Venepoetics: A Postscript

I started writing Venepoetics when I was living in Boston, in September of 2003, after a summer of reading many poetry blogs from the U.S. and Venezuela. I first heard about them via The Poetry Project Newsletter, which had a feature on blogs. Two decades feels like a good number to end a translation space that had been very active in the 2000s, serving me as a workshop and archive to pursue my Venezuelan-American interest in Venezuelan and Latin American literature. I'm especially grateful for the friends and colleagues I met through writing Venepoetics.

The years of this blog coincided with the destruction of Venezuela by a military caudillo and his band of thieves, who demolished the nation's infrastructure and forced over 7 million Venezuelans into exile, as of 2023. Because of that crisis, many of the translations I posted here in the 2000s came from columnists and writers I followed in Caracas newspapers such as Tal Cual and El Nacional, all of them trying to make sense of Venezuela's complex crisis.

But literature was always the main focus of Venepoetics. Between 2006-2012 I lived in Durham, NC. It was there I was most active with this blog, focusing on the work of the poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Cumaná, Venezuela, 1890 - Geneva, Switzerland, 1930). That's him sometime in the 1920s in Caracas, in the photo above, taken by Manrique & Co. 

In the years 2009-2012, I published dozens of first draft translations of Ramos Sucre here at the blog. Some of these were eventually included in my English translation of his poems, aphorisms and letters: Selected Works: Expanded Edition (Noemi Press, 2016). Having this blog gave me an outlet for the research on Ramos Sucre's work and life I was conducting in the U.S. and Venezuela. That research and translation of Ramos Sucre's work continues.

As a postscript, I've gathered a very personal list of links to various posts in Venepoetics relating to 26 Venezuelan, Latin American & Spanish writers (in no particular order) that I translated and wrote about. Although there's no index for the blog at the moment, individual authors translated here can be found through their labels at the bottom of each post.

Armando Rojas Guardia (1949-2020)

My translation of the poem "Patria" (2008) and the essay "¿Qué es vivir poéticamente?" (2013). Rojas Guardia was a member of the Caracas literary group Guaire in the 1980s.

Miyó Vestrini (1938-1991)

A poem by Miyó Vestrini, "Un día de la semana I" (1994). Vestrini was a member of the Maracaibo literary group Apocalipsis in the 1960s. Later she was an influential journalist in Caracas and a member of the literary movement La República del Este.

Renato Rodríguez (1927-2011)

Novelist and nomad, author of my favorite novel in Venezuelan literature, El bonche (1976). Back in 2008 I translated a 2006 interview with Renato Rodríguez by Albinson Linares for the newspaper El Nacional.

José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930)

The first poem by Ramos Sucre  I ever translated was "El extravío" (1929), back in the summer of 2008 after getting back from a trip to Caracas. There was something in that poem that drew me into his work completely. Among items related to Ramos Sucre, I also translated an essay by Eugenio Montejo (1938-2008) "Nueva aproximación a Ramos Sucre" (1981).

Finally, my English version of his essay on Alexander von Humboldt, "Sobre las huellas de Humboldt" (1923).

Manón Kübler (1961)

A poem from Manón Kúbler's first and only book of poems, Olympia (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1992), "XVI."

Antonia Palacios (1904-2001)

In the 1970s and early 1980s, at her home in Caracas, named Calicanto, the novelist and poet Antonia Palacios held an influential workshop where poets and fiction writers of several generations interacted. Her novel Ana Isabel, una niña decente (1949) is a great book that portrays a young artist's childhood in a rapidly-changing city. She is one of my favorite poets in any language.

Among the work of hers I have translated for the blog is a poem from her book Textos del desalojo (1973).

Oswaldo Barreto (1934-2017)

I translated many of Barreto's two columns in the Caracas newspaper Tal Cual: Pórtico and Balanza de Palabra. Before he wrote for Teodoro Petkoff's newspaper, which always opposed Chavismo from the left, Barreto had an unusual life in politics, with connections to literature through his close friendship with figures like the poet Juan Sánchez Peláez and the novelist Adriano González León. 

Barreto's astonishing and complex life as an underground guerrilla fighter in Venezuela, Latin America and the world in the 1960s is semi-fictionally recounted in the novel by English writer Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, Swallowing Stones (2006), which was based on interviews with him.

My translation of his column from November 3, 2009 ("Resurrección de El Techo de la Ballena") recounts his attendance at a book presentation in Caracas by some of the remaining members of the 1960s collective El Techo de la Ballena, where Barreto critiqued their support for Chavismo. Barreto was close friends with the Salvadoran poet & revolutionary Roque Dalton (El Salvador, 1935-1975), who wrote a poem in honor of Oswaldo Barreto, "Primavera en Jevani," in his book Taberna y otros lugares (1969).

Teodoro Petkoff (1932-2018)

In 2007, I attended a book presentation for Teodoro Petkoff's Socialismo irreal, which is a reissue of two of his books from the 1970s. Petkoff was a legendary guerrilla commander in the 1960s who, like Barreto, transitioned into civilian life during the 1970s.

The book presentation was held in a bookstore in the Chacaito shopping center in Caracas, I went that night with my dad and wrote about the event in a post after getting back to the U.S. a couple weeks later.

Petkoff's small but influential newspaper Tal Cual had excellent opinion and culture sections during the 2000s, and I frequently translated articles into English from there for my blog, in the interest of raising awareness about the crisis in Venezuela.

Two Peruvian Surrealists

Between the years 2007-2010 I spent time researching the poetry of Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003) in Caracas, at times consulting with his widow, my friend Malena Coelho de Sánchez Peláez (1937-2022). My translations of his work are available in Air on the Air: Selected Poems of Juan Sánchez Peláez (Black Square Editions, 2016).

Among the poets I encountered through researching Sánchez Peláez were the Peruvians César Moro (1903-1956) and Emilio Adolfo Westphalen (1911-2001). Moro was the only Latin American writer associated with the Surrealists in Paris (he was kicked out by Breton), and in the 1930s he and Westphalen met and collaborated in Lima.

César Moro, "The Scandalous Life of César Moro"

Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, "Viniste a posarte sobre una hoja de mi cuerpo"

Miguel James (1953)

Probably the most popular translation I've published, this short poem by Trinidad-born poet Miguel James,  "Contra la policía" (2003).

Fernando Paz Castillo (1893-1981)

The poet Fernando Paz Castillo used to accompany his friend José Antonio Ramos Sucre on some of his nighttime insomniac walks through Caracas in the 1920s. Paz Castillo was also one of the first critics to recognize his friend's unusual poetic gifts.

My translation of an essay by Rafael Arráiz Lucca (1959), "Fernando Paz Castillo: Nuestro poeta metafísico" (2015).

My translation of Paz Castillo's, "Poema" (1975).

