You return. You look at yourself in the mirror. In the glass orb. You do yourself up. You get your neck together, your tie. You touch up your hair. You observe your own image from all angles. Head on, from the sides; from the water, from the fire and the air. With curiosity. You watch time. You consult the abyss. You speed ahead a thousand years. You live. You return. You look at yourself in the mirror...
La depravación de los astros (1966)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
6.29.2014
DI / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
DI
I must be rigorously faithful to my mental oscillations. In consequence, my ubiquity should not be seen as a memorable feat. It’s understandable that one day I take a brusque and sudden leap from my room through the window’s emptiness and find myself, at the same time, hanging by a thread from my hair on the haunted slope, just like the acrobatic spider, or floating in a dinghy that simultaneously balances itself adrift from all waters. (The spider’s equilibrium undoubtedly embodies the image of happiness and disgrace and thus its relevant importance for the human race.) Nor is it unheard-of that without having to resort to the manipulations of fraud and other tricks I might be able to descend from the seventh dream, pulled by the vibrating strings of my eyelashes, to the place of the initial delirium, without for an instant releasing myself from my intimate room, now sustained by silence, four precarious walls and another nefarious dream.
Los venenos fieles (1963)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
I must be rigorously faithful to my mental oscillations. In consequence, my ubiquity should not be seen as a memorable feat. It’s understandable that one day I take a brusque and sudden leap from my room through the window’s emptiness and find myself, at the same time, hanging by a thread from my hair on the haunted slope, just like the acrobatic spider, or floating in a dinghy that simultaneously balances itself adrift from all waters. (The spider’s equilibrium undoubtedly embodies the image of happiness and disgrace and thus its relevant importance for the human race.) Nor is it unheard-of that without having to resort to the manipulations of fraud and other tricks I might be able to descend from the seventh dream, pulled by the vibrating strings of my eyelashes, to the place of the initial delirium, without for an instant releasing myself from my intimate room, now sustained by silence, four precarious walls and another nefarious dream.
Los venenos fieles (1963)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
6.28.2014
Salvados / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Saved
Saved
but still as though dressed
in that black slime
disasters leave in their wake
and that dust and that mark
of having lived for so long
in such a strange place
in the room that’s so closed
and for so many reasons so similar
to that spot
with hands accustomed to darkness
and the ring of dull eyes guarding us
and those masks that seem twisted
by the stigmas of the most
diverse circumstances
and now returning and reiterated
like a habit
to the daily illnesses
sweet accomplice
after having lived somber
and unpunished by chance
Fantasmas y enfermedades (1961)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
Saved
but still as though dressed
in that black slime
disasters leave in their wake
and that dust and that mark
of having lived for so long
in such a strange place
in the room that’s so closed
and for so many reasons so similar
to that spot
with hands accustomed to darkness
and the ring of dull eyes guarding us
and those masks that seem twisted
by the stigmas of the most
diverse circumstances
and now returning and reiterated
like a habit
to the daily illnesses
sweet accomplice
after having lived somber
and unpunished by chance
Fantasmas y enfermedades (1961)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El hilo equívoco de los vocablos. Antología poética, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 2014 }
6.17.2013
Pérez Perdomo: “Hay que tratar, a través del poema, de descubrir lo invisible” / Carmen Virginia Carrillo
Pérez Perdomo: “You have to try, through the poem, to discover the invisible”
A few years ago I interviewed Francisco Pérez Perdomo. I was beginning my research of the poetics of the sixties that eventually became the book De la belleza y el furor. I encountered a polite man, of deliberate speech and vast culture who told me anecdotes about his youth and we spoke about literature. What follows is the dialogue I sustained with the poet of magic and phantasmagoria.
Carmen Virginia Carrillo: Your first publication, Fantasmas y enfermedades, from 1961, came out with the publishing venture of the literary group Sardio. Could you tell us about your incursion in this group?
Francisco Pérez Perdomo: Sardio is the first group I belonged to in Caracas. Sardio emerges from the contact between future members of the group while they were still in high school together. Adriano González León, Salvador Garmendia, Guillermo Sucre, Luis García Morales and me. We were a group of people who were restless.
CVC: Do you think the group had a concrete theoretical proposal?
FPP: Sardio had two great theorists, Adriano González León and Guillermo Sucre. Adriano affirmed that Rómulo Gallegos wasn’t of great importance. That phrase was repeated, maybe not in the same form, but bringing its proposal to the forefront, as happens with any young group that wants to open new spaces.
