Lanza tu poesía / Ludovico Silva

Throw Your Poetry

Throw your poetry like an energetic dagger at
     reality; you’ll see how reality sends it back to you
     with even more strength

Don’t get drunk to know reality; it’s
     already drunk. It’s up to you to stay lucid.

The pure love of words doesn’t last forever;
there comes a moment when things impose themselves.

28 October 1968




{ Ludovico Silva, Cuaderno de la noche, Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1979 }

El miedo a la conciencia / Ludovico Silva

The Fear of Consciousness

The fear of consciousness
is the fear of my own being.
I’m scared of you, clarity that acts
beacon in the depths of my bones.

I fear you, precious stone
that nourishes and radiates in my head.
Ah, lucidity of lime, snows rays
murderous whiteness.
I want to return to the night of nights,
to that Genesiacal tranquility
where being moved like an unconscious mass
developing in the dark.
Where did this light of my being come from?
Who wanted to stamp it on my forehead
with the sign of suffering?
I have loved you, light,
but I can’t use you anymore in time;
I would need a total light, without a body,
arrived from the blood, but flying towards the cosmos.
Too much consciousness for such a small being!




{ Ludovico Silva, Cuaderno de la noche, Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1979 }

Fijos en el tormento / Ludovico Silva

Fixed in Torment

I can feel evil, the tenderness of evil
the softness of the abyss
hatred’s compassionate glance
rancor’s attractive profile
the purest impurity.

I hear the sulphur singing in the tunnels
and the creaking of regret.
I see sins suffering for being sins
yet they enjoy the punishment so much.
The angel becomes more alive for me again
when he was falling toward our time.

And after all, aren’t there two spaces?
Isn’t there one that’s alive and another one dead?
There’s one that’s alive and I can feel it nearby,
the infernal space.
It’s evil what is ours;
good is nothing more than good angels.
There is nothing but men, evil men
like me, in love with their evil
alive in their misery and in their miserable love
fixed in torment.

8 November 1968




{ Ludovico Silva, Cuaderno de la noche, Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1979 }

Mis Beatrices / Ludovico Silva

My Beatrices

An expert and wise friend of mine says
that all women are called Beatrice:
Is this eye of dusk real?

Ancient and deep, my friend also says
that Dante forgot
about the Beatrices of hell.

She’s the one I want,
the one with my inferno on her back.

Priestly, immense,
she holds the white chalice in her hands
she puts it to my lips
and everything dissolves in flames.

21 October 1978



{ Ludovico Silva, Cuaderno de la noche, Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1979 }

Con los otros / Ludovico Silva

With the Others

The beaches at night
are an orchestra in the dark,
they fall like fragments,
spears that infringe upon
cemeteries of quartz.

In my solitude, sounds
solidarity:
golden letter in the gloom.

18 October 1978




{ Ludovico Silva, Cuaderno de la noche, Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1979 }

Introito / Ludovico Silva

Prologue

Herein lie the scarce living remains of a long shipwreck.
After ten years of continuous and golden death, all I have
left to say is: I have a corner, a little corner where
I can breathe, I once more believe in poetry, or she
believes in me again! It’s hard to shout in the dark so
the words flee our mouths like luminous stones.
Writing before death is the only thing that a poet
can truly do. That’s why the words of a poem should
all be fatal. Despite the dark games and delicate
tortures, death has the color and the vigor of
hope. If not, how would it be possible to make poetry from it?
Death first makes poetry of us, it writes
verses and prose on our bodies, it drives us waving divine
flags towards the great dwelling. Maybe death will be the best
thing life has. It’s the chance to reconcile ourselves
with time, which is our substance.
Death reclines beside me like a faithful lover, or like a
piece of forgotten gold. I take her in my hands, and
transform the lover into beloved, and the gold I transform into
words.

21 October 1978




{ Ludovico Silva, Cuaderno de la noche, Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1979 }

Tiempo / Vicente Gerbasi

Time


to the memory of Ludovico Silva


Time past
was leaves
falling in light.
A distant glance
on an Abraham landscape.
I saw the lion of the abyss.
At night I sank
into the anxiety
of the stars.