Víctor Valera Mora (1935-1984)

My translation of this revolutionary poet's iconic 1968 poem "Masseratti 3 litros."

Victoria de Stefano (1940-2023)

One of Venezuela's most important and fascinating novelists. My translation of a 2014 interview with de Stefano. 

An appreciation from 2019 of Victoria de Stefano by her friend the novelist Ednodio Quintero.

Ednodio Quintero (1947)

Ednodio Quintero is one of Venezuela's most dynamic Venezuelan novelists writing today. I translated this short text by his friend Enrique Vila-Matas (Spain, 1948), from 2017, "Ednodio Quintero, Venezuela." Thank you to Vila-Matas for including a link to this translation on his website.

Ana Teresa Torres (1945)

Ana Teresa Torres is an incredible novelist and essayist, whose work has often reflected on the crisis that has engulfed Venezuela in the 21st century. This is my translation of her 2006 essay, "La voz intelectual se escucha en la escena pública."

Elizabeth Schön (1921-2007)

In 2018, I translated a series of prose poems from Schön's 1972 book, "Casi un país." In the book, she writes about a young woman from a small town discovering the universe of Caracas.

Adriano González León (1931-2008)

Adriano González León was a member of the writers and artists collective El Techo de la Ballena in Caracas during the 1960s. In 1968 he published the novel País portátil, a classic of the Latin American Boom. In the final years of his life he published a column in El Nacional newspaper. 

My translation of his column from 2006 about Caracas, "Una ciudad enloquecida."

Guillermo Sucre (1933-2021)

Sucre is known for his book of essays on Latin American poetry, La máscara, la transparencia: Ensayos sobre poesía hispanonoamericana (1975/2016). He was one of the scholars responsible for the rediscovery of the poetry of José Antonio Ramos Sucre that happened in the 1970s and 1980s in Venezuela.

An essay by Antonio López Ortega (1957) on Sucre's selected poems, "Guillermo Sucre o el país imborrable" (2021).

My English version of Sucre's poem "Toda la mañana ha llovido" (1982).

Rafael Cadenas (1930)

During my research trips to Venezuela between 2007-2011, I was lucky to see Rafael Cadenas at various readings and book presentations in Caracas. His legendary silence and poetry are essential to Venezuelan literature today.

Rafael Arráiz Lucca wrote about Cadenas for El Nacional in 2001, "Rafael Cadenas y la otra voz."

My translation of his 1963 poem "Derrota."

Roberto Bolaño (Chile, 1953-2003)

In 2003, I discovered Bolaño thanks to a friend who told me I had to read Los detectives salvajes (1998) immediately. Bolaño's early critique of Chavismo helped me understand the dangers facing Venezuela today.

My translation of a public statement Roberto Bolaño published in Teodoro Petkoff's newspaper Tal Cual in 2001, in relation to the Rómulo Gallegos Prize:

"I don't have much patience for Neo-Stalinists (or pseudo gangsters or corrupt functionaries)."

Simetrías y asimetrías: José Antonio Ramos Sucre y Andrés Eloy Blanco / Alejandro Oliveros

Symmetries and Asymmetries: José Antonio Ramos Sucre and Andrés Eloy Blanco

                    [José Antonio Ramos Sucre (L) and Andrés Eloy Blanco (R)]

The two most prominent figures of modern Venezuelan poetry were born in the city of Cumaná, on Venezuela’s eastern coast. The older poet, Ramos Sucre, was born in 1890, and Blanco in 1906. Members of distinguished families from the Oriente region, their childhood homes are only a few blocks apart from each other. Fate, however, made sure they never met, despite the symmetries that link the lives of these bards: an inclination for the humanities, law studies at the University of Caracas, both of them poets. Additionally, they were linked in their diplomatic careers; one of them, Ramos Sucre, was a functionary in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; and Blanco, was a minister, a couple of decades later, of that same Ministry. And the gods also chose a death in exile for them. The first one in Geneva; in what is undeniably a suicide, afflicted as he was by the “vampire of melancholia.” And the second, in an improbable driving accident during his exile in Mexico. The symmetries end here, because nothing could be more divergent than the poetics that distinguished their work.

Ramos Sucre is rightfully considered Venezuela’s first modern poet; prose poems, impersonal, hermetic, learned, demanding, with an exquisite syntax and the insistence on the image as the basic instrument of expression. He wrote little and never for many, his style was that of Cellini and his exquisite goldsmith work. Andrés Eloy Blanco, for his part, didn’t quite propose to be a poet of modernity. It seemed better to him to take on a crepuscular post-Romantic aesthetic, expressed in conventional diction and traditional meters. Incapable of dissociating the poet from the politician, he aimed to be and undoubtedly he was a popular poet, within reach of large crowds and immediate recognition. He never seemed to identify with the attempts being put forth, not without exhaustion, by the best of his contemporaries to adapt the new expressive forms that had been disseminated for several decades in Europe or the United States.

They were born in Cumaná, two poets of antipodal expressions, despite the symmetries that might have brought them closer. Blanco is probably the poet most read by Venezuelans during the 20th century, although I’m not sure he’ll keep that position in the 21st century. While Ramos Sucre continues to be a strange figure whose readership is limited to universities and poets who recognize him as the founder of modern Venezuelan poetry.




Alejandro Oliveros, poet and essayist, was born in Valencia on March 1st, 1948. He founded and directed the magazine Poesía, published by the Universidad de Carabobo. He has published ten poetry collections including El sonido de la casa (1983) and Poemas del cuerpo y otros (2005). His books of essays include La mirada del desengaño (1992) and Poetas de la Tierra Baldía (2000).




{ Alejandro Oliveros, Prodavinci, 4 March 2017 }

Caracas, 20 de marzo de 1929 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Caracas, March 20th, 1929*

Mr. Lorenzo Ramos, agent of Banco de Venezuela, Maracay

     Thank you very much for the kind telegram from you and Blanca. Some concerns have assaulted me this unfortunate year. But my patience is superhuman. I insist on the nobility of patience, origin of our affective virtues. Patience is courage in adversity and urbanity with our fellow humans. No one tries to find out our merits, but instead people want to see if we’re sociable and tolerant. In our home that fertile quality was almost always prohibited and plebeian irascibility rose to be considered an energy.
     I’m spending lots of money. In order to get some sleep, I’ve found myself having to rent the apartment contiguous to mine, much more spacious and better furnished. This way I avoid the danger of it being inhabited by two people at the same time, which would lead to conversations at night and my own annoyance. So I have occupied, then, the contiguous apartment.
     This is my reason for delaying gifts for my gracious nieces. I need to wait for the balance first. I hope to count on the benevolence of such exquisite girls.
     Be very careful with my previous letter, where I point out pitiful habits [...]. The list of illnesses and tragedies can afflict and depress. St. Thomas Aquinas has already pointed to the ravages of sadness and fear on man’s body.
     Well, dear Lorenzo, take care of yourself and be circumspect.
                                                                                                     J.A.R.S.