When Adriano made his comment about Gallegos a questioning of values and a formulation of principles occurred. This is very positive, because it responds to a restlessness among youth that should never disappear. However, when revising values one can make mistakes when wanting to break with everything that has come before.
CVC: What opinion does Gallegos’s work deserve?
FPP: Gallegos is one of the great figures, he highlights the great dramas of humanity; and yet his writing isn’t one of the most captivating. I’m particularly fascinated by Doña Bárbara because she’s a character that betrays Gallegos.
CVC: In what sense?
FPP: When Gallegos writes the novel he establishes a theme: the struggle between civilization and barbarism. The character he tries to condemn and abolish from the story is Doña Bárbara. However, she’s the most fascinating character because she represents witchcraft and magic. She’s a girl who is raped by bandits, and who unfolds, because her bitterness is joined with her capacity to live great passions. She’s a character that seduces, since she’s able to feel sublime affections; she believes in love and that’s why she encounters conflict, just like Santos Luzardo.
The latter is not one of the best characters, he represents the petit bourgeoisie, one of those centaur-like plainsmen who have become civilized —for him the university is extremely important—, who wants to fight for the plains where freedom is to be found. Santos Luzardo confronts the barbarism embodied by Doña Bárbara. When she’s defeated by life, she disappears. Doña Bárbara respects the love of Luzardo for Marisela, because she’s her daughter and to destroy him would mean harming her own daughter. There’s an unfolding in the character when Doña Bárbara puts down her weapon and leaves; she becomes the great myth.
CVC: Is there any relation between that mythical world present in Gallegos’s work and in your own poetry, such as the phantasmagorical, magic, the paradoxical?
FPP: I love Gallegos, but my writing isn’t like his at all. The themes, on the other hand, do coincide in terms of the topics since they have to do with magic, myth and witchcraft.
CVC: Regarding your work, the constant presence of certain phantasmagorical elements, the game in which one can perceive a tangible spatiality alongside an intangible one, does it have any relation with the influence of various authors, or is it a more individual search?
FPP: All of us poets are more readers than we are poets. You have to establish a difference between imitation and writing. Imitation is parodic. Influences are fructifying.
CVC: Can your poetry also be considered an heir to fantasy and horror literature?
FPP: I really like fantasy literature. When I lived in Boconó there was no electricity and we would use gas lamps. There were people who would tell fantastical stories, and in the shadows we would see apparitions and we believed in those stories. That stayed with me, along with the taste for fantasy literature.
My poetry comes from my reflection on reality. Anyone who looks at reality should find vibrations. Reality is vibrational. I think everything has two sides and that one is always hidden; we have to seek out that hidden side in order to discover it. Regarding this hidden reality, you see that objects move and that when you write about something you encounter those two worlds: first the visible and then the invisible. You have to try, through the poem, to discover the invisible. Many people can say my poetry is equivocal because it begins with an anecdote from childhood and, suddenly, that shifts toward the other reality that exists and has another time, which is otherness.
{ Carmen Virginia Carrillo, Tal Cual, 15 June 2013 }
Plaza Bolívar in Boconó, birthplace of the poet
A few years ago I interviewed Francisco Pérez Perdomo. I was beginning my research of the poetics of the sixties that eventually became the book De la belleza y el furor. I encountered a polite man, of deliberate speech and vast culture who told me anecdotes about his youth and we spoke about literature. What follows is the dialogue I sustained with the poet of magic and phantasmagoria.
Carmen Virginia Carrillo: Your first publication, Fantasmas y enfermedades, from 1961, came out with the publishing venture of the literary group Sardio. Could you tell us about your incursion in this group?
Francisco Pérez Perdomo: Sardio is the first group I belonged to in Caracas. Sardio emerges from the contact between future members of the group while they were still in high school together. Adriano González León, Salvador Garmendia, Guillermo Sucre, Luis García Morales and me. We were a group of people who were restless.
CVC: Do you think the group had a concrete theoretical proposal?
FPP: Sardio had two great theorists, Adriano González León and Guillermo Sucre. Adriano affirmed that Rómulo Gallegos wasn’t of great importance. That phrase was repeated, maybe not in the same form, but bringing its proposal to the forefront, as happens with any young group that wants to open new spaces.