{Vicente Gerbasi, El solitario viento de las hojas, Caracas: Tierra de Gracia Editores, 1989}

Ventana / Ludovico Silva

Window

The fence of the mind
peers into your eyes,
sings inside you
like a steel chorus.

Solitude and time
have brought you to this window
facing a sky of lead
carved by disgrace.

Behind the fence, a garden
of mineral roses
is a town of hard white demons
like this marble I write on.

Woman with naive eyes, martyred,
violent and lost
in the fog of time.

5-28-79




{ Ludovico Silva, Piedras y campanas, Caracas/Bogotá: Editorial Rayuela/Editorial Pluma, 1979 }

Pájaros / Ludovico Silva

Birds

Above the horror of the sea
dance the birds,
mystical scissors,
angels of this world.

Above the marine horror
fly my solitudes
like memory’s lightning.

The wind brings
lost kingdom birds,
memories that spin
like strange signs
over the sea of a recovered time.

5-28-79




{ Ludovico Silva, Piedras y campanas, Caracas/Bogotá: Editorial Rayuela/Editorial Pluma, 1979 }

Uveros / Ludovico Silva

Sea Grapes

Facing the turquoise sea
the grapes of death sing
and gleam like eyes
in the bloodied afternoon;
the bees murmur
in the serene air
as the leaves hum with the breeze.

My soul wanders there
with an amethyst tunic
while my eyes examine
a strange coffin
sleeping in the sea grapes.
High branches that reach the clouds,
grapes of solitude, oblivion stones!

5-28-79




{ Ludovico Silva, Piedras y campanas, Caracas/Bogotá: Editorial Rayuela/Editorial Pluma, 1979 }

Te recordaba, loco / Ludovico Silva

I Was Thinking of You, Lunatic

Advance, advance further, Ludovico,
towards the dung heap of dreams,
advance like a lunatic amid the night
with no idea where you’re headed nor to what time.

I was thinking of you, lunatic, in these nights
of love and disgrace
where eight refrigerators were singing
the solitude of beer.

I don’t know which is the art
of singing the miseries of the Aurora
nor the art made in silence
for the splendors of death.
All I know is that I live
between two manifested solitudes
and one that accompanies me
like a ray of gold in the shadows.

4-30-79




{ Ludovico Silva, Piedras y campanas, Caracas/Bogotá: Editorial Rayuela/Editorial Pluma, 1979 }

Samanes / José Barroeta

Samanes

                                                  To Ludovico Silva

These samanes where the day
falls with Christ
keep the sinister away.
Death doesn’t elevate itself in them
but actually lives again
like in childhood
walking around randomly.
Those samanes
living with your father’s colors
in their eyes
they carry no time and no space
they’re calmly subject to disappear.
These samanes that don’t make sense,
because we’ll never reach them,
they make your dead father appear
amid shadows
with the light of those psalms
the wind gives the dead.




El arte de anochecer (1975)




{ José Barroeta, Todos han muerto: Poesía completa (1971-2006), Barcelona: Editorial Candaya, 2006 }

Correspondences between Rimbaud & Ramos Sucre

I’d like to make a few observations about the Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre tonight. I’ll give a brief summary of his life and cite two critics who’ve noted the influence of Arthur Rimbaud on his writing.

Ramos Sucre was born in Cumaná, Venezuela in 1890 and died by his own hand in Geneva, Switzerland in 1930. He published five books and pamphlets in Caracas between 1921 and 1929. His texts are hybrids that employ elements from fiction, poetry and the essay. Many of these texts first appeared in Caracas newspapers and magazines throughout the twenties. In December of 1929, he travelled to Europe for a position at the Venezuelan consulate in Geneva. On his way, he stopped in Hamburg, Germany and Merano, Italy, where he stayed at sanatoriums he hoped might cure the insomnia that had plagued him for nearly a decade. Overwhelmed by his deteriorating mental health in Geneva, he took an overdose of barbiturates on his fortieth birthday and died three days later. His body was shipped back to Venezuela, where he was buried in his hometown.