     Give your condolences to Doña Carmelita Martínez de Sucre for the death of Antonio, your subaltern in Bolívar. I don’t believe in any resentment on your part towards that family. Don’t listen to intrigues.




* “Typewritten letter. Blanca González Pregal was Lorenzo’s wife and their daughters are: Gladys, Isabel Cecilia —Ramos Sucre’s goddaughter— and Luisa Elena. Antonio Sucre Martínez was a second cousin. The previous letter the author alludes to hasn’t been published.” (Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra poética, Edición crítica de Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio, Madrid: Colección Archivos, 2001 }

Hamburgo, 5 de Febrero de 1930 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Hamburg, February 5th, 1930

Ms. Dolores Emilia Madriz.
Cumaná.

Illustrious Dolores Emilia:

     I’ve answered the very polite letter you sent me at Juan’s house and now I’ll refer to another one from January 6th. In this new letter you give me the same unvarying solicitude regarding my health.
     But you talk about coming to Europe next April counting on my health.
     By that date the tremendous problem of my health won’t be resolved. I myself don’t even know what I have. I suspect all this horror comes from a parasite infection and two specialists I’ve consulted think the same thing. But if the sickness has its own independent existence and it isn’t related to that infection, then I’m doomed.
     I don’t even know how my brain manages to write a letter.
     The tropical institute in Hamburg assures me they’ve cured the amoebiasis perfectly. But the nervous anxiety hasn’t disappeared yet and it manifests itself in contradictory ways.
     This very week I leave for the Tyrol, where they’ll give me a new treatment to help me recover from the exhaustion and to wean me off the sleeping pills.
     Only the fear of suicide allows me to suffer with such patience. I’ll be good to you and you’ll be happy. But this process has to be decided still.
     German women are adorable, very pretty, of a child-like nature. German men hit their wives. One night I saved a girl from being run over by a car and she clung to me and I had never felt like I did then the infallible victory of women, of the defenseless creature, over compassionate men. The little German girl was like Luisa Elena Almándoz. She was full of terror and was moaning. She was absolutely lacking in virtue or ferocity.
     By the way, everyone in Europe is immoral, they live and let everyone else live. The roars of anthropophagous virtue aren’t heard around here. The Europeans work at a frightening pace and they’re very friendly. No one here curses or blasphemes. These are very cultured countries. I should have been born in Europe because I’m very corrupted*, in other words human.
     You know me.




* “In the facsimile published by the magazine Oriente, 1981, it’s evident that Ramos Sucre crossed out the syllable “com” with a line and an x, which proves he started to write the word “compasivo” [compassionate] before it occurred to him to play with the meaning and surprise his cousin with the unexpected “corrompido” [corrupted].”
(Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra poética, Edición crítica de Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio, Madrid: Colección Archivos, 2001 }

Ginebra, 13 de marzo de 1930 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Geneva, March 13th, 1930

Don César Zumeta, Minister of Venezuela.
Paris - Beethoven 3.

My respected friend:
     I greet you with due respect and want to tell you I’ve returned here.
     My illness, a perpetual insomnia, won’t prevent me from serving and obliging you. And if fate were so benevolent as to reduce that illness and I’m able to find relief, I will commit the fearless act of visiting you in Paris. Above all it’s important for me to meet such a spiritual person.
     Mr. Yépez has helped me out with exquisite charity. I hope to be as solicitous with my colleagues and compatriots. I won’t voluntarily give my superiors any motive for censure.
     I protest, mister Zumeta, my affection and consideration.

                                                            JOSÉ ANTONIO RAMOS SUCRE




Los Aires del Presagio, ed. Rafael Ángel Insausti, 2nda ed. (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, edición de José Ramón Medina, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

Hamburgo, 6 de febrero de 1930 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Hamburg, February 6th, 1930

Mr. Luis Yépez, General Consul of Venezuela.
Geneva. Rue du Rhône, 39.

Dear Luis:

     The Tropical Institute has released me and declares the illness has been perfectly cured. They’re recommending I go to a sanatorium in Merano and once I get there I’ll write you.
     It was several days ago I sent you those 318 francs again that were needed to smooth out the matter of the consulate’s office. I used a more explicit address.
     The nervous disorders, my desperation, haven’t ceased yet. They’re very singular and they completely disconcert me. The insomnia continues to be horrible.
     If these phenomena don’t disappear, I will have fallen into the deepest disgrace. I would lose my mental faculties.
     I’ve only received a single check so far. You shouldn’t pay me in Hamburg anymore. I’ll be leaving this city tomorrow or the day after.
     I’m sorry about any inconveniences I might cause you.
     I uncover myself to your wife and I hug and kiss the little ones.
     I am your most affectionate,
                                                            JOSÉ ANTONIO



Los Aires del Presagio, ed. Rafael Ángel Insausti (Caracas: Colección Rescate, 1960)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, edición de José Ramón Medina, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

Caracas-Hamburgo, 7 de enero de 1930. / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Caracas-Hamburg, January 7th, 1930.

Mr. José Nucete Sardi.
Caracas.

My dear Nucete:

Send me your book again. The one you gave me must have been left behind at the Ministry, when it was time for me to travel. From here it must have gone to a used book store. That’s what I suspect.
     Send me your book to the General Consulate of Venezuela, home of the incomparable Rafael Paredes. I’ve remembered you quite a bit with him.
     I’m now at the Mühlens clinic and I hope to cure my intestine, author of my collapse. The insomnia, of an unusual tenacity, threatens my mental faculties.
     Say thank you for me to Pedro Sotillo for his generous notes on my work and tell him he’s mistaken when he qualifies me as a misogynist. I am a brother to every woman and no one can accuse me of being negligent in their service, much less cruel. The aphorisms I wrote are shots in the air.
     I’ll write everyone at least once. Now I’m trying to resist the treatment. The nervous system is a wreck.
     Take care of yourself and accept the friendship of
                                                                                     JOSÉ ANTONIO RAMOS SUCRE
     How’s the little girl?




Los Aires del Presagio, ed. Rafael Ángel Insausti, 2nda ed. (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, edición de José Ramón Medina, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

Hamburgo, 5 de enero de 1930 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Hamburg, January 5th, 1930

Mr. César Zumeta, Minister of Venezuela.
Paris.