When Adriano made his comment about Gallegos a questioning of values and a formulation of principles occurred. This is very positive, because it responds to a restlessness among youth that should never disappear. However, when revising values one can make mistakes when wanting to break with everything that has come before.
CVC: What opinion does Gallegos’s work deserve?
FPP: Gallegos is one of the great figures, he highlights the great dramas of humanity; and yet his writing isn’t one of the most captivating. I’m particularly fascinated by Doña Bárbara because she’s a character that betrays Gallegos.
CVC: In what sense?
FPP: When Gallegos writes the novel he establishes a theme: the struggle between civilization and barbarism. The character he tries to condemn and abolish from the story is Doña Bárbara. However, she’s the most fascinating character because she represents witchcraft and magic. She’s a girl who is raped by bandits, and who unfolds, because her bitterness is joined with her capacity to live great passions. She’s a character that seduces, since she’s able to feel sublime affections; she believes in love and that’s why she encounters conflict, just like Santos Luzardo.
The latter is not one of the best characters, he represents the petit bourgeoisie, one of those centaur-like plainsmen who have become civilized —for him the university is extremely important—, who wants to fight for the plains where freedom is to be found. Santos Luzardo confronts the barbarism embodied by Doña Bárbara. When she’s defeated by life, she disappears. Doña Bárbara respects the love of Luzardo for Marisela, because she’s her daughter and to destroy him would mean harming her own daughter. There’s an unfolding in the character when Doña Bárbara puts down her weapon and leaves; she becomes the great myth.
CVC: Is there any relation between that mythical world present in Gallegos’s work and in your own poetry, such as the phantasmagorical, magic, the paradoxical?
FPP: I love Gallegos, but my writing isn’t like his at all. The themes, on the other hand, do coincide in terms of the topics since they have to do with magic, myth and witchcraft.
CVC: Regarding your work, the constant presence of certain phantasmagorical elements, the game in which one can perceive a tangible spatiality alongside an intangible one, does it have any relation with the influence of various authors, or is it a more individual search?
FPP: All of us poets are more readers than we are poets. You have to establish a difference between imitation and writing. Imitation is parodic. Influences are fructifying.
CVC: Can your poetry also be considered an heir to fantasy and horror literature?
FPP: I really like fantasy literature. When I lived in Boconó there was no electricity and we would use gas lamps. There were people who would tell fantastical stories, and in the shadows we would see apparitions and we believed in those stories. That stayed with me, along with the taste for fantasy literature.
My poetry comes from my reflection on reality. Anyone who looks at reality should find vibrations. Reality is vibrational. I think everything has two sides and that one is always hidden; we have to seek out that hidden side in order to discover it. Regarding this hidden reality, you see that objects move and that when you write about something you encounter those two worlds: first the visible and then the invisible. You have to try, through the poem, to discover the invisible. Many people can say my poetry is equivocal because it begins with an anecdote from childhood and, suddenly, that shifts toward the other reality that exists and has another time, which is otherness.
{ Carmen Virginia Carrillo, Tal Cual, 15 June 2013 }
5.28.2013
Falleció el trujillano que hacía poesía para descubrirse / Michelle Roche Rodríguez
The Man from Trujillo Who Made Poetry In Order to Discover Himself Has Died
Last weekend, death took away a veteran of Venezuela’s main literary avant-garde groups: Francisco Pérez Perdomo. After a week in the hospital, on Sunday morning the man who spent his life seeking himself in poetry died.
“I write with the conviction that as I do it I continue to discover myself and others (...) You can’t write just for the sake of pure narcissistic delight. Pure poetry is an aberration. I think poetry should definitely have a projection: it is the testimony of a human being who needs to communicate, if not, he wouldn’t publish,” he told El Nacional in 1988, during an interview for the book Los ritos.
The poet born in Boconó, in the state of Trujillo, in 1930, became known in the Venezuelan cultural scene during the decade of the sixties, thanks to his participation in literary groups such as La Mesa Redonda, Sardio and El Techo de la Ballena. Twenty years later he received the National Prize in Literature, in 1980. In the nineties he was named the director of the Revista Nacional de Cultura.
His poetry collections include Fantasmas y enfermedades (1961), Círculo de sombras (1980), El sonido de otro tiempo (1999), La casa de noche (2001), Antología mínima (2003) and Eclipse (2008).
His work was marked by the presence of the spiritual. In an interview published in Papel Literario on 6 July 1980, he was described with the phrase “the temptation of darkness,” because death, or more specifically what goes beyond the human, was his constant obsession.