One of the first critics to note the affinities between Rimbaud and Ramos Sucre was Francisco Pérez Perdomo, in the prologue to an anthology he edited in 1969, the first mass-market edition of his poetry. Pérez Perdomo wrote: “Ramos Sucre’s writing has a satanic, Dionysian tone just like some of the characters in his texts. […] and the uxoricide of “Life of the Damned,” frequented by the specter of his victim that will one day succeed in exterminating him with its rancor, recalls the infernal groom of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. A supernatural, fantastical world invades his texts.”

In his 1975 essay “Ramos Sucre and Us,” the philosopher and critic Ludovico Silva discussed the poet’s aesthetic lineage:

“The line that goes from Baudelaire to Rimbaud, which is to say, the line from Petits poèmes en prose (1864) to Une saison en enfer (1873) is perhaps the clearest literary source for detecting some of the most characteristic traits of Ramos Sucre’s universe, both in its purely formal aspect as well as in the behavior of the poet himself. The elongated and voluptuous prose, friend to a certain contemptuous Satanism; the landscapes in which

tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.

an almost complete indifference to the concrete social and historical references in which the poet lives (more accentuated in Ramos Sucre than in his French antecedents, who at least spoke about Paris) and, finally, the ironic manner of intermingling worlds of Olympian happiness and Hellenic clarity with somberly Christian worlds, of a “Christianity in ruins” that, according to Nietzsche, is a distinctive sign of poetic modernity; all of that is a clear symptom of a profound assimilation, on the part of Ramos Sucre, of the poetic message of those great French poets.”

In his poems and personal letters, Ramos Sucre never mentions Rimbaud, as he does other writers such as Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare or Leopardi. But he is known to have purchased many titles on a regular basis from two Paris booksellers, who shipped their merchandise across the Atlantic. Considering Ramos Sucre’s voracious and eclectic reading habits, his decision to exclusively adopt the prose poem form—when no one else in Venezuela had done that—and his use of transgressive or “satanic” imagery, Rimbaud can provide a helpful key to his work.

My reading of Rimbaud has been shaped by the Louise Varèse translations that New Directions first published in the forties. I’ve occasionally borrowed from Varèse’s somewhat antiquated diction and sensibility when deciding on what tones, words and images to employ in my Ramos Sucre translations. Reading Ramos Sucre these past five years, I’ve begun to pick up his trace in some of my contemporaries. Not that they’ve read him necessarily but rather his work has seeped into my sensibility as a reader. So for instance, when I read Jon Leon’s recent book The Malady of the Century (Futurepoem, 2012), I can’t help noticing Ramos Sucre lurking in some of his sentences.


Addendum: Three Views of Ramos Sucre

Winter Fête
Arthur Rimbaud
(tr. Louise Varèse)

     The cascade resounds behind operetta huts. Fireworks prolong, through the orchards and avenues near the Meander,—the greens and reds of the setting sun. Horace nymphs with First Empire headdresses,—Siberian rounds and Boucher’s Chinese ladies.


***


Gospel
José Antonio Ramos Sucre

     The mystical commotion had startled me. I was in the presence of an aerial vision. The symbols of faith gained a spiritual form and emitted voice.

     I fell on my knees under the radiant sky.

     A message of health, music from chaste silence, the earth surprised everyone, the inveterate aridity consoled.

     The escape of the devoted dream caused a unanimous lament in the far ends of the dark valley. The humble ones told themselves they had been hallucinated by a meteor of vain light and they complained about their shame and abandonment.