Don César:

I will begin by telling you the don is well donated and that my last name doesn’t lend itself to spiritual word play. It’s worth repeating I’ve professed an invariable sympathy towards you since my childhood and no cause will keep me from cultivating it. I feel honored to have a superior of your qualities.
     The General Consulate of Venezuela here gave me a letter from you and I’m now responding with these inarticulate lines. I beg your understanding for a person afflicted by agonizing insomnias, direct enemies of my mental faculties. It seems a tropical parasite has precipitated this ruin —and I inherit the insomnia and have suffered it for the past eight years.
     I protest that my illness won’t stop me from satisfying my superiors.
     During the insomnia last night I examined a short novel by Goethe, an episode inserted in Wilhelm Meister, and whose name is Bekenntnisse einer Schönen Seele. If you were here, we could admire together that poet’s ability to describe the scruples of a nostalgic soul, agitated by theological restlessness. No critic of Goethe has ever mentioned that brief moment in Wilhelm Meister. At least, I don’t know of any reference from any commentator. Here Goethe differs from the pantheist and the naturalist.
     In conclusion, I promise to go to Paris and give you a hug.
                                                                                     JOSÉ ANTONIO RAMOS SUCRE




Los Aires del Presagio, ed. Rafael Ángel Insausti, 2nda ed. (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, edición de José Ramón Medina, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

Hamburgo, 29-12-29. / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Hamburg, 12-29-29.

HOTEL ESPLANADE
HAMBURG, 36

Mr. Luis Yépez, General Consul of Venezuela.
Geneva, Rue du Rhône, 39.

My dear Luis:

I’ll start by telling you I’ve kept my promise and have sent you my last two books. I warn you Dr. Hurtado and I have spoken affectionately about you each night of our interview at the Hotel Bellevue. Such harmony between you two makes me happy. I waited for you until the 27th, the day of my precipitated departure for Germany. I should actually call it an escape. I really need to talk to you.
     I beg you keep the actual office for the consulate on Rue du Rhône. I’m willing to ratify whatever diligence you carry out with that goal in mind, for as long as I’m in Hamburg. Celebrate me a humanitarian contract. I’m at the service of Mr. Dunand and I can write whatever letter he might require, as long as you approve it.
     I bow to your lady and caress your children. I hope to enter the Mühlens clinic, tropical institute. I’ll write you once I’m there.

                                                                                     JOSÉ ANTONIO RAMOS SUCRE




Los Aires del Presagio, ed. Rafael Ángel Insausti (Caracas: Colección Rescate, 1960)




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, edición de José Ramón Medina, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }

Merano, 25 de febrero de 1930 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Merano, February 25th, 1930

My dear Luis,

     I’m inconsolable about your return to America and your demotion. I want to know the exact day you leave Geneva.I need to see you for a few days to talk about a thousand matters and about the administration of my consulate. I also want you to find me or point out a decent room with no noise and no cold, because my disease is exasperated by both phenomena.
     I’m going to find myself very alone in Switzerland when you’re gone. I possess the habit of suffering, but I’m exhausted by the inner life of the ascetic, of the sick person, of the abnormal. Leopardi is my equal. You would have been of great service and our friendship is fraternal.
     I will write Itriago about you telling him a thousand wonders.
     For now, I won’t send anything to Caracas with you.
     I bow to your wife and hug and kiss the children.
     I am your addict,

José Antonio




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra poética, Edición crítica de Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio, Madrid: Colección Archivos, 2001 }

Merano. [Febrero, 1930] / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Merano. [February, 1930]*

Mister Luis Yépez, General Consul of Venezuela.
Geneva. Rue du Rhône, 39.

Dear Luis:

     I’m here in Merano at your command. I arrived the day before yesterday via Munich and I’m living in the Stephanie sanatorium. I hope to see what path this horrible disease takes. The doctors in Hamburg, among them a specialist in nervous illnesses, examined me from head to toe and can only find a deep debility. The director of the sanatorium here says the same thing.
     I feel as though I’m gravely wounded. I can spend hours at a time in bed without any movement and without trying to get up. I warn you there’s nothing pleasant about the feeling of debility. I expect this whole process will lead me to consumption.
     I’ve discovered a vestige of Goethe here, the street with his name, and I’ve added this find to the memory of Manuel Díaz Rodríguez, who once talked to me about the ethnic composition of the Tyrol. Many Slavs. The German poet must have lived here on his way to Italy. I don’t have the means of verifying this conjecture. I precisely remember his stay in Trento, where he discovered only a single distinguished building: a palace attributed to the devil, that he’d built in a single night.
     I’m sorry that my absence is prolonged and tell Blanco that I’m not in Hamburg. I’d like to spend at least a month here. I count on your generosity. I have a few cents left from the monthly pay you sent me.
     My apologies to Zumeta and Hurtado Machado. The treatment doesn’t let me write them. I don’t have time.
     I uncover myself to your wife and I hug and kiss your children.
     Send me.

J.A.R.S.




*Luis Yépez gave seven letters from Ramos Sucre to Rafael Ángel Insausti for their transcription and publication in the anthology Los aires del presagio (1960). This one wasn’t dated, but Ramos Sucre left for Merano during the first week in February, after the 5th; which means it must have been written during the second week of the month. All the letters to Luis Yépez were handwritten and signed, the first one “José Antonio Ramos Sucre,” but the following ones just “José Antonio” or “J.A.R.S.”




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra poética, Edición crítica de Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio, Madrid: Colección Archivos, 2001 }

