XX
Sadness
dawns
in the door to the street.
Not in vain
have I been so cruel,
not in vain
do I wish
each afternoon,
for death to be simple and clean
like a shot of warm anise
or a slap whose echo is lost in the mountain.
El invierno próximo (1975)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
11.30.2012
11.29.2012
XI / Miyó Vestrini
XI
Enter the vigil of delirium,
the slow scream,
the fearsome resentment.
And though I may not recognize you then
I’ll wait
for the glass box with the nightingale inside,
the weeping that explodes under the aloe plants,
an evening,
anything that might bring us together,
cheerfully.
El invierno próximo (1975)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
Enter the vigil of delirium,
the slow scream,
the fearsome resentment.
And though I may not recognize you then
I’ll wait
for the glass box with the nightingale inside,
the weeping that explodes under the aloe plants,
an evening,
anything that might bring us together,
cheerfully.
El invierno próximo (1975)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
11.28.2012
IX / Miyó Vestrini
IX
The country, we’d say
we put it on tables,
we carried it everywhere,
the country needs
the country waits,
the country tortures,
the country will be,
they execute the country,
and we’d be there in the afternoons
waiting for some mourner
to tell him
don’t be an idiot
think about the country.
El invierno próximo (1975)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
The country, we’d say
we put it on tables,
we carried it everywhere,
the country needs
the country waits,
the country tortures,
the country will be,
they execute the country,
and we’d be there in the afternoons
waiting for some mourner
to tell him
don’t be an idiot
think about the country.
El invierno próximo (1975)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
11.27.2012
III / Miyó Vestrini
III
Don’t feel the port
or the ink
or the river
or the good wine
or the leaves growing under the ice
or the confusing city streets,
don’t let yourself go:
attend this long ceremony on the boat deck
special ceremony of the people
who want to know what next winter will be like.
El invierno próximo (1975)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
Don’t feel the port
or the ink
or the river
or the good wine
or the leaves growing under the ice
or the confusing city streets,
don’t let yourself go:
attend this long ceremony on the boat deck
special ceremony of the people
who want to know what next winter will be like.
El invierno próximo (1975)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
11.26.2012
Un día de la semana II / Miyó Vestrini
One Weekday II
Squeezing his eyelids to avoid the midday light,
was never a problem for Modigliani.
The truth is always waiting for us
at the bottom of a bottle,
he warned,
long before he stretched his women’s necks.
It’s degrading to eat in bed,
but I do it,
at the risk of losing el flaco’s company.
The bed unmade,
the book by Lévi-Strauss and Didier,
the chewable paper napkin,
how many years hanging around here?
On my stomach to watch TV,
facing the ceiling to be loved,
elbow folded for sleep.
Life doesn’t form part of the great laws of the universe:
I’m a solitary chance
in this space of rituals and penumbra.
Now I escape to the perspective of those climbing onto a bus
or pissing behind a tree.
A chimpanzee eating a turkey and mustard sandwich.
It’s April and the myopic eyes blink
in successive delicious messages:
pomo, party, babes, gays, borderline.
Living cells that unknot me and tell my memory.
I touch my little thing, tidy from so much iodized soap,
washed
and thoroughly washed again.
Island smelling of iodine.
Little thing disposed to the entrance of fungus, herpes, bacteria,
bugs, foams, plastics, coppers and rubbers.
Come here, kid.
El flaco caresses me with a paternal hand:
don’t reprimand your little thing,
it’s much more useful than art.
The boy with the violin starts up again over my ceiling.
I can see him, chubby cheeks, buck teeth,
smelling of swollen polyps and tonsils,
an enormous callus on his chin.
And there he goes with the scales,
nasal,
raspy,
idiotic.
Fuck, screams the Spaniard on the fifth floor.
My mother would say to me,
tu me fais grincer les dents,
nothing to do with the
tu me tue, tu me fais du bien,
from Hiroshima mon amour.
Anyways, long before,
Shakespeare had determined
that every man ends up killing what he loves.
The folds of the sheets hurt my back
just like the horoscope announced this morning.
Tidy and full refrigerator.
The beer can with its frosted edges
and the ham wrapped in aluminum foil.
A matter of values:
Walkman, gastronomy, Zen, cool, humanism,
no one will be defrauded by manipulative practices.
I choose the beer
and run to bed again.
I ask myself if the rights of man are truly
an ideology.
Fernando, the only alcoholic bartender who’s not retired,
speaks in rhymes:
the night is dark
and I don’t have my lark.
As I see it, he’s one of the few who live
human rights as morals.
I cup the pillow,
suck my finger,
and wait for el flaco to arrive.
There’s days like that.
Valiente ciudadano (1994)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
Squeezing his eyelids to avoid the midday light,
was never a problem for Modigliani.
The truth is always waiting for us
at the bottom of a bottle,
he warned,
long before he stretched his women’s necks.
It’s degrading to eat in bed,
but I do it,
at the risk of losing el flaco’s company.
The bed unmade,
the book by Lévi-Strauss and Didier,
the chewable paper napkin,
how many years hanging around here?
On my stomach to watch TV,
facing the ceiling to be loved,
elbow folded for sleep.
Life doesn’t form part of the great laws of the universe:
I’m a solitary chance
in this space of rituals and penumbra.
Now I escape to the perspective of those climbing onto a bus
or pissing behind a tree.
A chimpanzee eating a turkey and mustard sandwich.
It’s April and the myopic eyes blink
in successive delicious messages:
pomo, party, babes, gays, borderline.
Living cells that unknot me and tell my memory.
I touch my little thing, tidy from so much iodized soap,
washed
and thoroughly washed again.
Island smelling of iodine.
Little thing disposed to the entrance of fungus, herpes, bacteria,
bugs, foams, plastics, coppers and rubbers.
Come here, kid.
El flaco caresses me with a paternal hand:
don’t reprimand your little thing,
it’s much more useful than art.
The boy with the violin starts up again over my ceiling.
I can see him, chubby cheeks, buck teeth,
smelling of swollen polyps and tonsils,
an enormous callus on his chin.
And there he goes with the scales,
nasal,
raspy,
idiotic.
Fuck, screams the Spaniard on the fifth floor.
My mother would say to me,
tu me fais grincer les dents,
nothing to do with the
tu me tue, tu me fais du bien,
from Hiroshima mon amour.
Anyways, long before,
Shakespeare had determined
that every man ends up killing what he loves.
The folds of the sheets hurt my back
just like the horoscope announced this morning.
Tidy and full refrigerator.
The beer can with its frosted edges
and the ham wrapped in aluminum foil.
A matter of values:
Walkman, gastronomy, Zen, cool, humanism,
no one will be defrauded by manipulative practices.
I choose the beer
and run to bed again.
I ask myself if the rights of man are truly
an ideology.
Fernando, the only alcoholic bartender who’s not retired,
speaks in rhymes:
the night is dark
and I don’t have my lark.
As I see it, he’s one of the few who live
human rights as morals.
I cup the pillow,
suck my finger,
and wait for el flaco to arrive.
There’s days like that.
Valiente ciudadano (1994)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
11.25.2012
Horario / Miyó Vestrini
Schedule
What’d you do today?
I read the newspaper and didn’t recognize any friends.
I defrosted the freezer so the beer would
cool better.
I gave myself a bubble bath.
I dried my hair.
It doesn’t seem like you did that much.
I do many things and no one notices.
I can see myself at the bottom of the pots and pans
and on the kitchen floor.
But you didn’t go out. You promised you would.
I was at the bus stop.
I raised my hand and no one stopped.
You didn’t even read the book I bought you.
I didn’t have time.
You never have time.
Neither do you. And I don’t bug you by asking
what’d you do today?
I can just imagine how the hours pass in this house.
They pass,
believe me,
the pass.
Valiente ciudadano (1994)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
What’d you do today?
I read the newspaper and didn’t recognize any friends.
I defrosted the freezer so the beer would
cool better.
I gave myself a bubble bath.
I dried my hair.
It doesn’t seem like you did that much.
I do many things and no one notices.
I can see myself at the bottom of the pots and pans
and on the kitchen floor.
But you didn’t go out. You promised you would.
I was at the bus stop.
I raised my hand and no one stopped.
You didn’t even read the book I bought you.
I didn’t have time.
You never have time.
Neither do you. And I don’t bug you by asking
what’d you do today?
I can just imagine how the hours pass in this house.