***


La Isla Bonita
Jon Leon

I’m with four or five people on an elevator with a glass door overlooking the entire ocean that hovers above a ruined city like an Egyptian stela carved into the wall of the air. I’m wearing Surface To Air denim and patent leather Florsheims. Everybody else looks dimpled. I think I shouldn’t text you this. I text you this. Standing on the rail looking at a panoramic plaque with three girls I picked up at Wasteland. I did them both not five minutes ago with Rick in the changing room. Jenny Kayne shorts, Body Glove T-shirt. Came hard on her extensions. I’m thinking this as I step off the elevator into a crowd of minaret dancers faux-banging each other on the marble floor between a circular glass buffet. It’s not an actual club but I hang around until Marla beeps me. Marla beeps me. I call her back from a payphone on the hotel balcony. Tell her I saw five blondes peel a banana backwards from the foot of my satin sheets. I tell her I’m a part of this. Are you a part of this.


—Talk given in Cambridge, MA on 17 August 2012.

Recuerdos y lluvias

Ludovico Silva
(Caracas, 1937-1988)


Una noche, en San Germán de los Prados*
hace ya tanto tiempo, París, hace ya tanto
que se me ha extraviado de la memoria
y se me ha convertido en un trozo de cuarzo,
una noche en que las calles de París
estaban llenas de cadáveres de poetas
que se pudrían en los respiraderos,
yo salí temblando de mi refugio de la calle Cuyas
y me fui a encontrar la muerte.
Arrastrándome, llegué como un viejo mármol
al café de San Germán de los Prados
donde se acumulaban los esqueletos
y los cuerpos moribundos de burgueses y revolucionarios.
El estallido de la bomba había sido atroz, molecular,
y tan solo quedaban con vida
las botellas de vino y un viejo camarero
que tristemente me sirvió una botella.
Yo no podía más.
De las galaxias me llegaban extraños mensajes,
de alguna región donde los seres son de puro gas
me llegaban mensajes aterradores, como este:
“¡Todo, todo es al fondo fatal, hasta el azar!”
Entonces, acompañado de mi botella
en cuyo fondo cantaba Baudelaire
tomé mi cuaderno y escribí
“Mi gran tormento es: ¡Yo quiero vivir eternamente!”

Yo pensé que en aquella noche de mis veinte años
iba a morir de pura vida o de presentimientos.
Estaba enamorado de una mujer de ojos azules,
una pequeña francesita de Melun;
había sido feliz con ella hasta que me enamoré.
Entonces, a partir de ese momento,
me trató mal, me zahirió y me abandonó como a un perro.
Fue mucho lo que lloré en Monsieur Le Prince,
fue mucho lo que caminé como un loco
sin querer irme a mi refugio. No tenía dinero,
y sin embargo tuve que darle unos francos
a un alucinado de Argelia que me lo pidió
pistola en mano.
De repente empezó a llover mierda de los cielos
y me acordé de los aguaceros de mi lejano país
donde todos los años renace el diluvio universal
y donde hay que construir el arca de Noé
cada año. Mis metáforas de poesía
no dicen absolutamente nada
frente a esos ríos verticales,
esas tormentas de lágrimas
que caen desde arriba
y luego ruedan por los ojos de los miserables,
los que no tienen casa, ni nada, sino muertos.
Así estaba yo en esa noche lluviosa de San Germán
calléndome por las calles de París,
¡París!... , ciudad o moneda caída de lo alto
como un pedazo de oro
manchado de porquerías divinas.
Nunca te conocí, ciudad, y nunca te conoceré,
porque fuiste conmigo
demasiado cruel, como una hembra con látigo y dientes.
Allí amé, sufrí, morí, escribí tonterías trascendentales,
pero ya no hay más que la pura memoria fragmentada
el recuerdo del recuerdo.
Nunca más te volveré a ver,
pero aún me siguen haciendo daño
y sobre todo esos ojos azules, asesinos.

Ahora, después de tantos años
de haber huído de San Germán y del Boul Mich,**
me encuentro en mi ciudad de aguaceros rojos
en una ciudad también llena de cadáveres,
pero no de poetas,
porque aquí los poetas se protegen muy bien,
sino de descamisados, de miserables, de desocupados.
Para ellos este poema hematopoético,
hecho de sangre e hígado;
para ellos, por quienes nunca he luchado de verdad
a pesar de escribir muchos libros violentos
que deberían ser quemados
para producir aunque sea una señal de humo
que diga: “¡Yo quiero vivir eternamente!”