Tres historias perdidas / Rubi Guerra

Three Lost Stories

On the Barque

     We row along the river’s slow current. Standing on the flat bottom of the boat we pushed ourselves along with poles made slippery by the sweat and humidity. My two companions leave the last of their energy in the struggle against the viscous and absorbent riverbed. A yellow sky, unprotected by clouds, hangs over our heads like a threat. A tenuous cloud of vapor rises from the surface of the water. Shadows move amidst the palm trees on the far shore, we don’t know if they belong to animals or to the inhabitants of the devastated region.
     A wide estuary opens to our efforts. The waters of the river seem to spin around themselves, they form whirlpools of unhealthy colors, as though they couldn’t find an escape toward an impossible sea. The heat becomes less crippling.
     We advance toward a line of big mansions with wooden doors. As we drawn near, we notice that the iridescent water reaches the lowest windows. The fire has consumed the rooftops, the doors have fallen off the hinges and there are gunpowder and blood stains on the walls. We direct the boat toward one of them, more elevated than the rest, protected from the waters by a marble staircase.
     We agree to spend the night there. Hunger torments us. Even in that condition we manage to sleep, aided by exhaustion and the will to annul the world.
     I wake up with the first light of the sun. I shake my companions and we’re soon on our feet, ready to continue our journey, to reach the sea, to move as far away as possible and forget this region that’s been forgotten by the gods. The golden reflections of the newborn sun on the water and the facades of the mansions make the horror of the destruction disappear for an instant and allow a fugitive beauty to prevail.
     We search amid the underbrush and palm trees for the way out of the estuary. Slow spirals disorient us, but we eventually find it, hidden between scrubs and fallen trunks. The jungle surrounds us once again and accompanies us for hours.
     After unprecedented efforts one of my companions manages to catch a large fish. Three little horns stand out on its head. We gut it and lay its meat to dry on the planks of the boat. Hours later we devour it, sating the hunger that threatens to bring us down.
     Long stretches of jungle have disappeared, consumed by the fires. From the dead and blackened earth rises the smoke of the charred trees and animals. Further ahead, standing in the mud of the shore that stains her dress, a woman makes signs at us. We manage to drawn near and she climbs onto the boat. She stretches out on the floor with her eyes closed, her hands over her mouth in a gesture of stopping some words that she will never pronounce. We look at her and then back at each other; she’s a beautiful young woman despite her pale face that seems to announce death. I touch her on the shoulder; I offer her the remnants of the raw fish.
     At night we’re stunned by the icy glimmer of the stars. The constellations spin while we take turns rowing.
     The presence of the woman, who remains apart and silent, has made my companions stern and between them they’re plotting some type of violence. I decide to keep one step ahead of their designs: I wait for my turn in charge of the vessel; when I see them sleeping I toss the one closest to me into the thick water, where he sinks without even screaming. I hit the other one behind his ear with the pole. He tries to stand up; blood runs down his neck. I unleash a second, terrible blow to his skull. The sound of broken bones wakes up the woman, who begins to shriek as though she were crazy. The whiteness of her thighs awakens my drowsy senses.




***




The Tavern

     The two men —one old and the other young— arrive at the tavern. Like many other travelers in this corner of the country, they seem like they’re running from something, this is what the tavern keeper thinks. The majority of them come from the south and are heading north, toward the ports. The desert is in the east. The tavern is the last human establishment before the sands and the yellow stones that no one has crossed in centuries. The cities of the west, it is said, are cursed and have vanished from the memories of men.
     The old man and the young man get drunk every day with the liquor that is distilled in town. Some people affirm this drink brings on hallucinations.
     One night the tavern keeper stays at the table with them. There’s no one else around and he’s bored, so he’s willing to listen to a story. The youngest of the travelers affirms that the old man has been to one of the lost cities. The tavern keeper laughs. He’s already heard too many similar stories. “This one’s true,” the young man affirms. After a painful trip in which his companions and the animals for transporting their goods died, the old man —who wasn’t old at the time— arrived at a city of iron doors and stone walls. The doors were rusted and open, the temples had been decayed by time and by the grains of sand dragged along by the wind. In one building he came across a fountain from which a cold and crystalline water was bubbling. During the day he would explore buildings in which no utensil was left, no tool, no tapestry or jewel, not even a pottery fragment, as though its inhabitants had left taking everything with them, or as if thieves had visited the place for a thousand years taking even the slightest vestige. At night, he was visited by the specters of the city’s inhabitants, who came before him to voice their complaints as though he were a magistrate from the beyond. The translucent apparitions had terrible, sad faces.
     The tavern-keeper smiles reluctantly. Another absurd story.
     Just before dawn he wakes up and gets out of bed with careful movements. He’s been married for forty years and he’s still careful not to wake her when it’s still early. He goes outside. In the sky, the stars fade one by one. A cold and fast breeze coming from the desert shakes his wool clothing. He contemplates the infinite amplitude that extends before his sight as though it were an extinct planet. He too dreamed of one day crossing the great sands and conquering a forgotten kingdom.
     He puts on his clothing and blows on his hands before heading out to the corral to feed the chickens.
     His insipid days anticipate the indifferent sleep of eternity.




***




The Campaign


     We initiated the war to avenge the affront perpetrated against one of our women and to wash her husband’s honor. For forty five days we laid siege to our enemies’ city; we devastated their fields and took control of their flocks. At night, we would light giant bonfires that we nourished with animal grease to honor our God and to torment the starving defenders with its aroma. One morning the doors gave way to the push of the timbers. We penetrated like a man who claims his rights from a frigid woman, with blood and violence. First the defenders of the walls fell, then the priests who approached to negotiate; then came the men capable of picking up any weapon or tool; after that the elderly, the women and children, some of them disemboweled, cut in half, others slain quickly. Finally, we slaughtered all the animals remaining inside the walls. The blood mixed with the earth formed a thick, hot mud that stuck to our sandals.
     Our victory was not complete. Four hundred enemy soldiers had managed to escape through a secret door that led to a narrow mountain pass where they had hidden. Exalted by fervor and fury, we pursued them through the stone gorges until they were cornered. Then, our general, wise and prudent, spoke from his war chariot:
     “Brave warriors, God has favored us with his blessing; it has been a glorious day, but now the massacre must cease. Those who await death between the stone and the edges of our swords are brothers to us. It is true that they have offended us, but we worship the same God and speak the same language, their hearts beat like our own. We cannot allow their seed to be extinguished.”
     We made vows of peace. We gave them wine and food.
     We initiated a new campaign. Our army went to a neighboring city. We laid siege to it, broke its defenses, killed the soldiers and gathered the survivors in the plaza. Our general spoke once more:
     “Every man and woman who has had the experience of sleeping with a man should be irrevocably destroyed.”
     Then we took four hundred of their virgins and handed them over to our brothers. We slit the throats of all the rest.




Translator’s note: These texts are included as an appendix to Rubi Guerra’s novel, La tarea del testigo [The Task of the Witness], about the final days of the Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Cumaná, Venezuela, 9 June 1890 - Geneva, Switzerland, 13 June 1930).

Image of José Antonio Ramos Sucre in the mural “Letras y Tiempos” by Francisco Maduro Inciarte at the Liceo Andrés Bello school in Caracas. Photo taken in 2010.




{ Rubi Guerra, La tarea del testigo, Caracas: Lugar Común, 2012 / Fondo Editorial El perro y la rana, 2007 }

¿Y dónde está la literatura del chavismo? (algunas sentencias lapidarias) / Eduardo Febres

And Where is the Literature of Chavismo? (A Few Lapidary Precepts)

1

Chavista literature is a contradiction. An aporia. In any form of Chavista writing the weight of the anchoring Chávez/Chavismo turns any horizon different from the political one into nothing. It subordinates and subsumes it. And more so if it’s a horizon as fragile as the literary one. My neighbor Aquiles Zambrano wrote about this in an episode of lucidity: “If it’s Chavista then it isn’t literature: it’s Chavismo, in other words, a political discourse.”


2

Chavista writing, if it’s authentic, is political, and its horizon is the possible, which isn’t always verifiable, but does point towards the truth. That’s why the best Chavista writing isn’t literature, and if there are Chavistas who write good literature, the good aspects of that literature are not that they’re Chavista, in the same way that the good aspects about their Chavismo aren’t the literary ones.

