Labor / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Labor

One moment I felt the notion of peaks. I have possessed like
a melody. They assured me, before my trip, I wasn’t made to
scale the height. I came like a client, passing through. Now I
have company at my disposal, the season benefits us. We cross
seas when the full moon appears. Whoever’s watching knows
we work with our nails. Among beggars, the lousy, we are
the ultimate in poverty.

With sun we would see our exact shadow in the lake.

Whoever’s watching should love us, and be less aloof about
our thickets burned by clusters of ice.




Filiación oscura (1966)




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Barcelona: Lumen, 2004 }

Rimbaud/Sánchez Peláez

My first encounters with Rimbaud were through Louise Varèse’s translations, still the ones I prefer today. Une Saison en Enfer, especially, seems an ideal book, built as it is of failure, memory and a tragic awareness of writing’s autobiographical dimension. The weight of the real (or at least, a branch) when it finally arrives in the poem. (“Yes, the new hour is at least very severe.”) When he writes, in the section called “Morning,” of his seemingly distant youth, Rimbaud is melodramatic but also coldly realistic:


“Had I not once a lovely youth, heroic, fabulous, to be written on sheets of gold, good luck and to spare! Through what crime, through what fault have I deserved my weakness now?”


As I continue to translate Juan Sánchez Peláez into English, I keep Varèse’s Rimbaud in mind. I also think of Rimbaud through the filter of the Venezuelan poet, how his reading of Une Saison en Enfer and Les Illuminations in Caracas and Santiago in the 1940s might relate to or diverge from my own in Tampa in the early 1990s. I translate poems even more slowly than I write my own, sometimes because of a need to inhabit aspects (readings, travels, situations) of the poet whose work I’m facing. This isn’t always so, but with Sánchez Peláez I stop at certain poems for long stretches, silence acquiring a type of gravitational pull. Reading Rimbaud lately, I try to decipher what parts of his writing saturate Sánchez Peláez. The page as a space where poet and translator ondulate, unfixed. Rimbaud’s devotion to the book as an autobiography undone by a fading mythology. A carefully measured undoing.


[Photo: Jesús Castillo, El Nacional]

Las otras voces / Antonio López Ortega

The Other Voices

With the recent disappearance of the writer Elizabeth Schön (1921-2007) we’ve possibly lost the last great Venezuelan poetic voice of the twenties. Along with her, just a few years ago, we also lost Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003), whose legacy and influence continue to grow continentally due to the avant-garde accent of his voice, its sonorous device, its perennially fresh and renewed vision. Schön belonged to an airy, metaphysical current of Venezuelan poetry. It has been a marginal current, but a powerful one nonetheless. Poets like Ida Gramcko (1924-1994), Alfredo Silva Estrada or Alfredo Chacón emanate from that current and evolve toward other horizons.

These deaths raise the question of their work’s dissemination, and the situation is uneven in this field. To speak of the projection of Venezuelan poetry is to speak of an uneven process, which when achieved is due more to the efforts of the poets themselves than to the publishing houses or public policies. In 1988, under the Siruela imprint in Spain, an anthology of Ramos Sucre appeared called Las formas del fuego. Beginning with that pioneering gesture, there have been a succession of editions or translations in various countries, with greater or lesser resonance. The complete poems of Sánchez Peláez, for example, was taken up by the prestigious Lumen imprint in 2004 and today it remains the great Venezuelan poet’s definitive text. The thirties generation seems to be living through a stellar moment – especially if we pause to consider the work of Rafael Cadenas and Eugenio Montejo –, since their editions and recognition abroad are obligatory references. But the forties poets – such José Barroeta (1942-2006) or Hanni Ossott (1946-2002) – already have editions of their complete work in important Spanish editorial houses. The list would be longer because of the additional efforts needed in regards to the arrangement and promotion of poetic oeuvres, and not only in the case of Elizabeth Schön, as necessary as they are deserved. Closer poets whose deaths interrupted mature works – such as Miyó Vestrini (1938-1991) or Elí Galindo (1947-2006) – would also deserve this distinction.

The voice of the poets – we’ve known this since Homer – always moves beneath historical currents and vicissitudes. It is the other voice of societies: the one that could be the equivalent of the voice of the unconscious on the psychic plane, always reverberating beneath thought and ideas.