En aquella época tenebrosa de San Germán de los Prados
un sabio amigo me dijo: “Si solo escribes sobre la sombra,
no te quedará más recuerdo que la sombra.”
Tenía razón. Es mi único recurso.
No reconozco otra metáfora que la muerte.
Ella es como un prisma
que me ilumina todos los lados de la vida.
Morirse es lo de menos,
lo importante es aprender a morirse.
Yo me iré muriendo como un caracol,
caminando hasta el final, sin prisa y sin pausa,
y sólo le pido a la hermana Muerte
que me deje llegar con mis prosas funestas
hasta el término que me tienen fijado allá arriba.
Lo demás es puro sonido y color.
Veo montes que se derrumban,
veo poetas gritando bajo el lodo de las vertientes,
veo volcanes que vomitan la ironía de Dios,
veo el tiempo que viene como un toro de hierro,
veo a Mozart y a Glück cantando en mis praderas,
me veo en fin como un espectro,
como una señal para todos los que me circundan,
un cuerpo de marfil con algo de oro en los ojos enfermos,
unos poemas rotos, algunos versos buenos,
alguna joya que sonríe en la oscuridad.
Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem.***




N. del A.

* San Germán de los Prados: castellanización de Saint Germain des Prés, un lugar de París.

** Boulevard Saint Michel abreviado.

*** Triste hasta la muerte está el alma mía.




(Papel Literario, El Nacional, 8 junio 1986)

Los huesos andantes de Ludovico / Héctor Silva Michelena

Ludovico’s Rambling Bones

He had the privilege of shining in the various fields where he projected his sensitive intelligence. Philosopher, essayist, literary critic, poet and newspaper writer of great importance, Ludovico Silva (1937-1988) was a columnist for El Nacional, as well as the author of an extensive oeuvre that has been translated into several languages.


“If my bones were to perish, make them walk.” Ludovico would speak these chilling words to those of us who were intimate with him, and it is what I, his tutelary brother, aspire to achieve in these lines: to rescue his bones from the folds of my memory and make them walk: full of blood and sun. Yes, the sun because in a letter he sent me in 1956 from Freiburg in Breisgau, as he preferred to call it, he wrote: “Héctor, these sun cymbals bloody the shores of my eyes.”

I’m going to evoke terrible and beautiful splinters of the bones and sun that sustained and animated a tormented existence, which prolonged itself thanks to the spiritual rest he received in the last decade of his life, the love of his wife Beatriz.

Tormented existence? Yes! Together we traveled to alcohol’s chiaroscuro kingdom, together we caroused in the bars and taverns in the whirlwind of the República del Este and the Callejón de la Puñalada, together we gave food and drink to beggars and gangsters at high dawn. We received in the three apartments we shared together numerous friends, poets, actors, painters, novelists, like Darío Lancini, Caupolicán Ovalles, Luis Salazar, Héctor Mayerston, Indio Guerra, Salvador Garmendia and Adriano González León, who wrote, in front of a bottle of rum, a stupendous short story that Guillermo Meneses published in the magazine Cal. One day I arrived at our apartment in El Marquéz, where electricity blackouts were frequent, and I noticed thick smoke coming through the crevices of the door. I quickly opened the door and ran to the room where we slept. I found my brother laid out drunk on his bed, which was on fire on all four sides, a fire that spread to our clothes, which were ruined or scorched. Ludovico had passed out with a lit cigarette. In 1986 he entered the Casa Blanca clinic, where he wrote some moving and hard texts, which the poet Harry Almela published (2002). Four years later I opened my eyes in the intensive care unit of a hospital, where I was taken during an emergency of brain convulsions due to my alcoholism.