“Today’s events are what matter. But more than writing them, they must be produced,” could be a key phrase for the Chavista writer.


3

That was written by Rodolfo Walsh in 1969, in a private diary (published in Argentina in the 1990s), where the same tension moves through all the pages more or less from 1968 onwards. A tension the editor of those private papers (Daniel Link) condenses into “there’s no separation between life and literature.” But it gets better on the scene in this anecdote from the diary: “The time I should have spent on the novel I spent, mostly, in founding and directing the weekly for the CGT (General Central for Workers).”

You can rest assured that during these past fifteen years the time for writing novels of the best Chavista writers has likewise not been dedicated to the novel. And if there’s something similar to what we can call “Chavista literature,” one of the places to look for it is in the possible diary, or the email inbox, of one of those writers: in a writing that transforms into text the conflict described by Juan Calzadilla: “Not being able to choose action is always the fate and tragedy of all poetry.”


4

That conflict can end up producing a very potent writing, between the irreversible addiction to literature and the deep conviction that: “All males should ignore and curse literature. Reading it is a dissipation worthy, at most, of the harem’s deceitful odalisques and perverse eunuchs. ”

A lapidary precept by our Caribbean poète maudit, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, who also passed through and experimented that tension, although he never got close to political life except by accident, and in fact fled from the world and from life.

Nevertheless, his imaginary, isolated, bookish and self-destructive manner of living heroically produced a writing much more revolutionary, for example, than that of his contemporary Andrés Eloy Blanco, who really was a poet of the people, and definitely wanted to place his literature at the service of revolution.

Revolutionary literature has rarely been made by those who wanted to serve political revolution with literature, and it has always been made by those who have aimed to go beyond the limits of what is known and read as literature in their time.

The best place to look for the literature of Chavismo is in the future, or in forms of reading (or not reading) in the future.

5

One place where you definitely won’t find the literature of Chavismo is in established literature. Though there are plenty of writers who’ve tried to simplify (and capitalize) the storm of Chavismo from the comfort of that literature, all of them have crashed straight into what Che already warned against in 1965, in Socialism and Man in Cuba: “Authentic artistic research is annulled and the problem of general culture is reduced to an appropriation of the socialist present and the dead (but not too dangerous) past. This is how socialist realism is born.”




{ Eduardo Febres, Contrapunto, 7 October 2015 }

Felipe Segundo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Philip the Second

     Despotism is a prodigious heir. It consumes the most treasured reserve in more benign days. Spain ceases to produce, under the Austrian kings, the opportune politician, the entrepreneur soldier, the subtle diplomat.
     Capable men are still abundant around Philip the Second, he envies and persecutes them. They evoke the wonder of a vegetation that renews itself triumphant over the weather as it turns hostile. He only accepts those who are similar to him in his practices of an insignificant and timed office worker, the ones that accompany him in the religion of the formula, the requisite and the dossier. A circumstance that explains the more sustained fortune of the Duke of Alba, a sophist instead of a soldier due to the habit of rumination and hypothesis.
     No one more adequate for the superfluous and impolitic punishment of Flanders. A type from his narrow, unkempt, famished and violent town. He unleashes his fanatical rancor against pagan life and the brimming prosperity of the country that is nourished directly from the loot. He wouldn’t have forgiven a Flamenco lady the attempt to seduce him with her luxuriant and fluffy beauty, because it would have led to the theme of a tragic romance forcing her death. He would have followed the coffin with a measured and proud step, and, once returned, he would have sat insomniac by the light of his silver candelabra, without taking off the velvet suit nor the bearing worthy of his martial self.
     The retinue of equipped servers facilitates Philip the Second’s plans with more assurance than the wealth of the entire new globe. No treasure is equivalent to a fecund spirit. But he tangles and paralyzes them with the detailed ordinance and rigid program. The absolute monarch is hostile to individual initiative, capable of altering the unity and uniformity that he proposes.
     This ideal in fashion at the time originates in how man simplifies in order to understand. Saint Thomas Aquinas gauges spirits because of the faculty for unifying. He assures us that superhuman beings understand with a minimal volume of ideas. The unit passes, without delay, from a requisite of thought to the goal of an ill-fated politics.
     The absorbing and centralizing effort was praised all over Europe by the theologians who remembered the reasons of Saint Augustine in The City of God and by the jurists who brought from Roman Law the machines with which to eradicate feudalism. For unifying, politics served the orthodoxy.
     Philip the Second personifies and extends the totalizing design that consolidates royalties. Under his authority he adds the clergy and sterilizes the enthusiasm of new religious orders. He lives in a solitary relationship with Divinity, whom he represents and substitutes on earth in contempt of the Holy See.
     A third irremediable decline under that amanuensis and swindler king, who accuses honorable people of rebellion, who never acknowledge him for exalting the armies and fertilizing discipline. Graduates and procedures consume the stipend of heroes.
     That mania of centralization and rules, grafted onto the perfidy of a Tiberius, had prospered with his being raised far from nature, amid etiquette and a formalist and petty education. Titian exhibits him inappropriately in front of a landscape painted with the hilarity of the colors of that era.
     The historian of that malignant life needs to reproduce the continuity of the dramatic piece and its growing effect, illuminating itself with the indignation of Alfieri. To force the fantasy of a seer and and a philosopher’s examination instead of an archivist’s details. To point out with a priest’s intonation the fatality that frustrates each of the king’s enterprises, and to promulgate in the horror of the denouement the edifying commentary of the chorus in ancient tragedy.




La Torre de Timón (1925)




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

Un sofista / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

A Sophist

     Mister Leopoldo Lugones continues to annoy us with his newspaper and instruction manual erudition.
     Lately he enunciates his political ideas, adopting the arrogance of one who publishes predictions. He limits himself to reproducing the impertinent and antiquated deliriums of Nietzsche. He maliciously confuses democracy with the fold, and he treats it with the arrogant and unintelligent disdain of a patrician from Greco-Roman antiquity. He remembers the improprieties of Theognis, the ferocious oligarch of Megara, and the autocratic thesis of Guizot, the odious freedman, ungrateful to the French Revolution. He is unaware that democracy is directed at suppressing artificial inequality, and is the only regime capable of provoking the coming of an individual aristocracy, as a term for plain and frank competition.
     He resoundingly denies the efficacy of ideas, and affirms that man’s intelligence only serves for passive adaptation and doesn’t go beyond being a mechanism that registers, inept for guiding the course of life. Herbert Spencer wouldn’t have expressed himself with more naivete in 1860.
     Lugones sees in man the vicious and egotistical beast. He omits the innate feeling of solidarity, and takes warrior metaphors of Darwin literally. He professes a refuted biology.
     By this same road he identifies the law with its observance or with force, forgetting the primitive notion of justice is born from sympathy. We feel ourselves threatened when we witness the grievance inferred by our brother.
     The political ideas of mister Lugones can only be measured with his opinions as a close reader of Homer. He affirms that knight errantry is the imitation of the heroes of the Trojan cycle and, starting from such a premise, he doesn’t hesitate to boldly rectify the humanist Alfredo Croisset, regarding Diomedes.
     He fights in a puerile manner with Christianity, and refers to it as Nazarene barbarism, usurping the famous adjective of Heinrich Heine. He rejects the notion that the knightly ideal is sustained by devotion to the Mother of Jesus, professed in a unanimous manner by superhuman paladins. The Middle Ages perfectly ignored Homer. Dante himself was removed from the speech and civilization of the Greeks, and he knew them through Virgil.