“What is eternity, an abrupt cut or a prolongation of life?,” the poet asked himself in that article. And while the literary world mourns, Pérez Perdomo begins to answer the question that marked his life.
{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 28 May 2013 }
The author of Los ritos received the National Prize in Literature
in 1980. Sunday marked a week that he had been hospitalized.
Last weekend, death took away a veteran of Venezuela’s main literary avant-garde groups: Francisco Pérez Perdomo. After a week in the hospital, on Sunday morning the man who spent his life seeking himself in poetry died.
“I write with the conviction that as I do it I continue to discover myself and others (...) You can’t write just for the sake of pure narcissistic delight. Pure poetry is an aberration. I think poetry should definitely have a projection: it is the testimony of a human being who needs to communicate, if not, he wouldn’t publish,” he told El Nacional in 1988, during an interview for the book Los ritos.
The poet born in Boconó, in the state of Trujillo, in 1930, became known in the Venezuelan cultural scene during the decade of the sixties, thanks to his participation in literary groups such as La Mesa Redonda, Sardio and El Techo de la Ballena. Twenty years later he received the National Prize in Literature, in 1980. In the nineties he was named the director of the Revista Nacional de Cultura.
His poetry collections include Fantasmas y enfermedades (1961), Círculo de sombras (1980), El sonido de otro tiempo (1999), La casa de noche (2001), Antología mínima (2003) and Eclipse (2008).
His work was marked by the presence of the spiritual. In an interview published in Papel Literario on 6 July 1980, he was described with the phrase “the temptation of darkness,” because death, or more specifically what goes beyond the human, was his constant obsession.
“What is eternity, an abrupt cut or a prolongation of life?,” the poet asked himself in that article. And while the literary world mourns, Pérez Perdomo begins to answer the question that marked his life.
{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 28 May 2013 }
5.26.2013
Desde la eternidad / Francisco Pérez Perdomo (1930-2013)
From Eternity
Under the shade of that
millenary tree, eccentric,
taciturn and feeble,
with wrinkled skin,
he looked toward the immensity.
The music of the spheres
dropped to what could
be men, errant,
whose qualities dared
decipher the future. Nothing
could be done in this sense.
The future was a fate
that never let itself be deciphered.
Falling in their own traps
were the majority of human
beings, simple,
who were thus anxious.
The dreams of fate were
different and diverse
in their nature. We could never
know anything
about our voluble and fickle life.
An enormous wing of silence
was moving through the heads
of men. A somber
peace then appeared
over them, among us.
They were merely dreams seeking,
among men,
their immortality. Despite
that, there were shades
wrapped in their coat
fluttering backwards,
on the other side of the moon.
An unknown and variegated eye
observed him, fixed,
from eternity.
Francisco Pérez Perdomo (Boconó, 1930 - Caracas, 2013)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Eclipse, Edición de autor: Caracas, 2008 }
Under the shade of that
millenary tree, eccentric,
taciturn and feeble,
with wrinkled skin,
he looked toward the immensity.
The music of the spheres
dropped to what could
be men, errant,
whose qualities dared
decipher the future. Nothing
could be done in this sense.
The future was a fate
that never let itself be deciphered.
Falling in their own traps
were the majority of human
beings, simple,
who were thus anxious.
The dreams of fate were
different and diverse
in their nature. We could never
know anything
about our voluble and fickle life.
An enormous wing of silence
was moving through the heads
of men. A somber
peace then appeared
over them, among us.
They were merely dreams seeking,
among men,
their immortality. Despite
that, there were shades
wrapped in their coat
fluttering backwards,
on the other side of the moon.
An unknown and variegated eye
observed him, fixed,
from eternity.
Francisco Pérez Perdomo (Boconó, 1930 - Caracas, 2013)
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Eclipse, Edición de autor: Caracas, 2008 }
8.20.2012
Correspondences between Rimbaud & Ramos Sucre
I’d like to make a few observations about the Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre tonight. I’ll give a brief summary of his life and cite two critics who’ve noted the influence of Arthur Rimbaud on his writing.