They pass,
believe me,
the pass.
Valiente ciudadano (1994)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
11.24.2012
Té de manzanilla / Miyó Vestrini
Chamomile Tea
My friend,
el chino,
wrote once about how women sit
and walk
after they’ve made love.
We never got to argue the point
because he died like a fool,
victim of a cardiac arrest cured with camomille tea.
Had we done so,
I would have told him that the only good thing about making love
are the men who ejaculate
without resentment,
without fear.
And that after doing it,
no one wants to sit down
or walk.
I named an old African palm tree planted
next to the pool at my apartment after him.
Each time I have a drink,
and I greet him,
he shakes his leaves terribly,
a sign that he’s furious.
He told me once:
one’s life is an immense happiness
or an immense anger.
I’m faithful to my childhood dreams.
I believe in what I do,
in what my friends do,
and in what everyone who’s like me does.
Sometimes we’re alone
until very late,
talking about the worms that harass him
and the terrible heat he feels every day
in that sand and dryness.
He hasn’t changed:
starving,
dispossessed,
he can sit down and befriend Mallarmé.
Lautréamont accompanied us one night
and said el chino was right:
poetry should be made by everyone.
And the others arrived:
Rubén Darío leading in Nicaragua,
Omar Khayyam with his festivities,
Paul Éluard bring pairs of lovers together.
Between all of us,
we submerged el chino in the pool, under the full moon,
and he was happy
like when he had a river,
some birds,
a kite.
Now he’s pissed off again,
because people bring him flowers
while he’s trying to scare off the cockroaches.
He wanted to be buried in Helsinki,
under eternal snows.
He went around the world,
passing through London where a woman waited for him,
and on his way back,
he drank camomille tea.
He,
who loved the shadows so much,
could no loner stay up all night.
Lucid and very hypocritical,
he had a horrible fear of dying in bed.
I know,
because he wrote me on a little piece of paper,
that the phrase he liked most was by David Cooper:
the bed is the laboratory of sleep and love.
Valiente ciudadano (1994)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
My friend,
el chino,
wrote once about how women sit
and walk
after they’ve made love.
We never got to argue the point
because he died like a fool,
victim of a cardiac arrest cured with camomille tea.
Had we done so,
I would have told him that the only good thing about making love
are the men who ejaculate
without resentment,
without fear.
And that after doing it,
no one wants to sit down
or walk.
I named an old African palm tree planted
next to the pool at my apartment after him.
Each time I have a drink,
and I greet him,
he shakes his leaves terribly,
a sign that he’s furious.
He told me once:
one’s life is an immense happiness
or an immense anger.
I’m faithful to my childhood dreams.
I believe in what I do,
in what my friends do,
and in what everyone who’s like me does.
Sometimes we’re alone
until very late,
talking about the worms that harass him
and the terrible heat he feels every day
in that sand and dryness.
He hasn’t changed:
starving,
dispossessed,
he can sit down and befriend Mallarmé.
Lautréamont accompanied us one night
and said el chino was right:
poetry should be made by everyone.
And the others arrived:
Rubén Darío leading in Nicaragua,
Omar Khayyam with his festivities,
Paul Éluard bring pairs of lovers together.
Between all of us,
we submerged el chino in the pool, under the full moon,
and he was happy
like when he had a river,
some birds,
a kite.
Now he’s pissed off again,
because people bring him flowers
while he’s trying to scare off the cockroaches.
He wanted to be buried in Helsinki,
under eternal snows.
He went around the world,
passing through London where a woman waited for him,
and on his way back,
he drank camomille tea.
He,
who loved the shadows so much,
could no loner stay up all night.
Lucid and very hypocritical,
he had a horrible fear of dying in bed.
I know,
because he wrote me on a little piece of paper,
that the phrase he liked most was by David Cooper:
the bed is the laboratory of sleep and love.
Valiente ciudadano (1994)
{ Miyó Vestrini, Todos los poemas, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1994 }
11.22.2012
Te he seguido... / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen
I have followed you...
I have followed you like the days pursue us
With the certainty of leaving them behind along the way
Of one day distributing their branches
On a sunny morning of open pores
Swinging from body to body
I have followed you like we sometimes lose our feet
So that a new dawn might light up our lips
And then nothing can be denied
And then everything can be a small world rolling down stairs
And then everything can be a flower bending into itself over blood
And the oars sinking further into the auras
To stop the day and not let it pass
I have followed you like the years are forgotten
When the shore changes its appearance with every gust of wind
And the sea rises higher than the horizon
So as to not let me pass
I have followed you by hiding behind forests and cities
Wearing the secret heart and the sure talisman
Marching over each night with reborn branches
Offering myself to every gust like the flower lays out on the wave
Or the hairs that soften their tides
Losing my eyelashes in the stealth of dawns
When the winds rise and the trees and towers bend
Falling from murmur to murmur
Like the day sustains our steps
To then get up with the shepherd’s staff
And follow the floods that always separate
The vine that’s about to fall on our shoulders
And they carry it like a reed dragged by the current
I have followed you through a succession of sunsets
Placed on the display counters of stores
I have followed you softening myself with death
So that you wouldn’t hear my steps
I have followed you erasing my own glance
And silencing myself like the river when it approaches the embrace
Or the moon placing its feet where there’s no answer
And I have kept quiet as if words couldn’t fill my life
And I will have nothing else to offer you
I have kept quiet because silence puts the lips closer
Because only silence knows how to detain death at the threshold
Because only silence knows how to give itself to death without reservation
And I follow you like that because I know just beyond you won’t pass
And in the rarefied sphere the bodies fall just the same
Because in me you’ll find the same faith
That makes the night tirelessly follow the day
Since eventually it will grab it and won’t release it from its teeth
Since eventually it will stretch it out
Like death stretches out life
I follow you like ghosts stop being such
With the relief of seeing you tower of sand
Sensible to the slightest breath or oscillation of the planets
But always on foot and never further
Than on the other side of the hand
Abolición de la muerte (1935)
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }
I have followed you like the days pursue us
With the certainty of leaving them behind along the way
Of one day distributing their branches
On a sunny morning of open pores
Swinging from body to body
I have followed you like we sometimes lose our feet
So that a new dawn might light up our lips
And then nothing can be denied
And then everything can be a small world rolling down stairs
And then everything can be a flower bending into itself over blood
And the oars sinking further into the auras
To stop the day and not let it pass
I have followed you like the years are forgotten
When the shore changes its appearance with every gust of wind
And the sea rises higher than the horizon
So as to not let me pass
I have followed you by hiding behind forests and cities
Wearing the secret heart and the sure talisman
Marching over each night with reborn branches
Offering myself to every gust like the flower lays out on the wave
Or the hairs that soften their tides
Losing my eyelashes in the stealth of dawns
When the winds rise and the trees and towers bend
Falling from murmur to murmur
Like the day sustains our steps
To then get up with the shepherd’s staff
And follow the floods that always separate
The vine that’s about to fall on our shoulders
And they carry it like a reed dragged by the current
I have followed you through a succession of sunsets
Placed on the display counters of stores
I have followed you softening myself with death
So that you wouldn’t hear my steps
I have followed you erasing my own glance
And silencing myself like the river when it approaches the embrace
Or the moon placing its feet where there’s no answer
And I have kept quiet as if words couldn’t fill my life
And I will have nothing else to offer you
I have kept quiet because silence puts the lips closer
Because only silence knows how to detain death at the threshold
Because only silence knows how to give itself to death without reservation
And I follow you like that because I know just beyond you won’t pass
And in the rarefied sphere the bodies fall just the same
Because in me you’ll find the same faith
That makes the night tirelessly follow the day
Since eventually it will grab it and won’t release it from its teeth
Since eventually it will stretch it out
Like death stretches out life
I follow you like ghosts stop being such
With the relief of seeing you tower of sand
Sensible to the slightest breath or oscillation of the planets
But always on foot and never further
Than on the other side of the hand
Abolición de la muerte (1935)
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }
11.21.2012
Sirgadora de las nubes... / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen
Tracker of the clouds...