Originally published in the newspaper El Nuevo Diario in Caracas, 27 January 1926.




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

El paria / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Pariah

     To Caracas, reduced almost to a disgraceful mendacity he comes from very far away, the separation from his own people afflicts him with unexpressed shame, because the ordinary expression of pain isn’t worthy of severe souls, it frightens him from the memory of home fulminated by destiny, he is retained by a generous idea: the good of humanity, of the fatherland, maybe the justice to which he promised to be a husband like the saint of Assisi to poverty.
     He is roused and maintained constant in his goal by the spectacle of victorious brutality, of beauty reduced to a scouring pad, of the hidden or negated merit; he suffers and thinks with his soul placed in the reparation that will come and insulting the triumph of force he doesn’t justify not even in nature.
     Like the Greek philosopher finds the man who solicits among the humble and never was he tortured more by disillusionment than when he saw everything stained black and with miserable and treacherous clarity spread around when he believed fire of ingenuity.
     He doesn’t listen to those who advise abdication with the word and the example; the dreams of his youth are wiser and keep his soul sick, a moment that will know how to consecrate them with brutal reality harder than a flag of insult or a life from the jaws of a wild beast.
     Incurable dreamer, reality gives you rude alerts in vain, your spirit responds very little to the impression of exterior life like a sea dead from cold that ceases to accompany with its rumors those of the air trembling from gusts of ice and mourning. He suffers poverty with decorum when inside him uncontrollable and never satisfied desires stand twisted and violent like asps, and the very deep and very black future approaches a danger.




Originally published in the magazine Cultura in Caracas, 5 October 1912.




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

Caracas, 25 de octubre de 1929 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Caracas, 25 of October of 1929



Mister Lorenzo Ramos Sucre,
Agent of Banco de Venezuela
Maracay

Faithful Lorenzo:

     I’ll begin by telling you that Federico has a pension from the State of Sucre and that he isn’t working at all on his studies. He’s a society man and not vulgar at all. Such a happy young man hadn’t ever emerged in the prison of that house. Observe the difference. Luisa can be hostile with strangers, but she doesn’t exasperate her children and you see it in the children’s marriages. Relatedly, Ramón’s calm presence neutralizes any melancholia or severity Luisa might have. I don’t believe in severity, bad moods, irascibility; I merely point out cruelty and vulgarity.
     You know the scant resistance I offer against illnesses only comes from a nervous system destroyed by the infinite displeasure, disagreements, curses, desperation and strangulation that afflicted me.
     Carúpano was a prison. Father Ramos had no idea at all about the proper guidance a child needs. He would incur in a stupid severity for ridiculous reasons. This is why I feel nothing towards him. I would spend days and days without going out to the street and so I’d be prey to moments of desperation and would remain for hours laughing and crying at the same time. I hate the people who were in charge of raising me. I never approached our father because I was scared. Father Ramos was an eminent figure and I was no one, just a foul tempered child. Bestial humanity didn’t see the foul temper came from the desperation of being locked up and not having anyone to turn to. I was scared of father, who paid attention to Trinita and not me. So you see how my disgrace began to develop. Suppose I was scolded by father Ramos and by that piece of shit Martínez Mata because I would run around with kids my age, at age eleven, in Santa Rosa plaza. That is, I was scolded for an act imposed by Anglo-Saxon pedagogy three centuries ago and jealously defended by the Anglo-Saxon police. Talk with people who know England or the United States.
     Once I left that prison that was Carúpano, circuit of a Dantean inferno, I was able to return to the street, but the tyranny was even more severe although in a new form. I would incur Rita Sucre’s anger for being unaware of certain courtesies or if I was too tired to notice something and these scenes were tremendous and would go on for months. I couldn’t placate her despite my native docility. I thought I was required to provide the example of honesty and all I managed was to be a hypocrite, a liar.
     I believe in the power of my lyric faculty. I know very well that I have created an immortal oeuvre and that at the very least the sad consolation of glory will be my recompense for so many pains.
     You will suppose if with such antecedents I can withstand an imperishable infection like amebiasis. The imbalance of my nerves is horrifying and fear is the only thing that has stopped me from the thought of suicide. We don’t do what we want but what the circumstances of inheritance, education, health or corporeal illness, etc. might allow. Our actions are involuntary and even reflexive.
     Now, I observe that I was sharper than all my contemporaries and that they only surpassed me in having a soothing and tolerant home. I have been loved, admired, pitied by the most beautiful women. Naturally, I haven’t taken advantage of their good will. María del Rosario Arias spoke with me one single time, before I came to Caracas and she always remembered me affectionately for that reason alone. She was surprised by my humanity and pleasantness when she met me.
     I don’t remember José Antonio Yépez. Say hello to him very cordially in my name. Dolores Emilia is very satisfied with you and your people.
     The judgments on my two books have been very superficial. It’s not easy to write a good judgment about such untarnished or refined books. The critic needs to have the knowledge I treasured in the cavern of my suffering. And not everyone has had such an exceptional life. Only Leopardi, the poet of bitterness. Someone has already pointed out my similarity to the Italian lyricist and philosopher. Lyrical is he who speaks of his own emotions.
     The day before yesterday the important Gladys, my perfect niece was here. I don’t think she left unhappy.
     Maintain your health and buy a house in Caracas.
     Your brother embraces you,

J.A.R.S.




{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra poética, Edición crítica de Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio, Madrid: Colección Archivos, 2001 }

Pittsburgh’s J.A. Ramos Sucre Mural in New York Times

                  [Images via the New York Times]

The José Antonio Ramos Sucre mural in Pittsburgh's North Side, part of a public art project entitled “A River of Words” (2014) by Carolina Arnal, Israel Centeno and Gisela Romero, sponsored by City of Asylum Pittsburgh, is included in a recent New York Times feature about Pittsburgh.