Ramos Sucre was born in Cumaná, Venezuela in 1890 and died by his own hand in Geneva, Switzerland in 1930. He published five books and pamphlets in Caracas between 1921 and 1929. His texts are hybrids that employ elements from fiction, poetry and the essay. Many of these texts first appeared in Caracas newspapers and magazines throughout the twenties. In December of 1929, he travelled to Europe for a position at the Venezuelan consulate in Geneva. On his way, he stopped in Hamburg, Germany and Merano, Italy, where he stayed at sanatoriums he hoped might cure the insomnia that had plagued him for nearly a decade. Overwhelmed by his deteriorating mental health in Geneva, he took an overdose of barbiturates on his fortieth birthday and died three days later. His body was shipped back to Venezuela, where he was buried in his hometown.
One of the first critics to note the affinities between Rimbaud and Ramos Sucre was Francisco Pérez Perdomo, in the prologue to an anthology he edited in 1969, the first mass-market edition of his poetry. Pérez Perdomo wrote: “Ramos Sucre’s writing has a satanic, Dionysian tone just like some of the characters in his texts. […] and the uxoricide of “Life of the Damned,” frequented by the specter of his victim that will one day succeed in exterminating him with its rancor, recalls the infernal groom of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. A supernatural, fantastical world invades his texts.”
In his 1975 essay “Ramos Sucre and Us,” the philosopher and critic Ludovico Silva discussed the poet’s aesthetic lineage:
“The line that goes from Baudelaire to Rimbaud, which is to say, the line from Petits poèmes en prose (1864) to Une saison en enfer (1873) is perhaps the clearest literary source for detecting some of the most characteristic traits of Ramos Sucre’s universe, both in its purely formal aspect as well as in the behavior of the poet himself. The elongated and voluptuous prose, friend to a certain contemptuous Satanism; the landscapes in which
tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
an almost complete indifference to the concrete social and historical references in which the poet lives (more accentuated in Ramos Sucre than in his French antecedents, who at least spoke about Paris) and, finally, the ironic manner of intermingling worlds of Olympian happiness and Hellenic clarity with somberly Christian worlds, of a “Christianity in ruins” that, according to Nietzsche, is a distinctive sign of poetic modernity; all of that is a clear symptom of a profound assimilation, on the part of Ramos Sucre, of the poetic message of those great French poets.”
In his poems and personal letters, Ramos Sucre never mentions Rimbaud, as he does other writers such as Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare or Leopardi. But he is known to have purchased many titles on a regular basis from two Paris booksellers, who shipped their merchandise across the Atlantic. Considering Ramos Sucre’s voracious and eclectic reading habits, his decision to exclusively adopt the prose poem form—when no one else in Venezuela had done that—and his use of transgressive or “satanic” imagery, Rimbaud can provide a helpful key to his work.
My reading of Rimbaud has been shaped by the Louise Varèse translations that New Directions first published in the forties. I’ve occasionally borrowed from Varèse’s somewhat antiquated diction and sensibility when deciding on what tones, words and images to employ in my Ramos Sucre translations. Reading Ramos Sucre these past five years, I’ve begun to pick up his trace in some of my contemporaries. Not that they’ve read him necessarily but rather his work has seeped into my sensibility as a reader. So for instance, when I read Jon Leon’s recent book The Malady of the Century (Futurepoem, 2012), I can’t help noticing Ramos Sucre lurking in some of his sentences.
Addendum: Three Views of Ramos Sucre
Winter Fête
Arthur Rimbaud
(tr. Louise Varèse)
The cascade resounds behind operetta huts. Fireworks prolong, through the orchards and avenues near the Meander,—the greens and reds of the setting sun. Horace nymphs with First Empire headdresses,—Siberian rounds and Boucher’s Chinese ladies.
***
Gospel
José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The mystical commotion had startled me. I was in the presence of an aerial vision. The symbols of faith gained a spiritual form and emitted voice.
I fell on my knees under the radiant sky.
A message of health, music from chaste silence, the earth surprised everyone, the inveterate aridity consoled.
The escape of the devoted dream caused a unanimous lament in the far ends of the dark valley. The humble ones told themselves they had been hallucinated by a meteor of vain light and they complained about their shame and abandonment.
***
La Isla Bonita
Jon Leon
I’m with four or five people on an elevator with a glass door overlooking the entire ocean that hovers above a ruined city like an Egyptian stela carved into the wall of the air. I’m wearing Surface To Air denim and patent leather Florsheims. Everybody else looks dimpled. I think I shouldn’t text you this. I text you this. Standing on the rail looking at a panoramic plaque with three girls I picked up at Wasteland. I did them both not five minutes ago with Rick in the changing room. Jenny Kayne shorts, Body Glove T-shirt. Came hard on her extensions. I’m thinking this as I step off the elevator into a crowd of minaret dancers faux-banging each other on the marble floor between a circular glass buffet. It’s not an actual club but I hang around until Marla beeps me. Marla beeps me. I call her back from a payphone on the hotel balcony. Tell her I saw five blondes peel a banana backwards from the foot of my satin sheets. I tell her I’m a part of this. Are you a part of this.