Tracker of the clouds dragged along by your hair
In the lifted silence of two parallel seas
And each limbo forged with your new glances
And each hope free to stir
Marshes and brambles to find the pearls
Covered by seven admirable palms by lozenges
Something else to not call you risky among the fates
The fears gathered the hopes born
The smiles deployed the tassels unwrapped
The teeth flowered the tears tinkling
Amid a crackling of fire against music by a girl against dream
The squealing happiness of seeing you girl and girl
Crashing soft little plates like hands
Trumpets of listen to me because I don’t respond
Under the shadow of birds and golden skies
And tears grown from carrying in their globe
The amorous accords of inaudible joys
According to a growing rumor of waves of rags
Amid large petals more than human stature
And bees sipping from our lips
Like this so as to not understand a curtain between each kiss
The marbles for the doves of grace exhausted
A few cypresses somewhat destined for the other sky
Going around without exhaustion without dropping the glass
A spout fanned by brilliants
Some spinning tops scratched revealing the tides of their hearts
A silk threaded from the honey of your lips
A few birds losing themselves in your hair
Support for the cold your forehead complete crystal
And a cloud stretched out beside trembling silence
Cadence after cadence of eyelids closed after eyelids
In the balanced barques some solitary hands
The auras dispersed with breath from the rivers
And other liquid hands to find ourselves blindly
And something like heads rolling down stairs
And something like fruit rising from circle to circle
To the pleasures the rainbows the breezes trespassing our foreheads
Carefully giving up words and lifting rivers
There were so many nests of sweetness and silence between our mouths
Between our hands such toil to settle in one
The world looked better in your eyes
Bigger and heavier with lilies
Stretched out like a dream or a cloud
The oysters cling to the walls of your dream
The pearls falling from your hands like words
This is how I always see you abandoned on a laughing shore
Amid scarps bathed in our hesitant coins
More fragile girl more fragile than your portrait in the water
Or than you yourself soaring to the clouds
Or than you yourself stretched out in my eyes
The pearls of love counted by your hands were growing like words
O flowers of your laughing tree
O silence of your hands charged with a heavy world of lilies
Abolición de la muerte (1935)
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }
Tracker of the clouds dragged along by your hair
In the lifted silence of two parallel seas
And each limbo forged with your new glances
And each hope free to stir
Marshes and brambles to find the pearls
Covered by seven admirable palms by lozenges
Something else to not call you risky among the fates
The fears gathered the hopes born
The smiles deployed the tassels unwrapped
The teeth flowered the tears tinkling
Amid a crackling of fire against music by a girl against dream
The squealing happiness of seeing you girl and girl
Crashing soft little plates like hands
Trumpets of listen to me because I don’t respond
Under the shadow of birds and golden skies
And tears grown from carrying in their globe
The amorous accords of inaudible joys
According to a growing rumor of waves of rags
Amid large petals more than human stature
And bees sipping from our lips
Like this so as to not understand a curtain between each kiss
The marbles for the doves of grace exhausted
A few cypresses somewhat destined for the other sky
Going around without exhaustion without dropping the glass
A spout fanned by brilliants
Some spinning tops scratched revealing the tides of their hearts
A silk threaded from the honey of your lips
A few birds losing themselves in your hair
Support for the cold your forehead complete crystal
And a cloud stretched out beside trembling silence
Cadence after cadence of eyelids closed after eyelids
In the balanced barques some solitary hands
The auras dispersed with breath from the rivers
And other liquid hands to find ourselves blindly
And something like heads rolling down stairs
And something like fruit rising from circle to circle
To the pleasures the rainbows the breezes trespassing our foreheads
Carefully giving up words and lifting rivers
There were so many nests of sweetness and silence between our mouths
Between our hands such toil to settle in one
The world looked better in your eyes
Bigger and heavier with lilies
Stretched out like a dream or a cloud
The oysters cling to the walls of your dream
The pearls falling from your hands like words
This is how I always see you abandoned on a laughing shore
Amid scarps bathed in our hesitant coins
More fragile girl more fragile than your portrait in the water
Or than you yourself soaring to the clouds
Or than you yourself stretched out in my eyes
The pearls of love counted by your hands were growing like words
O flowers of your laughing tree
O silence of your hands charged with a heavy world of lilies
Abolición de la muerte (1935)
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }
11.20.2012
Amarrado a su sombra... / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen
Tied to its shadow...
Tied to its shadow the forest
Made way for the burning steps
Several fauns were carrying the creeks
A flute was playing in the antlers of the moon
The nymph on the slope was resting her arm
Summers of floral graces
Were weaving and unraveling the breezes
In the temples of the sleeping beauty
As if two children were playing with it
The world turned so many times
From one set of hands to others it was seen frequented
Of worms with top hats and dignity
The rivers wouldn’t dare
Touch the edge of the cities
From afar they would sing them and in a low voice
So as to not break the calm of the ramparts
Or disturb in the precinct
The clearest voice of the troubadours
There the sleeping beauty would appear covered in suns
Her burning steps would measure the floor as much as the sky
An olive tree shade under the eyes
Murmurs of water for hands
In the seas the eyes would always float
And this branch of laurel from horizon to horizon
Clinging to dreams raised from the sky
You haven’t seen a smile spin a landscape
The girl laughs with the sky spilling from her hands
Her eyelashes would give me more shade
Than a grove under the triple weight
Of leaves winds and skies
You haven’t seen a dawn open up
Over snows like a fountain
Lighting the sun and stars
A hand clearer than water and with its murmur
In this manner I’ve been run through from morning to night
By the frozen music the steel fingers
With new fringes her face wouldn’t rest
Now on the dahlia or the snowdrift
Now in the breeze or in the very heart of winter
And in the other hand the scepter of summer
And in the other foot the sun of autumn
The glances charged with gleams of sunny oceans
Crossing the Mediterranean the dolphins were rising
The turtles incrusted in the airs
The girl hadn’t woken yet
The flower was filling the spaces
Abolición de la muerte (1935)
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }
Tied to its shadow the forest
Made way for the burning steps
Several fauns were carrying the creeks
A flute was playing in the antlers of the moon
The nymph on the slope was resting her arm
Summers of floral graces
Were weaving and unraveling the breezes
In the temples of the sleeping beauty
As if two children were playing with it
The world turned so many times
From one set of hands to others it was seen frequented
Of worms with top hats and dignity
The rivers wouldn’t dare
Touch the edge of the cities
From afar they would sing them and in a low voice
So as to not break the calm of the ramparts
Or disturb in the precinct
The clearest voice of the troubadours
There the sleeping beauty would appear covered in suns
Her burning steps would measure the floor as much as the sky
An olive tree shade under the eyes
Murmurs of water for hands
In the seas the eyes would always float
And this branch of laurel from horizon to horizon
Clinging to dreams raised from the sky
You haven’t seen a smile spin a landscape
The girl laughs with the sky spilling from her hands
Her eyelashes would give me more shade
Than a grove under the triple weight
Of leaves winds and skies
You haven’t seen a dawn open up
Over snows like a fountain
Lighting the sun and stars
A hand clearer than water and with its murmur
In this manner I’ve been run through from morning to night
By the frozen music the steel fingers
With new fringes her face wouldn’t rest
Now on the dahlia or the snowdrift
Now in the breeze or in the very heart of winter
And in the other hand the scepter of summer
And in the other foot the sun of autumn
The glances charged with gleams of sunny oceans
Crossing the Mediterranean the dolphins were rising
The turtles incrusted in the airs
The girl hadn’t woken yet
The flower was filling the spaces
Abolición de la muerte (1935)
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }
11.19.2012
César Moro / Emilio Adolfo Westphalen
César Moro
Through a field of breadcrumbs the little hand of a clock extends itself
disproportionally
A pair of crab or serpent eyes alternately light up or turn off on it
Against the light emerges a smoke cloud of embroidered eyelashes
And disposed like a tower that simulates a woman who undresses
Other more familiar animals like the hippopotamus or the elephant
Find their path amid bone and meat
A web of medusa eyes impedes transit
Through the sand that extends like an abandoned hand
At each step an ivory ball says whether the air is green or black
If the eyes weigh the same on a scale crossed by hairs