Years before, I had diminished the journey, due to my studies. But Ludovico continued his atrocious trip: he had his son, Rodrigo, whom he barely got to know, to his own mortification; Rosa del Olmo, his wife at the time, soon left him; she had grown tired of having to welcome him home drunk on so many nights and of picking him up from their apartment hallway. This initiated a terrible orbit through rented rooms, pigsties, jails, alleys and a few lovers who were fascinated by bohemia and by his dazzling and suggestive words.

Ludovico was born on February 16, 1937 and died early one morning in December of 1988. He was killed by a major cirrhosis of the liver that gave him a heart attack. Death came and took his eyes without agony. Thus ascended to encounter Baudelaire and Machado, his aesthetic fathers, he who had never stopped writing not even while under the lash of his abundant ethyl and psychic crises. From them he extracted his Ars Poetica: “Poetry is the musical combination of symbols.”

I don’t want to continue without clarifying that I write this at the request of my friend, the writer Nelson Rivera, and on the occasion of the recent publication of Ludovico’s book Teoría poética (Caracas: Editorial Equinoccio, Universidad Simón Bolívar, 2008). This is a unique edition in many ways. It was discovered in Maracay, in 2005, in the offices of the Fundación Ludovico Silva, run by his widow Beatriz. We owe the discovery of this manuscript, which he began to write in the mid eighties, to the intimate and tenacious dedication of the high poet Edda Armas, who with admirable diligence “put the pieces of the puzzle together,” on the tough trail of loose and dispersed texts, in order to piece them together with one objective: to reveal what for Ludovico was a great dream: to write a major work, “a vast book entitled Teoría poética de la cultura occidental,” which ranges from Homer to Vicente Gerbasi.”

Nothing better for discerning the great interest of this discovery, than transcribing a fragment from Edda Armas’s stupendous prologue: “Invited by the Fundación Ludovico Silva, I traveled to the city of Maracay to give a reading in the poetry series Cuadernos de la Noche, at the Agustín Codazzi Library. Once the event was over, we gathered in the offices of the homonymous Foundation where the manuscripts, photographs, portraits and art works inspired by the poetic work of Ludovico are housed. Late into the night, when I was ready to sleep, I received from Beatriz Guzmán, Beatrice, his widow, a river blue-green folder, dated 1986, with the heading “Teoría poética,” so that I might look it over. This sparked my curiosity once I was installed in the small guest room and beneath the precarious light of the bedside table I opened and read “Las misteriosas correspondencias,” which is what he titled the first chapter. The original folder contained the original and the carbon copy of this document, composed on a typewriter. He clarifies that these are his notes on Teoría poetica and that he selects as an ideal and concrete door for them the name of the well-known and inexhaustible sonnet by Baudelaire, “Correspondances.” ”

Edda says the text moved her in a particular manner, not because of its yellowed pages no the date but, dramatically, because of what it contained: the topics the poet addressed in the first poetry workshop offered at the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos (1975-1976), in which Edda participated and never forgot: mainly the poetics of Nerval, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarmé and Valéry; these were his literary preferences, balanced on the immortal verses of Saint John of the Cross. I drop the curtain here and continue.

Luis José Silva Michelena–Ludovico’s birth name–was the youngest of five siblings. He was born in the house Villa Marietta, located on Argentina Street in the uninhabited neighborhood of Catia. It’s not possible, nor desirable, to follow Ludovico and his family’s steps in life. For that we have the excellent chronology in the book edited by Edda. Nor am I going to analyze his work, for two reasons: first, I lived alongside it intensely; secondly, such an examination has already been undertaken, even if in an unsatisfactory manner because of its fragmentary nature. I could say, for example, that the seeds of Teoría literaria spring from our intense discussions of Aristotle’s Poetics, as well as by a luminous essay by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” which greatly influenced Baudelaire’s ideas.