It is the voice that remains, that belongs to deep humanity, and the one that gathers the misfortunes, accidents or phantasmagoria of human desires. The voice of the poets survives while historical pomp disappears or ends up trapped in marble. One could say that History varies, for good or ill, due to intrinsic reasons. But facing variety, which is inconstant by nature, it’s good to hold up the invariability of poetry, the voice that remains.

All cultures, in their most extreme or compromised moments, have known to quench their thirst in those fountains so as to recognize, in their misplacement, what has nourished the past and will nourish the future. This is why we must return to the poets: to recognize the trunk from which the branches flourish, to reconcile ourselves with the word that doesn’t stain or diminish itself each day, to seek refuge in the soul and to understand that suffering, no matter how prolonged it might be, is always fleeting.




{ Antonio López Ortega, El Nacional, 5 June 2007 }

The Ghost of Memory

I received a copy of the new novel by Wilson Harris, The Ghost of Memory (Faber & Faber, 2006) in the mail last night. As I began to browse through its pages I was stunned to find that one of the three epigraphs he uses to open the book is an excerpt from my translation of a poem by Juan Sánchez Peláez. The epigraph reads as follows:


Elena is earth seaweed
Ocean wave.
...
Standing on the rock and the coral of the abysses.

Juan Sánchez Peláez, translated from
the Spanish by Guillermo Juan Parra


In 2004, I wrote a review of his previous novel, The Mask of the Beggar (Faber & Faber, 2004) for The CLR James Journal which included a discussion of the above excerpt in relation to affinities between the work of Harris and his contemporaries in Venezuela, Sánchez Peláez and Elizabeth Schön. I'm deeply honored to have Harris cite my translation in his new novel.

*

I'm also happy to note two recent publications of my work:

1. An essay on the poetry of Micah Ballard, in Galatea Resurrects #5.

2. My English translations of several poems by Juan Sánchez Peláez from his book Filiación oscura (1966), in Fascicle #3.

Thank you to editors Eileen Tabios and Tony Tost.

Juan Sánchez Peláez

I've just published a feature on the poet Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003) in issue 4 of Eileen Tabios's Galatea Resurrects. The feature includes my English translations of four poems by Sánchez Peláez, along with essays on his work by Lorenzo García Vega and Juan Calzadilla. Thanks, Eileen, for giving me the space in your fantastic magazine.

I find it very difficult to translate someone whose work I feel so close to. What I admire in Sánchez Peláez's work is the devotion to silence he enacts, in composition itself and on the page. He was one of those rare writers whose first book is a masterpiece. The poems in that collection, Elena y los elementos (1951), transformed Venezuelan literature by inaugurating its postmodern era. The rest of his books emerged slowly, a total of seven relatively short collections in five decades.

As I've been preparing this feature, I've also been immersed in reading the work of Jack Spicer. It's felt like synchronicity to see certain parallels between these two poets. For one, they both adapted aspects of French surrealism to an American context, in the process creating something far beyond Breton's original ideas. Spicer's notion of poetry as dictation echoes Sánchez Peláez's use of automatic writing as a form of composition. Both also use the serial poem as a way to redefine what a collection of poems might be.

Throughout his career, Sánchez Peláez constantly revisited his poems. The 50th anniversary edition of Elena y los elementos has many changes and omissions from the original manuscript. Likewise, the final edition of his collected poems, published in Spain within months of his death, includes revisions to most of his books. Although these changes could seem minor (an image here, a line there) what they point to is the notion of poems as living works the writer doesn't always understand, or even build correctly, at first.

There hasn't been an English edition of Sánchez Peláez's poetry published yet. Obviously, I hope to eventually remedy that problem. For various reasons, Venezuelan literature remains one of the large unknowns within Latin American letters. Regardless, Sánchez Peláez is a major presence in Venezuelan poetry. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to call him one of the most important Latin American poets of the XX century.