—Talk given in Cambridge, MA on 17 August 2012.
7.25.2012
Ese es mi nombre / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
That’s My Name
Francisco they call me,
that’s my grace
and I am from these places,
I was born in this land
called land of clouds
one day the sixteenth of September
of nineteen thirty, amid
the trees, the forests and a wind
that often emerged
from giant vessels
and would move in circles
through the nearby plaza.
I came into the world
escorted by luminous insects,
squirrels and lizards.
A few days after my birth
some owls and serpents
kidnapped me
and hid me in a corner of the fields.
In that lapse my parents didn’t see me.
When after a short while
my kidnappers released me,
I crossed the highlands
reclining on my mother’s skirt
while she rode on horseback
a skinny and chestnut mare.
That’s how I arrived at a neighboring village.
One could say the birds abducted me
and lay me down in a new district.
My feet grew
over mountains and cliffs, tangled
in thin and ragged
weeds and a spectral
vegetation that would moan day and night
climbing up stone walls.
From time to time a very sad
ditch would bind my legs,
throw me down onto thickets
and then lull me like a sibyl.
Little by little my body grew longer
in the plateaus behind those
kites that would write in the sphere
indecipherable celestial signs
and to whose tails I would cling.
For a long time the kites were
my umbilical chord.
One day, one day their strings dragged me
in a frenzied race
over the biggest plateau.
Then I was elevated, I moved further
from the earth, and repeatedly turning
my eyes to look back,
I would watch it not without a certain start,
bewitched I would fly above the distances.
Without realizing it I became,
almost insensibly, a remote point
barely discernible in the spaces.
Many years of an adventurous and avid existence
passed in this manner.
With utmost happiness
and robed with the sky’s layers
I would have spent my entire life there
deciphering that writing
and making signs at the world
with a white lamp
at times very agitated in my hands.
I ran about the moon.
The whistle of the stars
was the magic flute that retained me
in such high places.
In my familiarity with the stars
the noises of the ground didn’t lacerate my ears.
I spoke aloud to the constellations.
I lived a fugitive exploit in a suspense
I would have liked to eternalize.
The wind would spin further below.
After several years, plunged
into the backyard of the house, atop
some cacti and broken parapets,
with ragged clothes
and toothless gums, they found,
victim of an impossible illness,
a very old and wrinkled man
who was clutching shreds
of paper to his chest
and which could have been a kite.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los ritos secretos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1988 }
Francisco they call me,
that’s my grace
and I am from these places,
I was born in this land
called land of clouds
one day the sixteenth of September
of nineteen thirty, amid
the trees, the forests and a wind
that often emerged
from giant vessels
and would move in circles
through the nearby plaza.
I came into the world
escorted by luminous insects,
squirrels and lizards.
A few days after my birth
some owls and serpents
kidnapped me
and hid me in a corner of the fields.
In that lapse my parents didn’t see me.
When after a short while
my kidnappers released me,
I crossed the highlands
reclining on my mother’s skirt
while she rode on horseback
a skinny and chestnut mare.
That’s how I arrived at a neighboring village.
One could say the birds abducted me
and lay me down in a new district.
My feet grew
over mountains and cliffs, tangled
in thin and ragged
weeds and a spectral
vegetation that would moan day and night
climbing up stone walls.
From time to time a very sad
ditch would bind my legs,
throw me down onto thickets
and then lull me like a sibyl.
Little by little my body grew longer
in the plateaus behind those
kites that would write in the sphere
indecipherable celestial signs
and to whose tails I would cling.
For a long time the kites were
my umbilical chord.
One day, one day their strings dragged me
in a frenzied race
over the biggest plateau.
Then I was elevated, I moved further
from the earth, and repeatedly turning
my eyes to look back,
I would watch it not without a certain start,
bewitched I would fly above the distances.
Without realizing it I became,
almost insensibly, a remote point
barely discernible in the spaces.
Many years of an adventurous and avid existence
passed in this manner.