And locked in an aquarium installed in the heights of a mountain
Sometimes stopping and sometimes tossing like a catapult
Pink or black or green cadavers of children at the eight extremes
Cadavers painted according to zebras or leopards
And that open up so beautifully like a box of trash when they fall
Spread out in the middle of a patio of pink marble
1935
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }
Through a field of breadcrumbs the little hand of a clock extends itself
disproportionally
A pair of crab or serpent eyes alternately light up or turn off on it
Against the light emerges a smoke cloud of embroidered eyelashes
And disposed like a tower that simulates a woman who undresses
Other more familiar animals like the hippopotamus or the elephant
Find their path amid bone and meat
A web of medusa eyes impedes transit
Through the sand that extends like an abandoned hand
At each step an ivory ball says whether the air is green or black
If the eyes weigh the same on a scale crossed by hairs
And locked in an aquarium installed in the heights of a mountain
Sometimes stopping and sometimes tossing like a catapult
Pink or black or green cadavers of children at the eight extremes
Cadavers painted according to zebras or leopards
And that open up so beautifully like a box of trash when they fall
Spread out in the middle of a patio of pink marble
1935
{ Emilio Adolfo Westphalen, Otra imagen deleznable..., México DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980 }
11.18.2012
Poema recortado / César Moro
Clipped Poem
For the first time
thirteen fugitives
remember
HEROINES
tree leaves
ancient women
THE UNKNOWN AIRMEN
completely inoffensive
crackling
From 61 to 65 years old
I will not die of pneumonia
Crested tulips
some crimpers to curl
A REVOLVER
Apollo and a fig tree
a venomous flower
an olive tree
A CLOCK
a hill full of pockets
a cup
a laurel
a chord
a parrot
one on top
four slight wheels
A COW
the golden West
A leather overcoat
poplar and beech trees
a rag soaked in alcohol
a warrior without a sword
an elephant
three common dancers
a willow tree
a hand in the shade
a Bulgarian photograph
a bucket of water
a doble prism of spar from Iceland
a wagon
the exact reproduction of a drawing as small as we’d like
a PROBABLE photograph
a small room
a laiza of selenium
in a basket
TWO RINGS
a cancer of the mouth
accompanied by pure and delicious victuals
a flask with flint spouts
a young lady with a revolver
dough that’s too dry
semi-crystalized dry dough
dough that’s too big
AND THE STARS OF OPERA UNANIMOMOUSLY
warm up
dreams
{ César Moro, La tortuga ecuestre y otros textos, ed. Julio Ortega, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976 }
For the first time
thirteen fugitives
remember
HEROINES
tree leaves
ancient women
THE UNKNOWN AIRMEN
completely inoffensive
crackling
From 61 to 65 years old
I will not die of pneumonia
Crested tulips
some crimpers to curl
A REVOLVER
Apollo and a fig tree
a venomous flower
an olive tree
A CLOCK
a hill full of pockets
a cup
a laurel
a chord
a parrot
one on top
four slight wheels
A COW
the golden West
A leather overcoat
poplar and beech trees
a rag soaked in alcohol
a warrior without a sword
an elephant
three common dancers
a willow tree
a hand in the shade
a Bulgarian photograph
a bucket of water
a doble prism of spar from Iceland
a wagon
the exact reproduction of a drawing as small as we’d like
a PROBABLE photograph
a small room
a laiza of selenium
in a basket
TWO RINGS
a cancer of the mouth
accompanied by pure and delicious victuals
a flask with flint spouts
a young lady with a revolver
dough that’s too dry
semi-crystalized dry dough
dough that’s too big
AND THE STARS OF OPERA UNANIMOMOUSLY
warm up
dreams
{ César Moro, La tortuga ecuestre y otros textos, ed. Julio Ortega, Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1976 }
11.16.2012
Under the Enamel Sky: On Translating José Antonio Ramos Sucre
[Francisco Maduro Inciarte, "Letras y tiempos", Liceo Andrés Bello, Caracas]
Revised version of a talk given at One Makes Many: A Conference of Poetic Interactions, in the panel “Latin America (in Translation),” with Steve Dolph, Laura Jaramillo and Carlos Soto Román, on 11 November 2011 at Duke University.
Although José Antonio Ramos Sucre is a central figure in Venezuelan letters, and his work has been published in Mexico, Spain, Portugal and France, he didn’t exist in English until very recently. My translation of his poetry into English, José Antonio Ramos Sucre: Selected Works (University of New Orleans Press, 2012), is among the first. (1) I say that with astonishment and trepidation. I’d like to comment briefly on how specific places in Ramos Sucre’s work and life affect my translation of his poetry. In his texts Ramos Sucre created autonomous zones far removed from his immediate surroundings in Venezuela. For Ramos Sucre, the poem exists primarily in the realm of the book, removed from the physical world. But as his translator, my research in two Venezuelan cities has been invaluable.
Origins
Ramos Sucre’s short life was picturesque enough for the poet Cedar Sigo to remark that he is the “Venezuelan Rimbaud.” Born to an aristocratic family in the coastal city of Cumaná in 1890, he was a direct descendant of the revolutionary Antonio José de Sucre, one of the founding fathers of Venezuelan independence.
In 1900 he was sent to the nearby city of Carúpano to live with his uncle, a cruel and strict priest who forced Ramos Sucre to stay at home after school and study, isolated from his classmates and friends. The poet remarked in a letter to his younger brother Lorenzo in 1929: “Carúpano was a prison. Father Ramos completely ignored the consideration a child requires. He would incur in a stupid severity for trivial reasons. That’s why I feel no affection toward him. I would spend days and days without going out into the street and I would then be assaulted by fits of desperation and spend hours laughing and crying at the same time.” (2) However, his uncle had a substantial library and it was there that Ramos Sucre developed his passion for literature.
In 1911 he moved to Caracas to study at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. He worked as a teacher and as a translator for the Foreign Ministry. It was in Caracas that the legend now surrounding Ramos Sucre began to take shape. His texts were unlike anything else in Venezuelan literature, with their elegant erudition and dark narratives. They were ostensibly prose poems, but also hybrid objects that incorporated elements from poetry, fiction, non-fiction and aphoristic writing. He suffered from anxiety, depression and an insomnia that would torment him throughout most his short life. The poet Fernando Paz Castillo (1893-1981) recalled accompanying his former teacher during his nightly walks throughout Caracas. Ramos Sucre used these nocturnal walks to combat his sleeplessness. Paz Castillo remembered how Ramos Sucre once confided to him: “This insomnia will end up killing me.”
[Photo by Manrique y Co. Caracas, c. 1920s]
Ramos Sucre self-published all five of his books, beginning with the compilation of articles, aphorisms and prose poems called Trizas de papel [Paper Shreds] in 1921. In 1923 he published an essay on the Venezuelan travels of the German scientist Alexander von Humboldt, Sobre las huellas de Humboldt [On Humboldt’s Trail]. In 1925 La torre de Timón [Timon’s Tower] appeared, which includes his previous two books alongside new work. 1929 saw the publication of Las formas del fuego [The Forms of Fire] and El cielo de esmalte [The Enamel Sky]. Many of his poems and essays first appeared in Venezuelan newspapers and magazines.
At the end of 1929 Ramos Sucre travelled to Europe to take up a position at the Venezuelan consulate in Geneva. His last months in Europe were torturous, as the insomnia and anxiety that plagued him for so many years began to deteriorate his mind and body. He spent time at sanatoriums in Hamburg and Northern Italy in an attempt to cure his insomnia, but these therapies were unsuccessful. On June 9th he turned 40 and upon returning home from work ingested an overdose of barbiturates. He died four days later on June 13th. His remains arrived in Venezuela on July 17th and he was buried in Cumaná several days later.
Ramos Sucre was aware of his work being ahead of its time. In another letter to his brother Lorenzo in 1929 he wrote about the importance of his writing: “The judgments on my two books have been very superficial. It’s not easy to write a good judgment about two books that are so untarnished or refined. The critic is required to have the knowledge I treasured in the antrum of my sufferings. And not everyone has had such an exceptional life. Only Leopardi, the poet of bitterness.” It was not until the 1960s, when Ramos Sucre’s work was championed by younger avant-garde poets, that he was acknowledged as a central figure of 20th century Venezuelan literature.
[Caracas, c. 1920s]
Inner Landscapes of the Book
The places identified in Ramos Sucre’s poems are not his immediate surroundings in early 20th century Venezuela. His landscapes are often mythological, and always highly stylized. They are self-consciously literary, and include ancient Greece, 19th century London, the pastoral countryside or remote Chinese provinces. Ramos Sucre’s landscapes are radical departures into the realm of the book, the page as its own privileged location, much like the zones Jorge Luis Borges would create in his short stories a few years later. As in Borges, Ramos Sucre’s work is often about the process of reading, and about discovering a critique of daily life within the pages of a book.