Our family’s life was itinerant, until we entered the San Ignacio School, where we graduated from secondary school. Important things happened there. Truthfully, Ludovico wanted to be a poet since he was a child, and this desire would not have given early fruits had it not been for three decisive factors that came together at San Ignacio: his conversations with me, the stimulus of the Jesuit priest Leopoldo López Guerrero, and the strong influence of the Haitian writer Paul Verna, who instilled in us the divine poison of French poetry in his classes. Paul turned us into fanatics of Baudelaire. Under his warmth, he made us read Les Fleurs du mal and several biographies, among which stands out one I bought in Buenos Aires, by François Porché, which is psychoanalytical and chilling, and which left us forever feverish. This is the reason why Ludovico chose the poem “Correspondances” as an entrance to his Teoría poética, following the teachings of Hugo Friedrich, his professor of Roman Philology at the University of Freiburg.

Ludovico was in Europe from 1954 until 1960. He read voraciously, traveled, took classes and frequented bars and taverns. In none of his letters I received did he hint at any political inclination, although a light air led him to flirt with the right. Many moons passed, unsettling for me. Ludovico returned to Venezuela in 1960, inserted himself in the rebellious literary groups of the 60s. The poet couldn’t find work. He lived with me, a communist activist, for five years, during which, after arduous discussions, I convinced him to go see comrade Pedro Duno, who had an important position at a Marxist institute and who asked him when he visited: “What can you tell me?” Ludovico answered: “All the world’s darkening will never eclipse the light of Being,” a phrase by Nietszche known to Pedro, who hired him. He taught classes on grammar and literature, but he never joined the party; he said it restricted him. But he did become a student of Marx, whose discourse and, in particular, his literary style fascinated him. Ludovico and the PCV, though not the MIR, hated each other, save for a few exceptions. (Jesús Sanoja Hernández, Héctor Mujica, Federico Álvarez, Pedro Duno and Alfredo Maneiro.)

In this manner, the move towards enchantment was produced, which Sanoja briefly describes (2002): “After the dissolution of the group that animated this magazine (Crítica contemporánea) and the confrontation between some of its members (…) and Ludovico having traversed leftist journalism, he made the decision to study philosophy (…) This transitional stage coincided with his magnificent work in the magazine Papeles, funded by the Ateneo.” In August of 1965, Jesús Sanoja Hernández presented in the Ateneo, the Antimanual para uso de marxista, marcianos y marxólogos, which resulted in, according to Sanoja, “not a few complaints that my comrades of inquisitorial nature expressed to me for ideological tolerance.” Honor to Jesús Sanoja Hernández!

Let us make ask ourselves a burning question: How would Ludovico’s stupendous and sharpened pen have written today? Is he be happily listening, in that warehouse full of alcohol and wine that is his grave, to the cheers of imposture that he receives today from a claque under its veil of ignorance? As my brother’s only literary executor, I think his bones would have been walking, without listening to the call of the sirens. Those bones would be like flutes blown by Orpheus, allowing the beautiful prosody of his verses to be heard: “the waters departing from me forever / passing mutely in front of my world.”




{ Héctor Silva Michelena, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 21 March 2009 }

Tiempo y poesía / Ludovico Silva

Time and Poetry

The End of the Year is indefinable.

The stars have wanted, obeying an infinite poetics, for earthly time, human time, to be divided into hours, months, years. Men have gathered that celestial requirement and in this way they provide a magical category, ritual, to the end of the month, the end of the year. Apart from the, let us say it this way, financial interest of these human rituals, there is the no less defined ritual of the Celebration, latent in all earthly beings. Dionysian, Farious, Nefarious, Idus, Christmas, New Year, Carnavals, etc. are all celebrations dedicated to the exaltation of time. Of Time itself, as a basic ingredient of cells. In sum, everything that in a part of history has been called religion and which is perhaps better called the political condition of matter. Because regardless of how attached we might be to the practical, within our mysterious matter boils the thirst of the unknown, the intense desire to create, the poetic condition that propels us towards everything magic, ritualistic, fantastic and miraculous. I can already hear a multitude of fanatics saying: “Miracles don’t exist! Miracles don’t exist!” But those fanatics remind me of the anecdote according to which Baudelaire, when a friend asked him why he had abandoned a certain discussion at a café in anger, responded: “Of course I’m leaving! How can you discuss anything with a person who doesn’t believe in miracles?” That is: how can we consider an individual fully human if within his matter there doesn’t exist even an atom of poetic force, an atom of absurdity, a portion of magic?