There are two crucial books when it comes to Sánchez Peláez. The first is the aforementioned collected poems, which includes 9 poems written after his final collection Aire sobre el aire (1989). The second one is a collection of essays and criticism on his work by a wide range of Latin American critics and poets:

1. Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética (Barcelona, España: Editorial Lumen, 2004)
2. José Ramos, ed., Juan Sánchez Peláez: Ante la crítica (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994)

One of the essays on Sánchez Peláez that I've translated for this feature is by the Cuban poet Lorenzo García Vega, who was part of the circle of writers associated with José Lezama Lima in Cuba during the 1940s and 50s. Writing in January 2004 for El Nuevo Herald in Miami, García Vega recalled a visit he made to Venezuela:

"Or I remember once, when emerging from the room that was in the hallucinatory patio of his house in the Altamira neighborhood of Caracas, Juan arrived on the terrace were I sat to say to me suddenly, but not emphatically: “The words sound like gold animals.” And then—I can guarantee it happened this way—I hallucinated when I heard Juan say those words, since, in a way I wouldn’t know how to explain now, I understood what my poet friend was saying was not one of his verses, but just that, gold animals, which he seemed to know how to weigh in his hands, while he spied on the brilliance as though he were a child."

"Hallucinatory" is just the right word to describe the magnificent and strange poems of Juan Sánchez Peláez.

A veces las montañas / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Sometimes the mountains

Sometimes the mountains
will hide
and a horse will appear intact
under countless stars
its shank made of dew,
it is a frozen flame there
and without a rider to guide
its flanks are lanterns,

-breathe, breathe
frighten away fear,

-walk quietly: limpid lake
on the plain's horizon,

-it flies and abandons us:
it pauses for leagues and leagues,
turned into an offering of faithful bones and cordilleras,

that's why
it drinks from the whole earth's humid breast;

its furrow
is our navel,
its battle: the air of intense vibrations,

in famine or abundance
we are the long road
and short life,

while a horse
between us and the radiance
leans its entire body onto warm stones.

{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, El Universal, Verbigracia, 28 April 2001 }




__________________________________________________
Photo: El Universal. Juan Sánchez Peláez, Patricia Guzmán, Enrique Hernández-D'Jesús, Rafael Cadenas, Eugenio Montejo, Librería Monte Ávila, Caracas 2001.

Para Juan Sánchez Peláez / Juan Calzadilla

For Juan Sánchez Peláez


For many of our critics and also for many poets, among which I count myself, Juan Sánchez Peláez is, alongside J.A. Ramos Sucre, par excellence the emblematic figure of contemporary Venezuelan lyric poetry. Not only for having provided an extraordinary contribution to the country’s poetry with his book Elena y los elementos, published in 1951 (and with his subsequent books), but because it was done in a systematic manner, from generation to generation, a required and irreplaceable reference for our poetry when the time comes to speak of genealogies and influences. In particular, he is a reference for poets who emerged between the end of the fifties and the beginning of the seventies. An unavoidable reference when one begins to analyze, as has not been done so far, the effects of that poetic avant-garde which appeared in Venezuela simultaneously with the new art movements and with the renovation of languages we experimented at the beginning of the fifties. Juan returns us, in body and in work, to a mastery exercised with prudence and quickness, a mastery that was also translated, and this was important, in stimulation, fraternity and solidarity with new poets, throughout several decades, until only recently, when he left riding his final horse, the oldest one. For the long journey to the land that some of his verses cursed and kicked. Juan was thus a master, without pretending to be and with the utmost modesty, in front of us who, younger than him and with less experience, discovered in his work, when it was unknown to the rest of the poets, a different language, rigorous and at the same time profound, subliminal, whose new style for that time, forced us to a more attentive and confident reading than we usually gave poetry then. What is interesting about this observation is that the work of Juan Sánchez Peláez was never disavowed nor lowered in esteem under the gaze of the most recent poets who continued to read him attentively, with the same care they paid their own work, through the books he slowly and penitently, at blind and regular intervals, published between 1951 and 1989. In some way, eloquently or tacitly, we poets of the sixties are in debt to him for his own interest, as a great reader, in our work, within a camaraderie that never came close to being an academic pretension, or bearing traces of adulation or complacency.

The preference for his work that obliges us to this tribute is founded, to say something, in the unity and equal quality his work sustains, book by book; a qualitative level maintained throughout all his writing, amidst periods of silence, isolation and seclusion for the poet tormented by inner ghosts and by the uproar of the city. Rigor and temperance not often seen in Venezuelan poetry, before and after him, as corresponds a poet who had a high awareness of his role, removed as Juan was from any expression of vanity, from any marketing display or desire.

