El peregrino de la fe / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Pilgrim of Faith

I enjoyed losing myself on the poor island, removed from the usual path. I would rest in the cemeteries inundated by wild flowers, in the confines of wooden churches.
     My thoughts would disperse at the sight of the amber sky and a blue line of mountains.
     I would randomly break apart the voluble flora of the plains. The magic iris of a column of water would stun the sequence of my imprudent horses.
     The fortuitous sun would invert the hours of vigil and sleep, presiding the splendor of an eccentric latitude.
     The green rivers were occupying a riverbed of ash. They deserved the privilege of carrying a disconsolate virgin’s coffin to the ocean.
     I reclined my head on a stone, pitying the banished forehead of Jesus, and I slept in a sober hill, where a perfumed thicket was growing, close to the bland tapestry of the sea.
     I enjoyed, in the course of the placid night, the visions reserved for Parsifal and I received, before dawn, the command that I walk away in silence.
     A hero from the celestial court, favored with the semblance and wisdom of a Saint Jerome, was waiting for me at a short distance in the boat of passage and he guided it with his voice.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

Palabras de presentación en la lectura de cuentistas latinoamericanos: Enza García y Mario Morenza (USB) / Dayana Fraile

Introductory Remarks at the Reading by Latin American Short Story Writers: Enza García and Mario Morenza (USB)



Good Afternoon.

Thanks to the invitation extended to me by Mariana Libertad Suárez and Editorial Equinoccio, I now find myself introducing two old friends of mine: Enza García and Mario Morenza.

I met both of them in the hallway that connects the Escuela de Filosofía and the Escuela de Letras at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, that hallway belonging to Mario’s other memories. I accompanied them, anonymously, in their first steps as writers during my academic internship at Monte Ávila Editores and I had the opportunity to participate in the editing process of their first publications: Cállate poco a poco by Enza and Pasillos de mi memoria ajena by Mario. I must confess I was very impressed by both manuscripts and that the best of dispositions marked my work and my readings at that time. I have always been inspired by the fiction being produced by young writers in Venezuela.

Enza García and Mario Morenza are a part of that avalanche of young fiction writers today who are transforming the landscape of the national literary tradition. Both of them, in a short span of time, have become central and paradigmatic voices of this emerging generation.

So it was a pleasant surprise to encounter El bosque de los abedules and La senda de los diálogos perdidos, books that received awards during the Concurso Nacional Universitario.

At the risk of seeming too informal, I will say that Enza’s short stories possess the virtue of shaking the floors and also the walls for us. They leave us picking up ceramic and plaster fragments, after a trembling of 7 on the Richter scale, as though it were possible to put everything back in its place with Crazy Glue or Elmer’s. Through her writing, Enza deconstructs traditional imaginaries and manages to assert agency in substantially original spaces of the creation and reading of those very imaginaries. Cállate poco a poco and El bosque de los abedules materialize battlefields between primordial pulsations and ancestral prohibitions. Freud said that all behaviors present themselves provoked by desire and, precisely, in El bosque de los abedules we can observe how a machinery of desire constitutes itself in the territories of logos.

In “El bonsái de Macarena” we notice a particularly interesting use of the keys to the construction of the female subject in these postmodern times. The narrator transcends the trite recourse to feminine victimization, recovering it in an ironic tone, right at the moment when she has taken on the role of murderer.

Simone de Beauvoir proposed that all sexual phenomena contain an existential meaning. “El bonsái de Macarena” seems to project this hypothesis, desire is the true trigger for the characters’ actions.

In this short story the theme of transcendence is important. I can’t help recalling that Simone de Beauvoir also said that the phallus carnally represents transcendence. The allusion the protagonist makes to her lover’s “very little” penis could be a metaphor, then, for the impossibility of attaining transcendence that these characters suffer. This impossibility definitely ends up pushing them toward the territories of anguish, desperation and antisocial behavior.