A crucial aspect of my translation process has been the chance to research Ramos Sucre’s life and work in Venezuela. In the summer of 2010, I spent several weeks doing bureaucratic errands in downtown Caracas for personal reasons, at various government offices. I took advantage of these errands to go for walks around the streets of downtown Caracas, the same ones Ramos Sucre would wander in his nighttime excursions. Downtown Caracas today is a jarring contrast of 19th century houses, faded art deco buildings and mid-20th century skyscrapers, alongside huge postmodern glass towers. The streets are clogged with the noise of pedestrians, traffic and motorcycles. While I was there, I visited the rare books room at the National Library of Venezuela, where I inspected the first editions of his books.
[First edition of El cielo de esmalte, w/ inscription by author]
I also travelled to Cumaná to visit the Casa Ramos Sucre, a community library and cultural center in the colonial district of that city. The house belonged to Ramos Sucre’s grandparents, and he and his family lived there during his adolescence. At the Casa Ramos Sucre, I spoke with the novelist Rubi Guerra, who in 2006 was awarded the Rufino Blanco Fombona Prize for his novel based on Ramos Sucre's final months in Europe, La tarea del testigo [The Task of the Witness](Caracas: Fundación Editorial El perro y la rana, 2007). Guerra told me about his research on Ramos Sucre and his family in Cumaná and offered to take me to his grave.
Ramos Sucre is buried in the once-fashionable Santa Inés cemetery that today stands dilapidated in an area Guerra referred to as The Triangle of Death, as it neighbors a local prison and the ruins of the abandoned San Antonio castle. The first thing we saw as we entered the cemetery gates was a group of people drinking aguardiente liquor under Cumaná’s intense noonday sun. There was an awkward moment when both our groups stared at each other in silence, until Guerra told them, “We’re here to see a relative.” To reach Ramos Sucre’s grave, we had to walk on top of gravestones and around mausoleums overgrown with weeds.
I could translate Ramos Sucre’s work without ever setting foot in Caracas and Cumaná. But seeing these places with my own eyes, feeling the intensity of the sun in Cumaná, noticing the dried flowers scattered on top of his faded mausoleum, observing the traces of buildings Ramos Sucre would have walked by in the 1920s, these details have provided me a physical context for understanding his work.
[With Rubi Guerra at Casa Ramos Sucre, Cumaná]
The Poet as Stranger
Among the books catalogued in Ramos Sucre’s personal library are several French editions of Charles Baudelaire. The figure of Baudelaire is a presence throughout Ramos Sucre’s work, particularly his notion of the poet as a wanderer for whom the landscape of city is a source of inspiration. Another connection between Baudelaire and Ramos Sucre is their devotion to antiquity as a living presence in their poetry. Walter Benjamin writes about the importance of the ancient world in Baudelaire’s work. (3) In The Arcades Project Benjamin finds a key to Baudelaire’s poetics: “It is very important that the modern, with Baudelaire, appear not only as the signature of an epoch but as an energy by which this epoch immediately transforms and appropriates antiquity. Among all the relations into which modernity enters, its relation to antiquity is critical.” This interpenetration of distant times and places in the present is what I find in Ramos Sucre’s texts, saturated as they are with references to classical Greek literature, ancient European mythologies and writers such as Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
Benjamin also mentions “Baudelaire’s estrangement from the age…” He cites Baudelaire’s comments from “Salon de 1859”: “Tell me in what salon, in what tavern, in what social or intimate gathering you have heard a single witty remark uttered by a spoiled child, a profound remark, to make one ponder or dream…? If such a remark has been thrown out, it may indeed have been not by a politician or a philosopher, but by someone of an outlandish profession, like a hunter, a sailor, or a taxidermist. But by an artist… never.” Benjamin sees these people of “outlandish profession” as versions of the “amazing travelers” evoked in Baudelaire’s poem “The Voyage”–in Roy Campbell’s 1952 translation:
Amazing travellers, what noble stories
We read in the deep oceans of your gaze!
Show us your memory’s casket, and the glories
Streaming from gems made out of stars and rays!
We, too, would roam without a sail or steam,
And to combat the boredom of our jail,
Would stretch, like canvas on our souls, a dream,
Framed in horizons, of the seas you sail.
What have you seen?
In Ramos Sucre we continuously come across the motif of travel, of locations far removed from Venezuela by time and physical distance. The explicitly artificial “enamel sky” of his final book is a symbol for the realms Ramos Sucre crafted in his literature. He was very conscious of his books as composing a single, long work. La torre de Timón opens with the poem “Prelude” and his final book ends with the poem “Omega,” creating a closed circle in which his life work progresses through distinct stages. The only text he ever identified with a specific place at the time of composition is the poem “Residue,” which was signed: “Geneva, March of 1930” and found among his belongings after his death.
My translations aim to introduce Ramos Sucre to an American audience as a precursor to Borges and a poet responsible for inspiring several generations of avant-garde Venezuelan writers in the 1950s and 1960s. Poets such as Francisco Pérez Perdomo (1930) and Juan Calzadilla (1931), who as members of the radical collective of artists and writers called El Techo de la Ballena [The Roof of the Whale], promoted Ramos Sucre’s writing. Pérez Perdomo published a selection of Ramos Sucre’s poetry with Monte Ávila Editores in Caracas in 1969, the first widely available anthology of his work. In his prologue, Pérez Perdomo writes: “Ramos Sucre must have been seen, without a doubt, as a challenge and an outrage. (…) But the strangeness of Ramos Sucre doesn’t manifest itself… in any pointed eccentricity but rather in a conscious uprooting.” I will have been successful in translating his poetry if I’m able to maintain a sense of that “conscious uprooting.”
Santa Inés Cemetery, Cumaná
Notes
(1) In 2008 Cedar Sigo and Sara Bilandzija published a chapbook of translations 5 Poems by José Ramos Sucre (Santa Cruz, CA: Blue Press).
(2) My translations of Ramos Sucre are based on two editions of his work: Obra completa, edited by José Ramón Medina with a chronology by Sonia García, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 and Obra poética, edited by Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio, Paris: Colección Archivos, 2001. The Venezuelan edition is available as a free PDF file from Biblioteca Ayacucho.
(3) All excerpts by Walter Benjamin taken from The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002).
Save for the portraits of Ramos Sucre, all photographs were taken by the author & Dayana Fraile in Cumaná and Caracas, Venezuela in 2010.
11.14.2012
La ilusión / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Illusion
I decided to overcome the resistance of that dissident official and impose on him my manner and conversation. He would often incur in a sudden and puerile rage. He had refused, under the steel of surgeons, the relief of anesthetics. He professed a religion of parsimony and pain.
We struggled day and night with the sinuous Japanese man. We Russians continued on the field and kept up the battle, preventing its conversion into defeat. An icon, of Byzantine mold and emphatic and bothersome rigidity, animated the sacrifice of the stricken heroes.
I solicited the company of the mad official during a repose from the fight, applied to the suppression of the dead. We admired the virtue of fire in dissipating the human remains. He came to mention, after a long circumlocution, his indifference to danger and his condemnation of life’s favors.
I knew the bizarre motive of his originality. He had visited, in the fulfillment of a mission, the zone of the Caucasus and saluted the peaks and canyons with the impetuous canticle of Lermontov. Amid the sculptural race he distinguished a young woman reclining on a deer and sheltered beneath an ostrich feather parasol. That woman, dressed in a royal suit, was singing the night of that same day, from her illuminated balcony. She closed the blinds from a Chinese junk when she felt a frequent glance upon herself.
The official would always stop at that moment in his tale and remain in suspense and with an empty stare, lost in the rumors of the cheerful Tiflis night.
I abstained from censuring the incoherent signs of his image. The soldier had registered, living in the secret, the most disparate civilizations and would join in a single memory the attire of a Lydian princess and the attitude of Diane de Poitiers sure of her invulnerable youth in a fascinating portrait.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
I decided to overcome the resistance of that dissident official and impose on him my manner and conversation. He would often incur in a sudden and puerile rage. He had refused, under the steel of surgeons, the relief of anesthetics. He professed a religion of parsimony and pain.
We struggled day and night with the sinuous Japanese man. We Russians continued on the field and kept up the battle, preventing its conversion into defeat. An icon, of Byzantine mold and emphatic and bothersome rigidity, animated the sacrifice of the stricken heroes.