In all, whoever thinks the work of J.S.P. is of easy access and is decipherable at first glance is being insensitive, since it is known to be suggestive and, metaphorically speaking, brilliant, concise in its intentionality. Juan was a poet obsessed with verbal alchemy, with the transmutation of the real into a feeling expressed in words, as is expected of a great reader of Rimbaud and a scholar of French surrealist poetry. Paradoxically, he writes in fascination of the associative power of memory (he was a great rememberer), but he doesn’t trust the anecdote, or anything that might end up being too explicit or linear, without renouncing the self-confessional tone, presented directly or hidden, in a symbolically Freudian, existential mode, in many of his texts. In this our poet is supremely contradictory (and Juan used verse almost exclusively to express himself): on the one hand he fights against reasoning, which he tries to drown at the riverbed of the unspeakable, from the persistent innocence that fights to recuperate childhood in his language. But on the other hand, generally automatically, he gives himself over to the nostalgia of real and material fields that seem unreachable through language and whose attainment is only possible within life itself, as are the female body, so physically caressed and desired in his verses, or in general, love’s machinery. Frustrated lover, Juan was a romantic, exacerbated in his explosions of ingenuity and contained anger, celebratory and emphatic in his I, like the master Ramos Sucre. Juan condemns and exalts himself before the cold and neutral beauty of language and prostrates himself before her as though she were the impossible lover, finally satisfying himself, in the kindness of speech to extract himself from the interludes of pessimism and frustration that anguish him, inundate him, especially facing the feeling of death, almost always expressed as a presentiment, like an arriving absolute, in all his books, confronting as it is the anxiety of purification.




{ Juan Calzadilla, 29 April 2004 }

Doce vigilias / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Twelve Vigils

Twelve vigils
named in silence:
our friends or sisters

who honor a promise:
our tomorrow friends,
our friends when parting

they belong to no hour:
at three hours to infinity
the universe belongs to all and none

in golden festivals
we'll hear glad rhythms
if our blood's sun develops,

go on girls, listening to yourselves, grieving
or not on our shoulders
the vigils without harming us.




*




Doce vigilias
nombramos en silencio:
son nuestras amigas o hermanas

ellas cumplen una promesa:
son nuestras amigas del mañana,
son nuestras hermanas al despedirnos

a ninguna hora pertenecen:
a las tres horas de lo infinito
el universo es de todos y de nadie

en doradas verbenas
escucharemos ritmos alegres
si madura el sol de nuestra sangre,

váyanse niñas, oyéndose a sí mismas, atribuladas
o no sobre nuestros hombros
las vigilias sin hacernos daño.




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Editorial Lumen, 2004 }

"...el ver del vidente no permanece..."

Another Chilean poet associated with Juan Sánchez Peláez is Humberto Díaz-Casanueva (1906-1992). The only text of his I've read is an essay included in Juan Sánchez Peláez: Ante la crítica (Monte Ávila Editores, 1994), a compendium of critical approaches to the Venezuelan poet's work, edited by José Ramos.

The essay by Díaz-Casanueva is a review of Sánchez Peláez's collection Rasgos comunes (1975), originally published in Caracas in the Revista Nacional de Cultura. He writes about Sánchez Peláez's extensive use of prose poems in his 1975 collection and the tensions that can arise between prose and verse:

"Podría afirmarse que la actitud dual de Sánchez Peláez ante el mundo es desocultar su riqueza esencial con la ayuda de ricas y extraordinarias imágenes, para luego demostrar que lo presente <<no cumple su presencia>>, el goce es indebido por algo que se interpone y que es preciso exorcizar, la multiplicidad de lo presente es abundante pero fugaz, el ver del vidente no permanece, hay un extravío del hombre, una vivencia de lo inconciliable sin negar los elementos múltiples y a veces contradictorios que componen cada ente o circunstancia. Porque nos negamos a creer que esta poesía no traiga su mensaje que sólo advertiremos del todo sumiéndonos en el poema, sin disecarlo en lo conceptual. Así, entenderemos mejor por qué nos cruzamos con un niño que de repente pasa <<al capricho del viento, con una luz y una melodía>>. El nos indica que aun en la demolición del mundo, hay una fuerza transparente que todo lo entremezcla pero que se opone a la desintegración dionisíaca del hombre y del mundo."

"Tatuado con la tinta imborrable del sonámbulo"

In some of the outdoor covered hallways between buildings at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, you'll find stretches of book and CD vendors at portable stalls. My father says they've been in that spot at least since he studied at UCV in the early 1960s. Among the books I've found there, these two were the most thrilling:

Juan Sánchez Peláez, Poesía 1951-1981 (Monte Ávila Editores, 1984).
Rosamel del Valle, Antología (Monte Ávila Editores, 1976).