In another vein, Mario Morenza’s La senda de los diálogos perdidos evidences an excellent use of humor and a sense of the absurd. His characters are inserted in their respective individual tragedies, barely separated by thin walls. Notwithstanding, Mario makes use of the recourse of parody to define infinite possibilities for pleasure. Tragedies end up becoming tragicomedies, without losing in this process their original and constitutive meaning. Maybe this is why all of us who’ve read La senda de los diálogos perdidos remember it with a complicit smile. Mario’s writing, at times profound, at others poetic, also has the great virtue of making us laugh.

Reading Mario is like going to the beach for a weekend: it’s a renovating and fresh experience.

In “Dos tazas de café antes del trigésimo paso” we find some clues regarding the poetics that sustains the book. The narrator comments: “I like to lean on the balcony and watch people go by, see their faces. See how they contort their features. The situation animates me. This activity, in some way, reminds me of the horse races. All the residents of Block 4 return and depart to their own races. Between those two categorical points that establish moments, there exist phenomena of conclusive character. A story. And in their bags or suitcases and purses they carry their fragmented destiny. Minute pieces with which they’ll build their dreams or end up destroying them. One can say I witness the openings and closings of work days.”

Effectively, the intertwined stories of the characters, often nameless, of Block 4, establish a fragmentary narrative sequence charged with emotiveness. From one of imagination’s balconies, Mario reconstructs the lives of characters that balance themselves between the crushing weight of the quotidian and the restorative hope of each setting sun.

In “Adán y Oto, siameses” Mario takes up once again the literary recourse of the double, tearing it from the kingdom of the fantastic and depositing it in the territories of the grotesque. The myth of the double has always reminded us of the fragility of our identities. This myth resignifies the dualism that dominates human thought: body and soul, good and evil, life and death.

Mario, in an interview he gave to a well-known website, affirmed that the situation of the country might have permeated the writing of this short story. Regardless, he declares that his intention was to create an homage to Jorge Luis Borges’s A Universal History of Infamy and Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas. Without intending to establish reductionist readings, it occurs to us that this story, beyond the effective splitting of the country of the Siamese, could have an interpretation of a political bent, one that’s not too evident and which is perhaps deeper: the avatar of those siblings that must remain together, against their will, because they share vital organs.

Undoubtedly, El bosque de los abedules and La senda de los diálogos perdidos enrich and revitalize Editorial Equinoccio’s catalog. With a paper hug, I celebrate the authors and their editors.




Translator’s Note: Enza García Arreaza’s El bosque de los abedules (2010) and Mario Morenza’s La senda de los diálogos perdidos (2008) are published by Editorial Equinoccio at the Universidad Simón Bolívar.




{ Dayana Fraile, presented at Cuentistas contemporáneos latinoamericanos, Universidad Simón Bolívar, Caracas, 23 October 2010 }

Recuérdame para no perderme / Luis Alberto Crespo

Remember me so I don’t get lost
Don’t get impatient in the brightness

Leave me on the shore
the thing nailed

Enlighten me with what brings you down

Lay me out over myself
only over myself

Place yourself as abyss

Abandon me
Let me go




{ Luis Alberto Crespo, Resolana, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }

Cuídame la desolación / Luis Alberto Crespo

Take care of my desolation
That I might listen to the family again
in the wire

And what’s my name
when I’m in black
and try to calm a rabbit’s heart

In the drizzle
wet
with that sad gold on my clothes




{ Luis Alberto Crespo, Resolana, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }

Maltrecho / Luis Alberto Crespo

Battered
by what I desire

What I would see was ending
in the mountain range

Still facing the extended
would remove the cross

The heat making me distant
the last one

I would wake up
with things on me

Horrible
with midday inside




{ Luis Alberto Crespo, Resolana, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }

Lo que creías fijo / Luis Alberto Crespo

What you thought was fixed
in your eyes doesn’t return

Hours and hours of clouds

Death
was drifting watching them
on the street

Time passes continues
over you who are blind
without knowing it




{ Luis Alberto Crespo, Resolana, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }

Entro / Luis Alberto Crespo

I enter
through the narrowest door

I speak to you
like that confinement

In the portrait that we are
in the middle of the hall

Where thorns
already ached from before

I know our headless names

I look for you with my finger
in the patio

And feel that eternity




{ Luis Alberto Crespo, Resolana, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }

Adelgazo de ir lejos / Luis Alberto Crespo

I grow thin from going far
Saying gone words

With no shadow to hear you

Beating the gate with the crown
Tilting my whole body in disgrace




{ Luis Alberto Crespo, Resolana, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }

La pared enseñaba su hendidura / Luis Alberto Crespo

The wall was showing its crack
in us

Where we were
no more water what to say

That white mouth
when we spoke of horses

Leaning on nothing
like in portraits




{ Luis Alberto Crespo, Resolana, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1980 }

La salva / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Salvo

A perfidious lover had submerged me in dishonor. Her discourse was occupying my thought with the image of an absurd race, in a proscribed vessel. I was raving in the hall of a cynical orgy.
     The whale hunters, venturing forth before Columbus and Vasco de Gama in the direction of the unknown countries, had not foreseen in their letters the place of deviation. The sea birds succumbed to fatigue on the masts and decks of my galley. I stopped at the foot of some inhuman cliffs, under a gaseous sky.
     In my memory I was wandering the passages of the Divine Comedy, where a certain star, signaled by Dante’s augural gaze, serves to set him on course amid the smoke of hell and over the mountain of purgatory.
     My journey was being carried out at the same time as the decadent orgy. I wanted to interrupt the boredom of the grave coastline, firing the prow canon. The crash reduced the house of infamous amusement to dust.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

Penitencial / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Penitential

The gentleman with a scarlet tunic, the same as his martyr effigy, aspires to entertain himself from anger by playing with a glove.
     In secret he hears the call of a total will and presumes the end of his greatness, oblivion in the naked crypt, save for the tapestry of a spider dejected in the calculation of eternity. One evening he has received, from a blind monk, a laughable crown of straw.
     The gentleman sets forth to meet with the prior of an austere religion and proposes to him the restlessness, the desire for withdrawal. Adversaries delight in spreading fallacious rumors and bring him back to the polemic of the world.
     Women and children lament the death of the inimitable gentleman on the morning of a day foretold, they censure the success of the pusillanimous squad and kiss the ground to divert the furies of vengeance. The black sky, mortified, oppresses the city and occasionally lets loose a warm rain.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

Victoria / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Victoria

Her white garb with silver lace suggested the stole of angels and the primitive gala of the iris. A simple crown, the branch of a millennial olive, covered her forehead. The diaphanous emerald eyes communicated the privilege of grace.
     The subtle traces of the countenance were attuned with those of a tacit form, which I guessed in the valley of wonder, by the light of a pluvial moon. One and another ghost, the one with the white garb and the one with the timid voice, looked alike in the neglect of the will, in devoted calm.
     I was concealing my childhood in a drowsy garden, church violets, Alhambra jasmines. I lived surrounded by visions and some serene virgins were reestablishing me from the stupor of an infinite evil.
     My fantasy was flying in a distance of history, arrests of El Cid and vows of Saint Bruno. I reached an epic view, on a supreme day, when my forehead declined over the damp earth of matutinal dew, trail of tears from purgatory. I saw the same ghost, the one with the timid voice and the one with the garb of white lily, armed with a crystal cross. His secret name was acclaimed by indefatigable archangels, in purple attire.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

La vida escandalosa de César Moro / César Moro

The Scandalous Life of César Moro

Disperse me in the rain or in the cloud of smoke from the torrents that pass
At the margins of the night in which we see ourselves after the running of the clouds
That reveal themselves to the eyes of the lovers who emerge
From their powerful castles of towers of blood and ice
To stain the ice scratch the leap of late returns
My friend the King brings me closer to his royal and royal tomb
Where Wagner stands guard by the door with the faithfulness
Of the dog gnawing the bone of glory
While intermittent and divinely fatal rains
Corrode the aerial streetcar haircut of relapsed seahorses
And murderers passing through the sublime terrace of apparitions
In the solemn carnivorous and bituminous forest
Where the strange passersby intoxicate their opened eyes
Beneath large catapults and elephantine ram heads
Suspended according to the taste of Babylon or Trastevere
The river that crowns your terrestrial apparition emerging from mother
Precipitates itself furious like a ray over the day’s vestiges
Fallacious crowding of medals of sponges of crossbows
A winged bull of significant happiness bites the breast or cupola
Of a temple that emerges in the ignominious light of day or amidst the rotten and light branches of the forest hecatomb
Disperse me in the flight of migratory horses
In the alluvion of dregs crowning the day’s longeval volcano
In the terrifying vision that pursues man at the approach of the astonishing hour among hours, midday
When the boiling ballerinas are about to be decapitated
And man pales in the terrifying suspicion of the definitive apparition carrying in its teeth the legible oracle as follows:

     “A pocket knife over the cauldron cuts through a pig hair brush of ultra-sensitive dimensions; at the day’s proximity the pigs are elongated until they touch twilight; when night approaches the pigs transform themselves into a dairy of modest and peasant appearance. Over the pocket knife a falcon flies devouring an enigma in the form of vapor condensation; sometimes it is a basket stuffed with animal eyes and love letters filled with a single letter; other times a laborious dog devours a cabin lit up from within. The absorbing darkness can be interpreted as an absence of thought provoked by the invisible proximity of a subterranean pond inhabited by turtles of the first magnitude.”

The wind rises over the royal tomb
Ludwig II of Bavaria awakens amid the debris of the world
And emerges to visit me bringing through the surrounding forest
A moribund tiger
The trees fly off to be seeds and the forest disappears
And covers itself with creeping fog
Myriads of insects now free deafen the air
At the step of the two most beautiful tigers in the world




La tortuga ecuestre (1938-1939)




{ César Moro, La tortuga ecuestre y otros textos, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976 }

Elaina / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Elaina

The virgin sleeps the invariable sleep in her glass coffin. A stone lamp illuminates the low relief of the passion in the nocturnal church. The trickle of the rain divides the roof tiles and disseminates a frail brush on the walls.
     The virgin sits up from where she lies, in the days of portents and threats. Her incoherent voice has revealed the wonders of another century, of the supernatural world, the relief of the souls of purgatory on Good Friday.
     The natives don’t dare deposit her in the heart of the Earth and admire how she passed from a happy youth to self-absorbed thought, to a mortal and conflicted affect. The mystical doctrine doesn’t consent to the excessive affliction toward creatures.
     The virgin of sleep suffers with the worries of those in love and she straightens them out on the path of remedy. I was living consumed by desperation and came across solace by staying on my knees at the foot of the glass coffin.
     I didn’t know about the virgin of sleep nor of that manner of health during the withered year’s days of rain, when the clouds would throw a cold gauze on the mountains. I discovered the church of the miracle and saw in the prostrated and humble attitude a requisite for finding jubilation, when the dawn of spring broke and within view of a message from the fairy swallow.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

La nave de las almas / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Ship of Souls

I barely recall the place of my absence. A column of fire was illuminating the boreal clime. I had become lost in a desert of snow.
     The voice of my distress was rising to the clouds of pale amber.
     Your ghost came from the distance, in the taciturn ship, guided by the flight of a wounded albatross. Your actual life had slid, centuries before, in a graceful city. Shakespeare has dreamed the chimerical gardens, where the gentlemen and ladies of importance persist in winning the honor of acuteness or decant the merits of love with citations and arguments from Plato. Cypresses and laurels demand the virginal sky.
     I had conceived around your image an inhuman legend and pointed to your passage from this world in the nocturnal darkness. I furtively deposited some violets on your casket, those flowers with your very name.
     You took me, as a reward for my fidelity, to the vague country of your home, to a horizon of reverie. I attended the somnambulist parade of your sisters, heroines of the tragedy, and fell face down at the sight of pain, under a vengeful bird’s flapping wings, condemned to the fate of Satan.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

El alumno de Violante / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Violante’s Student

An enigmatic cypress dominates the horizon of my childhood.
     I preferred the vespertine ecstasy, I would retire from the village and willingly lose myself in the reserve of the hills. An invisible power would move me toward the presence of some sepulchers, to discover serenity and hope in the countenance of marble images.
     A clement shade, different from the figures of fear, would shroud me with its kindness and situate me on the path home. Its face was announcing a celestial pain and the cypress of its refuge was emanating a cithara’s lament.
     I was submerging myself in a dream free of visions and reaching an exact oblivion.
     An attentive virgin guided my first years with the example of her faculties. Her fugitive canto would awake jubilation in the sylphs of the air. Her easy fingers would injure a mandolin from France.
     Her candid voice was alienating my senses when it covered the episodes from a collection of ballads. She was conjuring the clement shadow from the limbo of my dreams and surrounding it with the garb of a legendary ballad.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