Poetry has cracked the skulls of many philosophers. From Plato to Heidegger, philosophers have tried to arrive at a definition of poetry. But despite their brilliant speculations (brilliant, the majority of the time, in the same measure in which they are genuinely poetic) they’ve almost always incurred in a contradiction: Trying to give an atemporal definition – definitive!– for something that is temporal. We could argue that, no matter what differences exist between Homeric poetry, for example, and that written in the space age, it will always be an atemporal essence: poetry. The argument is of rank Socratic lineage; but Socrates, as Nietzsche said in The Birth of Tragedy, despite having provided great services to humanity, had injected it with his worst intellectual vices. Poetry, like man himself, is time, but it is also the word in time (A. Machado); and being the word in time, it is impossible to define it by any means other than the poetic word itself. But not words ad usum poetarum (this expression is from professor García Bacca) nor words for technical use in philosophy, but words: poetry.

With this I wanted to say that the poetic condition of human matter is indefinable, or better yet, its only definition is men themselves, flesh and bone definitions, and thus it is useless or impossible to try and define celebrations such as the end of the year, because they belong to the poetic-temporal movements of human life.

Poetry is something perpetually perfectible; its goal is always that: beyond poetry itself. We can always imagine a poem being better, more perfect. And that’s why we can’t bind it in a definition, without risking its assassination. Just as we can’t stop time.




Translator’s note: The original Spanish version of this essay can be read online at the January 2009 issue (#42) of El Cautivo.




{ Ludovico Silva, Teoría poética, Caracas: Editorial Equinoccio, 2008 }

Un dragón / Ludovico Silva

A Dragon

A dragon is not a dragon
until a poet decides it is.
I decide there is a dragon
who won’t vomit fire, but stones
and looks at a woman’s face
strangely, as if hoping
to sing with her the moon’s chorus.
Her stone scales
weigh upon the world.
Oh unicorn dragon
of my nocturnal hallucinations!

5-28-79




{ Ludovico Silva, Piedras y campanas, Caracas/Bogotá: Editorial Rayuela/Editorial Pluma, 1979 }

Con los otros / Ludovico Silva

With Others

   The night beaches
are an orchestra in the dark,
falling like fragments,
spears that wound
quartz cemeteries.

In my solitude, rings
solidarity:
a golden letter in the gloom.


18 October 1978




{ Ludovico Silva, Cuaderno de la noche, Caracas: Editiorial Arte, 1979 }

El sueño insomne / Ludovico Silva

Insomniac Dream

I live a little and yet, I live.
I exist cornered
between an armchair where my father died
and some beer.

My father learned from television
how to die alone
dreaming that he dreamed.
On memory’s screen I see
a way of dying a thousand times.

What solitude facing the merchandise!
What solitude, Jesus, of the Philistines
in your future temple!
What solitude, oh Karl, amidst the ruins
of your own mysteries!


20 July 1978




{ Ludovico Silva, Cuaderno de la noche, Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1979 }

Colores / Ludovico Silva

Colors

I see a night wherein temples sing,
I see battlements that whistle in fog,
I see a darkness full of stones
and memories return to tomorrow.

All the solitude of the mountains
descends in a black avalanche down slopes
as I hear the immense night arriving,
catastrophe of light, drunk bells.

Everything lost always returns to my eyes
always returns to my eyes, always returns
what was left behind on the road.

And just like black always returns
to its faithful whiteness, my destiny
is secretly blue, like the snow.


21 October 1978




{ Ludovico Silva, Cuaderno de la noche, Caracas: Editorial Arte, 1979 }