The 1984 edition of Sánchez Peláez's collected poems has a deep brown paperback cover and, next to the title page, a photo of the author in oversized 1970s glasses and a wide tie, looking down at something on his desk. This edition also has a great introduction by Adriano González León, who writes:

"Se trata de una brusca irrupción de precisiones, de texturas desdeñosas, elocuentes en el freno y el cincel, a veces frías por el mucho cernir las palabras; por fortuna hay un tono, una obsesión que siempre se abre paso. Vuelve la constante herida de la muerte y el amor, regresan las visiones, se hace presente el descarrío verbal, porque las palabras, según dice espectacularmente el poeta, 'suenan como animales de oro.' "

A story I've heard from a friend about Sánchez Peláez is that he was trying to find as many copies as he could of this edition of his collected poems so he could destroy them. Supposedly, after the 1994 edition had come out, he'd noticed various mistakes in the earlier edition and wanted to ensure those didn't remain archived. I don't know how many copies of that edition (3,000 were printed) he was able to destroy. But this one was saved and ended up at one of the bookstalls, where I was lucky enough to find it.

The second book was edited by Sánchez Peláez the year I arrived in Venezuela from the US. The same year my brother was born in Caracas. The copy I have is in excellent condition and includes a great selection from the Chilean poet, ranging from his early book Mirador (1926) to poems he wrote in New York City and back in Chile before his death in 1965.

I hadn't read his work before finding this edition, though I'd heard of him through reading Sánchez Peláez, who uses two of his lines as an epigraph to his third book Filiación oscura (1966). I rarely see Rosamel del Valle mentioned in relation to Chilean poetry. Overshadowed by the often dull Neruda, I suppose. But the secret poets are so much better anyways.

Here's part III of his poem "Cánticos," from El corazón escrito (1960):

"Luz del verano dormida entre mis dedos
Viva en mí y muerta en mí
Y rosario del santo temeroso del milagro
Un pájaro en vigilia en el nido de este cuerpo
Tatuado con la tinta imborrable del sonámbulo
Deshecho en cada sueño mas despierto en tu oído
Como el amor que lleva en un cesto las catástrofes
Porque tu sonrisa es la sonriente cicatriz que te hizo el ángel
Y arrojada estás en mi pequeña eternidad
Por una hora y otra hora y un siglo y otro siglo
Cada día recibida y amada cada día
Por el fuego de mi palabra ardiente y sin origen"

Obra poética, de Juan Sánchez Peláez / Jacobo Sefamí

Obra poética by Juan Sánchez Peláez


Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Lumen, Barcelona, 258 pp.


The poetry of Juan Sánchez Peláez (1922-2003) is part of a rich heritage of Latin American writing with Surrealist affinities. The conections are evident in the magazines that ascribed to the ethics of the French movement, such as the Chilean Mandrágora (1938-1943), the Argentine Qué (1928) and A partir de cero (1952-1954), or the Peruvian El uso de la palabra (1939). Keeping in mind how problematic an explicit Surrealist allegiance can be and attending more to ethical and/or aesthetic connections, with a malleable criterion, one could elaborate a long list of poets. Just for the sake of establishing a point of reference for the reader, it's worth mentioning some of the names that come to mind: Aldo Pellegrini, Enrique Molina, Olga Orozco, Braulio Arenas, Gonzalo Rojas, César Moro, Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Octavio Paz, Álvaro Mutis, Vicente Gerbasi, Juan Liscano, Tomás Segovia (the list can easily be amplified). To these we could add other poets not ususally paired with Surrealism, but whose work contains certain echoes, images or an attitude which make us evoke it: Vicente Huidobro, Oliverio Girondo, Xavier Villaurrutia, José Lezama Lima.

But perhaps the poet who had the largest influence on the generations that began to publish in the 1940s and 1950s was the Neruda of Residencia en la tierra (1933, 1935). Starting with this text, a Latin American poetry that found its enchantment in the intersection of natural exhuberance and a verbal wealth channeled through surprising images began to take shape. The rhythm of Neruda's long and measured verses, accompanied by a strong eroticism, as well as a bleak condition, returned in various forms among subsequent writers.