The mural includes my English translation of the opening paragraph of Ramos Sucre’s poem “The Clamor,” from his final book:

“I lived submerged in the shadow of a lethal garden. An affectionate being had left me in solitude and I constantly honored her memory. A few high walls, of a secular old age, were defending silence. The willows were sporting flowers of alien branches, which I myself had sewn into their sterile foliage.”
(The Enamel Sky, 1929)

The NYT video can be seen here: http://nyti.ms/1HuX6Zy

A free PDF download of my English translation of José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Selected Works (University of New Orleans Press, 2012) is available via the link below:

[http://cl.ly/1W2d40071P1a]

Arrival of the Remains of José Antonio Ramos Sucre

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

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




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




{ Élite, Caracas, July 1930 }

Bibliografía. La torre de Timón, José Antonio Ramos Sucre / Fernando Paz Castillo

Bibliography: Timon’s Tower, José Antonio Ramos Sucre

                  [Fernando Paz Castillo (1893-1981) in Caracas by Vasco Szinetar]

This title is an authentic find. José Antonio Ramos Sucre lives in his tower, anachronically in his tower of books, removed from everyday life and modern literature.

“My teachers come from a long way away,” he says emphatically, with a certain Andalusian exaggeration, when someone points out the resemblance or suggestion between one of his poems and those by any number of writers from the nineteenth century to our days.

But this strange, tough spirit, this ascetic soul, has the sickly emotiveness of a modern writer.

For the author of Timon’s Tower the exterior world doesn’t exist. Life for him is a series of more or less arbitrary cerebrations, I say life and not art, because his art is a faithful transfer of his way of living, incomprehensible and maniacal.

The topics of his compositions seem incomprehensible to many people, and they are always suggested by readings, or by those somewhat bookish emotions that, altered by childhood imagination, eventually form a picturesque world of imps and ghosts, that begin by tormenting us and eventually become our best friends. I always note in his poems something from this world of childhood, any one of those superstitions, like sediment from past beliefs.

“The soul is ancient and knows so many things!” said an old philosopher. Yes the world of evocations has no limits in time nor does it recognize a fixed point in space. We’re each born with a fortune which is all of our patrimony: the East, Greece, Rome, these form part of a beautiful past, you could almost say, of our childhood. Sesostris, Achilles, Brutus end up being, as time passes, the same thing as the disobedient child’s broken sled and Juan, the one whose cap is missing the chin strap. Whoever lacks the reminiscences, whoever doesn’t have a literary tradition that begins, at the very least, on school benches, won’t be able to understand the motives of this writer, or better yet, this scholiast of ancient parchments.

His exalted fantasy moves him to situate himself preferably in the Middle Ages. The spirit of his melancholia enjoys the landscapes of such a sinister era that was called “night.” Isn’t the Gothic tower a product of that past? Isn’t Ramos Sucre’s art rather Gothic? Don’t all his writings have a construction of medieval architecture, somber and fantastical?

The dream of this writer is unity, the annihilation of the will in the great theological mystery. Ramos Sucre is a mystic, though not a joyful pantheist who contemplates nature, but rather a superstitious ascetic, gaunt like a Spaniard from the 1500s.

We can’t forget Ramos Sucre’s early childhood in an ancient city, with narrow streets and bloody legends, where colonial life tenaciously remained up until very recently, that his first years were under the shadow of Father Ramos, an erudite straggler from the nineteenth century, and that the first books that fell into his hands, at that point unable to browse them, were those of Massillon, Bossuet and a few Latin textbooks.

In hours of leisure he wouldn’t go out to the countryside to play with his friends, to wade in the placid ocean in Cumaná, a place toward which he always has a deep affection, to swim in the Manzanares river bordered by palm trees like a sacred river in India, to leap with a naked body in the clear water of dawn, under the clean sky of that tropical Greece. An erudite since childhood, he would seek out eclogues of solitude to read, hidden away from everything, with some thick volume of narrative history, or some entertaining novel by Alexandre Dumas.

Many of his poems, since there’s nothing else these texts could be, are reminiscences more than of reading, of the plates that illustrate those books: Gustave Doré, Albrecht Dürer, etc. This is why those who haven’t seen these illustrations find the text obscure, but, thinking clearly about it, this isn’t really the author’s fault.

Is it a duty for the writer to be understood by everyone? I sincerely don”t think so. It’s hard to understand other people’s thoughts. Even in life itself it happens to us, quite frequently, that the people we feel closest to don’t really know us. Many times we imagine we’re proceeding correctly, because we proceed with sincerity, and we’re interpreted wrongly. Interested feelings, selfish stares, these stain the purity of our dreams and it’s much easier to say “I don’t understand” then to take the trouble to understand.

In order to understand someone in life or art you need some generosity and in order to be generous you have to let go of yourself partly. The fact of not being understood is sad, because the person who is misunderstood feels isolated, without sympathy from the world. Only a strong spirit can construct for itself with the spoils of its dreams a Tower of Timon: a tower of isolation and bitterness, a tower of shyness toward other men, like the one constructed by the misanthrope of Athens.

I said he has a maniacal temperament and this is seen quite clearly: in many of his poems the word that doesn’t appear. Some will say it’s a linguist’s virtuosity; but isn’t linguistics a form of mania in the author?

Undoubtedly he’s not the correct type of author, preoccupied with the purity of language, but rather with the purity of an arbitrary language he himself has formed, with outdated rules of Latin grammar. One notes in many of his compositions gallicized words such as miraje for a mirage and escrutar in the sense of investigating. Does Ramos Sucre know these words are incorrect? Of course. He uses them constantly and if someone notices it, he says:

“They’re Latin and I write from a base of Latin. After all that’s an explanation.”

Now in the latest productions by Ramos Sucre we discover new influences. From the sixteenth century ascetic he was, he has now become a pagan of an Adriatic from the seventeenth century. His new poems are motives of the Renaissance seen through a Nordic fog, with a certain sobriety in the strokes of a Pre-Raphaelite painter.

José Antonio Ramos Sucre is a poetic temperament. Except he lacks a mastery of rhyme and that modern form of art that consists of watching. The modern poet can’t discard the landscape, which is for Ramos Sucre an abstraction: thin pine trees, withered lands, skies with blinding light; but no color, no reality, nothing to give a feeling of life, nor the impression of movement.

Timón’s Tower isn’t a book, like most written today, to get in touch with the public, conquer the sympathy of readers, but instead a book to isolate oneself further. Men forgive everything except not understanding. Revenge is inevitable: they nickname crazy and extravagant whoever they don’t understand.

Locked in his tower, in his misanthrope’s tower, he’ll be able to watch everyone who screams as they pass, everyone who vociferates...

Art wasn’t made for those who won’t take the trouble to understand.




Élite, 3 October 1925




{ Translated from José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra poética, Edición crítica de Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio, Madrid: Colección Archivos, 2001 }