La ciudad / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The City

I lived in an unhappy city, divided by a dull river, trailing toward the sunset. Its banks, of immutable trees, were obstructing the light of a troublesome sky.
     I was awaiting the close of the ambiguous day, interrupted by the yellow sage trees. I was leaving my diverted house in demand of the afternoon and its glimmers.
     The declining sun was painting the city of the profaned ruins.
     The birds would pass by to repose further on.
     I was feeling the obstacles and latches of an impeded life. The ghost of a woman, image of bitterness, was following me with its infallible somnambulant steps.
     The sea was startling my absorption, undermining the earth in the night’s secret. The breeze was disorganizing the sandbanks, blinding the shrubs of a low coastline, ending in an extenuated flower.
     The city, afflicted by time and received in a bend of the continent, kept secular customs. It counted with water carriers and beggars, versed in proverbs and advice.
     The most skilled of all of them was pressing my attention referring to the similarity of an Indian apologist. He managed to accelerate the course of my thought, turning my accord inside out.
     The pre-dawn aura was forcibly refreshing my fevered head, exiling the flock of a confused dream.




La torre de Timón (1925)

Translator’s Note: An English version of this poem translated by Cedar Sigo and Sara Bilandzija can be read at the Project for Innovative Poetry blog (scroll down).




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

Azucena / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

White Lily

The solitary one entertains his glance through the sky in a lull from his despair. He thanks the effluvium of a planet inspiring himself in a few lines from the Divine Comedy. He recognizes, from the roof, the premonition of a languid morning.
     Fear has demolished grandeur and obstructed the doors and windows of his lucid home. A rider with an immobile mask faithfully returns from an unreal journey, amid the darkness, on top of a horse with a thick hulk, and he rests in an inviolable garden, seat of boredom. Sinister blue flowers, resembling the flabella of a remote liturgy, obfuscate the air, infiltrate delirium.
     The solitary one hears the fabric of his coffin in a secret of the Earth, dominion of evil. Death takes on the semblance of Beatrice in a chaotic dream of her troubadour.
     A maiden appears amidst the tenuous clouds, armed with the unconquered javelin, and captivates the glance of the solitary one. She arrives on the birth of the day of rewards, after the agonizing Friday, announced by a white elk, student of the celestial spring.




El cielo de esmalte (1929)




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

El escudero de Eneas, Il. 1,49 / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Aeneas’s Shield-Bearer
Il. 1,49

The events of the conflict safeguard the calm of Aeneas, the patient hero. He goes toward the greatest danger, where the voices of his own demand him.
     The smoke of the funerals rises to deface the summer’s red glow.
     The clamor of the combatants, dressed in metal, wounds the concave sky.
     The hero moves on foot, followed by a single shield-bearer. He occasionally feels the graze of a missile or a stone.
     He suddenly gathers a squadron of enthused soldiers and launches it onto a throng of islanders, scattered in the middle of celebration over a recent success.
     The enemies, raised amid the sea’s pounding, resist and die with weapons in their hands, before repairing their disorder.
     Aeneas confirms the ferocious companions, attentive to the fate of the native city, in the hope of a superior destiny, free from the contingencies of the present war.
     His discourse dominates the protest of the vanquished.
     The gesture of his hand, always exempt of blood, announces the design of a city, a shoal against the waves of time, terminus and relief of the world’s avenues. Over the sumptuous palaces, a troop of consecrated birds flies perpetually, joined in the form of a triangle or an arc; and its ruins, on the day of final decadence, will not nourish the bonfire, where the victor’s orgy will warm itself.
     The hero comforts his friends and moves away until he loses himself in the scalding horizon.
     The shield-bearer turns to look, and fires from the edge of the field.
     The contenders marvel at the luminous cape and the terrifying sound of his arrows.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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