I solicited the company of the mad official during a repose from the fight, applied to the suppression of the dead. We admired the virtue of fire in dissipating the human remains. He came to mention, after a long circumlocution, his indifference to danger and his condemnation of life’s favors.
I knew the bizarre motive of his originality. He had visited, in the fulfillment of a mission, the zone of the Caucasus and saluted the peaks and canyons with the impetuous canticle of Lermontov. Amid the sculptural race he distinguished a young woman reclining on a deer and sheltered beneath an ostrich feather parasol. That woman, dressed in a royal suit, was singing the night of that same day, from her illuminated balcony. She closed the blinds from a Chinese junk when she felt a frequent glance upon herself.
The official would always stop at that moment in his tale and remain in suspense and with an empty stare, lost in the rumors of the cheerful Tiflis night.
I abstained from censuring the incoherent signs of his image. The soldier had registered, living in the secret, the most disparate civilizations and would join in a single memory the attire of a Lydian princess and the attitude of Diane de Poitiers sure of her invulnerable youth in a fascinating portrait.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.13.2012
A propósito de Boyacá / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Regarding Boyacá
War is labor and the profession of the empirical, according to the calm verdict of Maurice de Saxe. The student of camps and combat easily breaks the wings of the ordinary and pedantic technician. Chance presides the hostilities, praises the conjecture, mocks the calculation.
The campaign presents surprising and diverse situations that succeed each other. Thus it requires instant cunning, brusque originality at each step. It defeats the preconceived theory, the lofty and meticulous erudition.
Events seek out and reveal the leader. In the course of prolonged struggles arise captains in young and arrogant flocks to diminish established renowns. The general often germinates in the meager and dreamy young man.
Enthusiasm brings forth the apt and intrepid conductors with the same certainty as calamitous time or the alternate course of long conflicts. This occurs when extraordinary circumstances overturn and spread the energy of a certain people, until that moment stuck in a ditch and hidden.
Enthusiasm resists knowledge and seizes victory in intricate and uncertain disputes. It incorporates nations and arms popular agitations that in the end submerge the Napoleonic powers. It rigorously demonstrates the insurmountable strength of the spirit, secret sediment of the world.
Otherwise there would be no way to explain the rough tenacity, the finally victorious resolve of the Venezuelan ancestor committed in the joust with the king’s party. The generals of youthful daring, the soldiers of coarse energy learned the never-written art of conquering in the school of afflicted campaigns, by means of the council of enthusiasm, as if by a deity.
The previous ability that any of them might have attained in the service of the rudimentary colonial militia wouldn’t have much value nor would the backward theory learned in dealings with peninsular leaders, if these are compared to refined practice amid the extermination, in the alternative of victory and disaster.
Anzoátegui is an honorable example in the ambitious, inexperienced and beardless phalanx. A lean young man with dreams who perceived the electrified effluvium of Europe, who consecrated all at once an entire life to great actions, in a vote of classic invoice. Days later, wrathful and frail soldier, immune to dejection in the campaign ten times begun. Eventually, inspired and youthful general, marked by struggle and by advice, who attends the disaster, takes charge of the retreat, hurries the results of victory. Stamped with melancholy by nearby death, he decides Boyacá with an archangel’s flaming sword.
Bolívar laments his death with proud and tearful words. He thankfully recalls the subaltern’s submission and the citizen’s probity. He would not exercise the prodigal indulgence nor the clement oblivion to honor him. He had effortlessly taken advantage of the abundance of that docile energy. He had seduced from the beginning the will of the ill-fated hero for important aims. He had gathered and harmonized, without hurting himself, that character with several others for the single endeavor. With the same object of driving back the night, the sagacious peasant combines the different virtues of the trees, when he breaks off their branches for a single torch.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
War is labor and the profession of the empirical, according to the calm verdict of Maurice de Saxe. The student of camps and combat easily breaks the wings of the ordinary and pedantic technician. Chance presides the hostilities, praises the conjecture, mocks the calculation.
The campaign presents surprising and diverse situations that succeed each other. Thus it requires instant cunning, brusque originality at each step. It defeats the preconceived theory, the lofty and meticulous erudition.
Events seek out and reveal the leader. In the course of prolonged struggles arise captains in young and arrogant flocks to diminish established renowns. The general often germinates in the meager and dreamy young man.
Enthusiasm brings forth the apt and intrepid conductors with the same certainty as calamitous time or the alternate course of long conflicts. This occurs when extraordinary circumstances overturn and spread the energy of a certain people, until that moment stuck in a ditch and hidden.
Enthusiasm resists knowledge and seizes victory in intricate and uncertain disputes. It incorporates nations and arms popular agitations that in the end submerge the Napoleonic powers. It rigorously demonstrates the insurmountable strength of the spirit, secret sediment of the world.
Otherwise there would be no way to explain the rough tenacity, the finally victorious resolve of the Venezuelan ancestor committed in the joust with the king’s party. The generals of youthful daring, the soldiers of coarse energy learned the never-written art of conquering in the school of afflicted campaigns, by means of the council of enthusiasm, as if by a deity.
The previous ability that any of them might have attained in the service of the rudimentary colonial militia wouldn’t have much value nor would the backward theory learned in dealings with peninsular leaders, if these are compared to refined practice amid the extermination, in the alternative of victory and disaster.
Anzoátegui is an honorable example in the ambitious, inexperienced and beardless phalanx. A lean young man with dreams who perceived the electrified effluvium of Europe, who consecrated all at once an entire life to great actions, in a vote of classic invoice. Days later, wrathful and frail soldier, immune to dejection in the campaign ten times begun. Eventually, inspired and youthful general, marked by struggle and by advice, who attends the disaster, takes charge of the retreat, hurries the results of victory. Stamped with melancholy by nearby death, he decides Boyacá with an archangel’s flaming sword.
Bolívar laments his death with proud and tearful words. He thankfully recalls the subaltern’s submission and the citizen’s probity. He would not exercise the prodigal indulgence nor the clement oblivion to honor him. He had effortlessly taken advantage of the abundance of that docile energy. He had seduced from the beginning the will of the ill-fated hero for important aims. He had gathered and harmonized, without hurting himself, that character with several others for the single endeavor. With the same object of driving back the night, the sagacious peasant combines the different virtues of the trees, when he breaks off their branches for a single torch.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.10.2012
El crimen de la esfinge / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Crime of the Sphinx
“Yes, gentlemen, it’s true,” Don Álvaro said emphatically, as he tossed a cigarette celebrated by suspicious advertisement as though it were insipid; the masses don’t err when they attribute to the leprous the calculus of proportioning to healthy men the chance for contagion.
He calmed for a moment his countenance and remained silent; he awaited the disapproval of the listeners to satisfy his mania for argument and polemic.
But his words then ceased to arouse ironic commentary and sharp debate. Since it was about the ill par excellence, all were overcome by a respect that participated in compassion and fear.
Thus, he was able to continue moved and theatrical:
“The many years have not been able to extinguish the memory I hold of my friend Julius. The gracious courtesy, the clear disposition, the body of a prince conciliated him the sympathy of men and the love of women. His wandering and arbitrary character was like an artist’s. He lived for intrepid action and the gallant bond.
One night he tenaciously followed down a narrow and ominous street the steps of a cloaked woman. After catching up to her, he confirmed his conjecture that she was young and beautiful. At first she displayed a haughty circumspection at being approached by the devoted young man. Saying she was married she easily imposed upon him that she would not uncover her face and that he never follow her home.
However, she agreed to show up at the house he had reserved for his diversions on a hidden street. A desolate and spacious house, of difficult rent, in whose patio a fateful pine stood straight. I go there with frequency to liven the memory of its most unfortunate inhabitant.
The insistence of that woman on remaining unknown at first flattered my friend’s novelistic spirit; then it aroused his curiosity. In order to resolve the enigma he determined to follow her home.
And that’s what he did hiding once and again. Night was falling when he saw her penetrate that building at whose name he trembled. We already know it was an ancient construction, of a threatening Spanish impression, more like a prison than a hospital, with eminent walls, as though one might protect oneself during turbulent and armed days. Around its walls the uproar of the indocile aborigines was once dissipated.
I didn’t expect to see him secluded there when I later attended the annual party, financed by the institution’s patrons.
After the service, the priest accused life of being a perfidious accomplice, rejected happiness as an unworthy buffoon, spoke of the earth as an ill mother.