Sánchez Peláez's poetry emerges amid this field. At 18 he went to Chile to study and was able to establish a friendship with the members of the Surrealist group centered around the magazine Mandrágora (Braulio Arenas, Enrique Gómez Correa and Jorge Cáceres, who were later joined by Teófilo Cid and Gonzalo Rojas; moreover, we should point out the presence of two other poets: Rosamel del Valle and Humberto Díaz Casanueva). But his books began to appear later, starting in 1951. Sánchez Peláez began to develop a concise poetry, which matured as the years progressed. Sadly, the poet died before this edition was published. Outside Venezuela, his poetry was impossible to find; so that this volume is a revindication while also being a final result that culminates and closes his cycle of creation.

Obra poética gathers seven books and nine unpublished poems. The books are: Elena y los elementos (1951), Animal de costumbre (1959), Filiación oscura (1966), Lo huidizo y permanente (1969), Rasgos comunes (1975), Por cuál causa o nostalgia (1981) and Aire sobre el aire (1989). There would not be actual stages or phases in this work, since a continuous line of exploration is sustained from beginning to end. There are different modulations of the voice and modes of expression: the long initial verse, the short poems with images loaded with silence (on occasion marked by spaces between the lines), the prose poems, the interrupted verses that spread out on the page (the style of Octavio Paz in the 1960s) from one side to another. And yet his poetics persists over time: to resist the condemnation to solitude, human misery, injustice, contingency and the anguish of being, through love, freedom and poetry (the famous Surrealist triad). Facing the awareness of failure, language ends up being a balm: "Though the word be shadow in the midst, home in the air, I am another, freer, when I see myself tied to her, at dawn or in the storm. // For the word I live in placid waters and in a foreign seam, outside the immense hole." If the word is a house that rescues him from the abyss, love is "a permanent state of revelation, the only climate capable of returning its magic and vital force to the languid universe" (as his compatriot Eugenio Montejo points out quite well).

Guillermo Sucre is correct when he points out that what predominates in the first book is "the verbal splendor, proliferation even," while in the second one his poetry "makes itself more concentrated and secret." In the same manner, one would have to note that Sánchez Peláez never loses the freedom of association in the image, which is characteristic of Surrealism: "The wheels that rock the sea are geraniums," "Two bodies join together and dawn is a leopard" or "Your fig kiss amid long branches." In "Poem" (from Filiación oscura), the hidden lines of communication are revealed through the surface of words: "From the stone to the flame to the sweet stream they call hummingbird / what term puts me in the unfortunate juncture? // I scratch and bury. The writing of my details in the fist." The Venezuelan's poetry insists on a type of alquemical vocation, a desire or a wish for the transformation of reality, even if he later falls into anxiety: "When I return from the imaginary voyage, I live and lie in the pure desert. Instead of advents and honors, solitude still tolls the bell in the forest."

In Rasgos comunes allusions to an oppressive social environment appear ("Taste the cup without soup / there's no more soup... / try the suit... / it hangs it drags at / the lapel"), although the references are minimal and figurative. This is perhaps the book that most intensely expresses the relationship between daily reality and the magic that underlies it. For example, see the very beautiful poems dedicated to horses or cows. I cite from "Trajectory" (I regret very much not having noticed it before publishing my anthology Vaquitas pintadas [Little Painted Cows], edited recently by Mexico's Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana): "When I see you, vertical and sacred cows, I see you as lush cows, I see you up close and jumping in the lanes, females with those udders for the male, your white liquor falling, Adam's fountain in our paradises."

Aire sobre el aire and the unpublished poems confront old age and death. They are themes faced with irony, parsimony, or with honest terror. In "Tracks," the last poem in Obra poética, the subject is stripped of everything and is made to march alone in front of his fate: "and if there were no one? no one but nothingness?" Álvaro Mutis affirms on the back cover of this volume that Sánchez Peláez "is Latin America's best kept secret." It's a very elegant way of saying the Venezuelan poet is unkown in Spain. This edition should help fight this ignorance.




{ Jacobo Sefamí, Letras Libres (España), June 2005 }

El que arrojaba uvas ardientes / Lorenzo García Vega

The One Who Threw Burning Grapes

The one who threw burning grapes into the hard bays? Who knew how to say it? Only a poet, of course, only my friend Juan Sánchez Peláez knew how. But since it ends up being painful for me to say he’s no longer here, I’m going to take a leap that will lead me to a cinema from my youth. How is this?