With utmost happiness
and robed with the sky’s layers
I would have spent my entire life there
deciphering that writing
and making signs at the world
with a white lamp
at times very agitated in my hands.
I ran about the moon.
The whistle of the stars
was the magic flute that retained me
in such high places.
In my familiarity with the stars
the noises of the ground didn’t lacerate my ears.
I spoke aloud to the constellations.
I lived a fugitive exploit in a suspense
I would have liked to eternalize.
The wind would spin further below.
After several years, plunged
into the backyard of the house, atop
some cacti and broken parapets,
with ragged clothes
and toothless gums, they found,
victim of an impossible illness,
a very old and wrinkled man
who was clutching shreds
of paper to his chest
and which could have been a kite.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Los ritos secretos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1988 }
7.24.2012
La noche nos borra del espacio / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Night erases us from space
Disjointed, formless voices
begin to rise from below.
They murmur in the air,
travel through the frozen hills
and silently draw near our house.
In the distant patios of that time
those voices still voiceless
mysteriously construct
phantasmal figures, raise
their registers and become
a single hallucinating scream.
Harrowing, the scream rides
on its wire edges, ululating
it crosses the backyard shadows,
insistently pierces the tree trunks,
whistles, arrives at our bed
and freezes our blood.
Overcome with terror,
night erases us from space.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El límite infinito, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1997 }
Disjointed, formless voices
begin to rise from below.
They murmur in the air,
travel through the frozen hills
and silently draw near our house.
In the distant patios of that time
those voices still voiceless
mysteriously construct
phantasmal figures, raise
their registers and become
a single hallucinating scream.
Harrowing, the scream rides
on its wire edges, ululating
it crosses the backyard shadows,
insistently pierces the tree trunks,
whistles, arrives at our bed
and freezes our blood.
Overcome with terror,
night erases us from space.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El límite infinito, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1997 }
7.22.2012
Y me suspendía en la inmortalidad / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
And would suspend me in immortality
I never knew what that was.
It seems like an ecstasy.
I never knew.
It began to take over my forces.
It threw me to the ground
and would make me feel the rumor of the firmament.
It would make me intemporal.
I would let it happen.
It would envelop me with its layers of fire.
At the same time it would make me delirious and suffer.
It came from the depths within me
and it would run through me, lighting me up.
It was my vigil and my dream.
It would bring its luminous face near
in the intensity of the shadows.
With open eyes I would see it pass by.
It was like a painted sky.
That’s what it was. A meteor. An errant light
in the darkness.
It would stop the gust of time for instants
and would suspend me in immortality.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El límite infinito, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1997 }
I never knew what that was.
It seems like an ecstasy.
I never knew.
It began to take over my forces.
It threw me to the ground
and would make me feel the rumor of the firmament.
It would make me intemporal.
I would let it happen.
It would envelop me with its layers of fire.
At the same time it would make me delirious and suffer.
It came from the depths within me
and it would run through me, lighting me up.
It was my vigil and my dream.
It would bring its luminous face near
in the intensity of the shadows.
With open eyes I would see it pass by.
It was like a painted sky.
That’s what it was. A meteor. An errant light
in the darkness.
It would stop the gust of time for instants
and would suspend me in immortality.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El límite infinito, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1997 }
7.21.2012
Una cosa innominada te llama / Francisco Pérez Perdomo
A nameless thing calls you
A nameless thing calls you.
You listen to it in the uncertainty.
It’s like a strange and fictitious voice
crossing an abolished space.
Do you hear it?
It could very well be a bird
that incessantly pecks in your ears.
You can’t move.
It paralyzes you.
An infinite desolation courses through you.
It isolates you from the world.
It makes you cry.
It’s something like a blurry voice
and it surges from the deepest realms.
It suspends you in the air.
It surrounds you.
It’s barely a murmur that envelops you
and makes you delirious in the vast silence.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El límite infinito, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1997 }
A nameless thing calls you.
You listen to it in the uncertainty.
It’s like a strange and fictitious voice
crossing an abolished space.
Do you hear it?
It could very well be a bird
that incessantly pecks in your ears.
You can’t move.
It paralyzes you.
An infinite desolation courses through you.
It isolates you from the world.
It makes you cry.
It’s something like a blurry voice
and it surges from the deepest realms.
It suspends you in the air.
It surrounds you.
It’s barely a murmur that envelops you
and makes you delirious in the vast silence.
{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, El límite infinito, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1997 }
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