A gust coming from the neighboring hills was purging the infected air, supplanting with rustic aromas the cloud of incense, shaking the candle flames and the tears of compassionate eyes.
The sermon evoked the phosphated air of the ossuary, the mute entrance to the sepulcher, when he invited me to a remote spot.
He preceded me with slow and thick feet that humiliated his tall bearing.
When we arrived at the expected place, where the shade projected by a wall saved us from the sun, I was able to notice that he wore one of his old elegant suits in a woeful state, in imitation of his fortune.
Then he spoke to me amid powerful sobs.”
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
“Yes, gentlemen, it’s true,” Don Álvaro said emphatically, as he tossed a cigarette celebrated by suspicious advertisement as though it were insipid; the masses don’t err when they attribute to the leprous the calculus of proportioning to healthy men the chance for contagion.
He calmed for a moment his countenance and remained silent; he awaited the disapproval of the listeners to satisfy his mania for argument and polemic.
But his words then ceased to arouse ironic commentary and sharp debate. Since it was about the ill par excellence, all were overcome by a respect that participated in compassion and fear.
Thus, he was able to continue moved and theatrical:
“The many years have not been able to extinguish the memory I hold of my friend Julius. The gracious courtesy, the clear disposition, the body of a prince conciliated him the sympathy of men and the love of women. His wandering and arbitrary character was like an artist’s. He lived for intrepid action and the gallant bond.
One night he tenaciously followed down a narrow and ominous street the steps of a cloaked woman. After catching up to her, he confirmed his conjecture that she was young and beautiful. At first she displayed a haughty circumspection at being approached by the devoted young man. Saying she was married she easily imposed upon him that she would not uncover her face and that he never follow her home.
However, she agreed to show up at the house he had reserved for his diversions on a hidden street. A desolate and spacious house, of difficult rent, in whose patio a fateful pine stood straight. I go there with frequency to liven the memory of its most unfortunate inhabitant.
The insistence of that woman on remaining unknown at first flattered my friend’s novelistic spirit; then it aroused his curiosity. In order to resolve the enigma he determined to follow her home.
And that’s what he did hiding once and again. Night was falling when he saw her penetrate that building at whose name he trembled. We already know it was an ancient construction, of a threatening Spanish impression, more like a prison than a hospital, with eminent walls, as though one might protect oneself during turbulent and armed days. Around its walls the uproar of the indocile aborigines was once dissipated.
I didn’t expect to see him secluded there when I later attended the annual party, financed by the institution’s patrons.
After the service, the priest accused life of being a perfidious accomplice, rejected happiness as an unworthy buffoon, spoke of the earth as an ill mother.
A gust coming from the neighboring hills was purging the infected air, supplanting with rustic aromas the cloud of incense, shaking the candle flames and the tears of compassionate eyes.
The sermon evoked the phosphated air of the ossuary, the mute entrance to the sepulcher, when he invited me to a remote spot.
He preceded me with slow and thick feet that humiliated his tall bearing.
When we arrived at the expected place, where the shade projected by a wall saved us from the sun, I was able to notice that he wore one of his old elegant suits in a woeful state, in imitation of his fortune.
Then he spoke to me amid powerful sobs.”
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.09.2012
El escritor venezolano José Balza, uno de los grandes olvidados del “boom” / Carmen Sigüenza
Venezuelan Writer José Balza, One of the Forgotten Greats of the “Boom”
Madrid, 9 Nov (EFE).- In the so called Latin American “Boom” not everyone had the visibility of Vargas Llosa, García Márquez or Fuentes, there were also great writers during that time that didn’t have the same editorial fortune or who preferred to live literature in another manner, such as the Venezuelan José Balza.
An essential writer in Spanish-language fiction, born in the delta of the Orinoco river, in 1939, little known outside literary circles, National Prize for Literature in his country, and with an oeuvre of fiction and as an essayist that for many make him someone who deserves the Cervantes Prize.
José Balza has come to Spain to participate in the international congress “The Canon of the Boom,” which is being celebrated in honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero.
A congress that concludes on the 10th and has been organized by the Vargas Llosa Seminar, which is directed by Juan José Armas Marcelo, who along with the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner himself has revealed in public his desire to recover the figure of Balza as a member of that phenomenon of the Latin American novel produced in the sixties, along with other forgotten figures, such as Jorge Ibargüengoitia or Adriano González León.
But Balza’s visit to Spain also coincides with the publication of a 500-page volume with a selection of his short stories, from the publishing house Paréntesis, with an extensive prologue by the author from Granada Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga, a writer who also participates in the congress, and to whom Balza has dedicated an essay and whose name forms part of the lecture the writer will give today in Valladolid with the title “Before, During and After: Meneses, Onetti, Pitol y Pérez Zúñiga.”
Balza, of whom Julio Cortázar said that his prose was “an experience at once deep and fascinating,” explains in an interview with EFE that the “Boom” was for him like a river into which he dove “like a scuba diver in fascinating, but unknown waters.”
“Because Borges, Onetti, Guillermo Meneses or Ramos Sucre —the predecessors— were known waters, but then that resonance that existed with Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Fuentes... the books that came to us from Seix Barral... it was fascinating,” he says.
But Balza, whose first book Marzo anterior came out in 1965, didn’t have that commercial visibility outside Latin America, and he doesn’t know why. “It might have to do with the personal attitude of each writer; in my case, I don’t know, it could be a feeling I’ve always had, not of being set apart, nor of solitude, but it’s as if literature existed somewhere else, and I approach it as if I were not myself, in another manner, from another shore,” he explains.
The author of Percusión, his greatest work, within an oeuvre so prolific with more than sixty titles of novels, short stories and essays, thinks that another forgotten writer is Sergio Pitol, “who turns even the most degrading matters into works of art and a traveler of the world who recovers unusual languages, even Russian ones.”
A great admirer of Cortázar and Octavio Paz, Balza’s work —his “narrative exercises”—, which is framed by nature and the river that witnessed his birth, is moved primarily by his concern for the human condition.
“I have a great curiosity for beings, I’m like a vampire, attentive to every living thing I see, and what I like is that a lot of people don’t realize what they’re living, of the conflict in which they live,” he explains.
In the prologue to the book of short stories, Pérez Zúñiga says that “reading Balza is a full experience. To not read him is to lose.”
Zúñiga assures that Balza stands out for a number of qualities that are rare in a single writer: “The impeccable invoice and sensuality of his language, the varied invention, the subtlety of his thought, the capacity to amalgamate by playing with structures and plots, to propose rhythms and inquietudes that come from experience, from dreams or from another dimension that is found in some invisible place in reality...”
Balza says that in the field of the essay today there remains much to be done, more than in the novel or in poetry. And that for him, concretely in the genre of the essay there remains plenty to be accomplished, because he has pending debts with the past of the Americas and with the present.
{ Carmen Sigüenza, La Información (Madrid), 9 November 2012 }
Madrid, 9 Nov (EFE).- In the so called Latin American “Boom” not everyone had the visibility of Vargas Llosa, García Márquez or Fuentes, there were also great writers during that time that didn’t have the same editorial fortune or who preferred to live literature in another manner, such as the Venezuelan José Balza.
An essential writer in Spanish-language fiction, born in the delta of the Orinoco river, in 1939, little known outside literary circles, National Prize for Literature in his country, and with an oeuvre of fiction and as an essayist that for many make him someone who deserves the Cervantes Prize.
José Balza has come to Spain to participate in the international congress “The Canon of the Boom,” which is being celebrated in honor of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero.
A congress that concludes on the 10th and has been organized by the Vargas Llosa Seminar, which is directed by Juan José Armas Marcelo, who along with the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner himself has revealed in public his desire to recover the figure of Balza as a member of that phenomenon of the Latin American novel produced in the sixties, along with other forgotten figures, such as Jorge Ibargüengoitia or Adriano González León.
But Balza’s visit to Spain also coincides with the publication of a 500-page volume with a selection of his short stories, from the publishing house Paréntesis, with an extensive prologue by the author from Granada Ernesto Pérez Zúñiga, a writer who also participates in the congress, and to whom Balza has dedicated an essay and whose name forms part of the lecture the writer will give today in Valladolid with the title “Before, During and After: Meneses, Onetti, Pitol y Pérez Zúñiga.”
Balza, of whom Julio Cortázar said that his prose was “an experience at once deep and fascinating,” explains in an interview with EFE that the “Boom” was for him like a river into which he dove “like a scuba diver in fascinating, but unknown waters.”