Some of us poets or men of letters, or whatever term one might use, who erupted onto the Latin American scene encompassed between the years 1940 and 1955, saw certain pathetic newsreels in the cinemas where a broadcaster with a “serious” voice explained what we were seeing: an atomic explosion over some Japanese cities. It was an entirely new Chapter in History (just like that, with capitals or with a capital voice, was how the newscaster said it) that was going to change everything, or take everything apart. This is how existential anguish became a daily occurrence. An existential anguish that was dyed with Surrealism’s good fires.

That’s exactly how it was. We made our entrance beneath an atomic explosion narrated by a newscaster and we hid ourselves, however we could, beneath Surrealism’s final shots. So that those of us who were young in those times—a few young people who had proposed among ourselves to hide beneath the metaphorical disorder of the avant-garde—, and who lived amid the isolation of an island, nourished ourselves in any way we could with what reached us from the outside world through the bookstores in Havana. And this, while on the mainland, in other words on the continent, a Venezuelan whom we didn’t know, Juan Sánchez Peláez, was making his way to Chile to gather the legacy of that Surrealist magazine, Mandrágora, where, according to a critic: “The Mandragorists opened a path with elbow jabs, savagely breaking with everything; screams, improprieties, insults against the medium with no concern for good manners.” And this, so that afterwards, on a journey by velocipede, as Juan confessed in one of his poems, he ended up in that Paris where he met Peret, and where he assimilated such things as “the deep and long night of my age,” pointed out by Eluard.

It was an anguish, then, which arrived with an atomic explosion that, transformed into shadows of film, settled in the Havana neighborhood cinema we went to. Or it was a Surrealism with a night of astonishing harlequins, or with a scream that warned: Into the water with Apollinaire!, but where isolation was the only thing that existed. An isolation where the Surrealist automatism we tried to plunge into ended up being an empty gesture. A gesture that was merely surrounded by the solitude of an island where the surreal was seen out of the corner of an eye by a glance that, even in its best expression, Gongoresque, attained the quality of the Beautiful with a capital. In other words, the Beautiful with a Roman God, which couldn’t help being, with its lamentable connection to the ritualistic, the manifestation of the cassock and the cathedral.

And, how sad then!, as we walked out of those cinemas where the atomic bomb exploded, that we young people, who lived surrounded by water on all sides, couldn’t fully connect with the great Latin American Surrealist shadows who wandered on the mainland: César Moro, Molina, or Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, or…

In the end, many things had to occur and, among these, departing the island in a stampede, so as to be able to encounter, after a few years, the surrealist, friend and contemporary, Juan Sánchez Peláez, whom we should have encountered sooner, much sooner. But, finally…We were destined to meet, and the Laws of Cosmic Necessity (laws that could have been dictated by that Gurdief that Juan was reading the last time I saw him) led the poet Octavio Armand to put me in contact with Juan (and, of course, with his companion Malena), during a New York night in the 1970s.

And who was Juan, the Venezuelan poet born in 1922 in Altagracia de Orituco, in the sate of Guárico, and who died in Caracas last November? Who was that Juan, with a turtleneck and Picassian eyes, whom I met one night in New York? Well, looking through a window now in January, through a window that, I don’t know how, puts me in direct contact with the old gold—alchemical?—of a light, this, with nothing else whatsoever but to face the weight of his absence. My friend the poet, who knew how to define himself so well in this manner: “And I know of my limits / I possess a dwelling, my dwelling is / the irony, / a living owl, no / embalmed / the owl that's in the well of the / moon / at the very lonely first hour of / dawn.”

Or I remember once, when emerging from the room that was in the hallucinatory patio of his house in the Altamira neighborhood of Caracas, Juan arrived on the terrace were I was to say to me suddenly, but not emphatically: The words sound like gold animals.” And then—I can guarantee it happened this way—I hallucinated when I heard Juan say those words, since, in a way I wouldn’t know how to explain now, I understood what my poet friend was saying was not one of his verses, but just that, gold animals, which he seemed to know how to weigh in his hands, while he spied on the brilliance as though he were a child.

Or Juan, how would I know how to say it?, with his deafness, in his slow, very slow walks that he took, where he was like a Zen figure whose cane, which in actuality he never used, had just been taken away. Very slow walks, I repeat. And above all I remember one, paradigmatic, which we took around the Paseo de los Chorros in Caracas, and where I thought to say to Juan that at any moment we could very well come across an apparition of Ramos Sucre, that Venezuelan poet so close to us, arm in arm with Empress Charlotte. I thought to say this to him, and my friend Juan, poet without a cane, advanced a few steps, as he tended to do during his walks; and he backed up one step, as he immediately tended to do; and this so as to, as always, conclude by opening his eyes, or covering his mouth, just like a gracious character in a silent film who knew how to say it all without having to use a single sound. Although, yes, a silent character, who in certain moments knew how to sing “Júrame” for us, that song composed by María Greber in 1926, which he loved so much (“I’m certain—he once told me—if the old Surrealists had heard it, it would have been one of their favorite songs”).

Or Juan, at the end, who knew like no one else how to evoke César Moro, a figure Latin American Surrealism can identify with, and he did this with words that can also serve to say goodbye to him in this brief essay:

"César Moro, beautiful and humbled,
playing a harp in the outskirts of Lima
said to me: come into my house, poet.
Ask always for air, clear sky,
because one must die some day, it's understood.
One must be born, and you are already dead.
The floor will always remain, wide and quiet,
though dying from the same family is birth."




{ Lorenzo García Vega, El Nuevo Herald, 26 January 2004 }

Poema

Juan Sánchez Peláez


De esta suavísima, tierna, relampagueante palabra
hay un oscuro susurro,
ella vuela sin cascos como la perdiz
o se recoge en el hueco de
tu mano;
hasta que no la halles
continuarás en el reflejo, en la mitad
en lo entrevisto;
o revolverás tus legajos,
lleno de atribulado silencio,
mientras no sabes si
apagas o no tu endecha fuera de
tono
o calientas con el borde
luminoso de tu mejilla una campana.




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Rasgos comunes, 1975, Obra poética, Editorial Lumen, 2004 }

La vida hermosa / Juan Sánchez Peláez

The Beautiful Life

My ninth fear
might happen in nameless cities;
when discarding wise teachers
on a light, warm day
we will improvise twenty thousand roses:
beneath everyone’s sky, our sky
sentimental and tragic faithless notions have left
and I carry an open wound
while the calming, appeasing sea escapes,

where do I come from
when wise teachers dismiss us in a garden,
or have I been a punctual guest
with my awareness of being alive?

or I never lived or it has been
the proximity of spells to adored
regions the beautiful life
we imagine together.




{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Obra poética, Editorial Lumen, 2004 }

Fortuito / Juan Sánchez Peláez

Fortuitous

If it were not suspended in air, that sound. If man were not a broken absence under the firmament. If our awaiting infinite root didn’t tilt us into nothingness. If we didn’t stand on the shore of vast solar rivers, with our enigmatic pupil somewhere in the night’s suggestion.



{ Juan Sánchez Peláez, Rasgos comunes, 1975, Obra poética, Editorial Lumen, 2004 }

A un paso de la medianoche / Juan Sánchez Peláez

At one step from midnight

stand the souls

near that room


at two steps

they touch the windows


at infinity's third hour

they remain identical

under the sun


though they shine more


and you tremble

and don't hear anything

because they keep quiet


and the distance that

separates us from them

is large


they've left at sunrise

from here


now close your door

and light a lamp.




*




A un paso de la medianoche

están las almas

cerca de esa habitación


a dos pasos

tocan las ventanas


a las tres horas de lo infinito

permanecen idénticas

bajo el sol


aunque brillan más


y tú tiemblas

y no oyes nada

porque guardan silencio


y la distancia que nos

separa de ellas

es grande


al amanecer se han ido

desde aquí


cierra ahora tu puerta

y prende una lámpara.




(Inti: Revista de Literatura Hispánica, No. 49-50, Primavera-Otoño 1999, Providence RI)

Surca el mar / Juan Sánchez Peláez

The sea furrows

My face observed by
the sun and moon
beside a memory of Valparaiso

profound, beautiful desire
for youth's drunkenness
ondulates far off
in the distance there

the sea furrows
a sail
brings unknown melodies
with the years’ rough sound,

in twilight’s mist
inside autumn afternoons
dreams ondulate, arrive
returning from Valparaiso

and the insomniac port
remains dreaming
its eyes staying
close to my eyes




{Juan Sánchez Peláez, Verbigracia, El Universal, Spring 2001 }