“Because Borges, Onetti, Guillermo Meneses or Ramos Sucre —the predecessors— were known waters, but then that resonance that existed with Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Fuentes... the books that came to us from Seix Barral... it was fascinating,” he says.
But Balza, whose first book Marzo anterior came out in 1965, didn’t have that commercial visibility outside Latin America, and he doesn’t know why. “It might have to do with the personal attitude of each writer; in my case, I don’t know, it could be a feeling I’ve always had, not of being set apart, nor of solitude, but it’s as if literature existed somewhere else, and I approach it as if I were not myself, in another manner, from another shore,” he explains.
The author of Percusión, his greatest work, within an oeuvre so prolific with more than sixty titles of novels, short stories and essays, thinks that another forgotten writer is Sergio Pitol, “who turns even the most degrading matters into works of art and a traveler of the world who recovers unusual languages, even Russian ones.”
A great admirer of Cortázar and Octavio Paz, Balza’s work —his “narrative exercises”—, which is framed by nature and the river that witnessed his birth, is moved primarily by his concern for the human condition.
“I have a great curiosity for beings, I’m like a vampire, attentive to every living thing I see, and what I like is that a lot of people don’t realize what they’re living, of the conflict in which they live,” he explains.
In the prologue to the book of short stories, Pérez Zúñiga says that “reading Balza is a full experience. To not read him is to lose.”
Zúñiga assures that Balza stands out for a number of qualities that are rare in a single writer: “The impeccable invoice and sensuality of his language, the varied invention, the subtlety of his thought, the capacity to amalgamate by playing with structures and plots, to propose rhythms and inquietudes that come from experience, from dreams or from another dimension that is found in some invisible place in reality...”
Balza says that in the field of the essay today there remains much to be done, more than in the novel or in poetry. And that for him, concretely in the genre of the essay there remains plenty to be accomplished, because he has pending debts with the past of the Americas and with the present.
{ Carmen Sigüenza, La Información (Madrid), 9 November 2012 }
11.08.2012
Cansancio / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Fatigue
Gratitude more than love is what I feel toward that adolescent who every afternoon, as I walk by her window, rewards my entire day’s overwhelming work with a smile. Her innocence has not been scared off by my sadness that transcends and is contagious; to calm my desperation, she responds to my gallantry with a timid silence, while wrapping herself in the most persistent of her sleepy glances, attenuating my own pain and what I’ve just picked up while passing through the slums of misery and vice.
Love is impossible when the future has fallen to the ground, and the illness of living intensifies like a sad and frozen rain. Only gratitude for the adolescent who protects me against disgrace for the rest of the day, following me with her eyes until I disappear amid the passersby on the interminable street. Gratitude as well for nature that at this time of year wears funereal attire, making me understand I’m not alone, that everything alive suffers, and everything lives.
Only she appears eluding the fatality of pain; the unconscious venture of childhood is prolonged over her youth; no sorrow has paralyzed the happy madness of her laughter, which belongs to her earliest years, though no freshness is as appalling in the hands of time as that manifestation of delight. One could say nature can’t resist her grace and lets itself be vanquished; when the solar light proclaims its victory, the night triumphs in her eyes, more luminous the denser it grows, like some tropical seas more phosphorescent the darker they are.
With her tranquil joy the affliction that traces furrows in my forehead and crushes my life does not come to pass. I would poison her innocence were I to initiate her in the urge to battle without respite, if in exchange for her compassion I made her understand how the anguish for murdered ambition asphyxiates. I will not aid against her well-being the hidden disgrace in every approaching moment that draws near like a wave swelling its roaring bosom. It is cruel to bring her forward in a few days to the disappointments that don’t postpone their arrival and the fierce thoughts that cling to sad foreheads in a mournful round.
With compassion I correspond her own, if from her quietude I move away with the sterile fear of life, fleeing from the smile that binds. Love is not worth more than this soft memory, that I will conserve from her apparition in the moments of my coarsest living. Plunging in time, her figure awakens tranquil affections, that are suitable for tired spirits; and now my own has only strength for that melancholic sympathy with which the traveler in repose contemplates the distant palm, lit up in the sun’s last goodbye, only companion throughout vast solitude.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Gratitude more than love is what I feel toward that adolescent who every afternoon, as I walk by her window, rewards my entire day’s overwhelming work with a smile. Her innocence has not been scared off by my sadness that transcends and is contagious; to calm my desperation, she responds to my gallantry with a timid silence, while wrapping herself in the most persistent of her sleepy glances, attenuating my own pain and what I’ve just picked up while passing through the slums of misery and vice.
Love is impossible when the future has fallen to the ground, and the illness of living intensifies like a sad and frozen rain. Only gratitude for the adolescent who protects me against disgrace for the rest of the day, following me with her eyes until I disappear amid the passersby on the interminable street. Gratitude as well for nature that at this time of year wears funereal attire, making me understand I’m not alone, that everything alive suffers, and everything lives.
Only she appears eluding the fatality of pain; the unconscious venture of childhood is prolonged over her youth; no sorrow has paralyzed the happy madness of her laughter, which belongs to her earliest years, though no freshness is as appalling in the hands of time as that manifestation of delight. One could say nature can’t resist her grace and lets itself be vanquished; when the solar light proclaims its victory, the night triumphs in her eyes, more luminous the denser it grows, like some tropical seas more phosphorescent the darker they are.
With her tranquil joy the affliction that traces furrows in my forehead and crushes my life does not come to pass. I would poison her innocence were I to initiate her in the urge to battle without respite, if in exchange for her compassion I made her understand how the anguish for murdered ambition asphyxiates. I will not aid against her well-being the hidden disgrace in every approaching moment that draws near like a wave swelling its roaring bosom. It is cruel to bring her forward in a few days to the disappointments that don’t postpone their arrival and the fierce thoughts that cling to sad foreheads in a mournful round.
With compassion I correspond her own, if from her quietude I move away with the sterile fear of life, fleeing from the smile that binds. Love is not worth more than this soft memory, that I will conserve from her apparition in the moments of my coarsest living. Plunging in time, her figure awakens tranquil affections, that are suitable for tired spirits; and now my own has only strength for that melancholic sympathy with which the traveler in repose contemplates the distant palm, lit up in the sun’s last goodbye, only companion throughout vast solitude.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.05.2012
Fulmen / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Fulmen
Through the old stained windows the light enters the office. It comes from the dark and clouded sky into this place of severe order and melancholy retreat. It remains suspended, without grazing the earth, like a beatific apparition.
The luminous ray crossed in its journey the humid and cloudy air. It seems to reach the objects it illuminates with the fatigue of a patient. One might say the impotent arrow of Apollo’s Homeric bow. Or maybe it predicts the future light of the aged sun.
While the diluted splendor shines, the forced and industrious work hums. The souls communicate with each other through the heavy silence, attention hardens the countenance, the task compels the strong arms and agile hands. The undaunted chests barely recover.
There’s no respite for diversion or thought. The boss wants the greatest benefit for his machines. He imposes on his men the serf’s doubled back as the only attitude. He holds for them the mistrust of a boatswain for his galley slaves.
He urges the sullen flock without respecting their tedium for the uniform and narrow life. He irritates their oppressed desires, that reach the tension of the thick cloud. He challenges danger until he sees death in the sinister idea that exalts the livid foreheads. He feels the traveler’s consternation before the grave sign of the ray, scourge of the arid peaks.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
Through the old stained windows the light enters the office. It comes from the dark and clouded sky into this place of severe order and melancholy retreat. It remains suspended, without grazing the earth, like a beatific apparition.
The luminous ray crossed in its journey the humid and cloudy air. It seems to reach the objects it illuminates with the fatigue of a patient. One might say the impotent arrow of Apollo’s Homeric bow. Or maybe it predicts the future light of the aged sun.
While the diluted splendor shines, the forced and industrious work hums. The souls communicate with each other through the heavy silence, attention hardens the countenance, the task compels the strong arms and agile hands. The undaunted chests barely recover.
There’s no respite for diversion or thought. The boss wants the greatest benefit for his machines. He imposes on his men the serf’s doubled back as the only attitude. He holds for them the mistrust of a boatswain for his galley slaves.
He urges the sullen flock without respecting their tedium for the uniform and narrow life. He irritates their oppressed desires, that reach the tension of the thick cloud. He challenges danger until he sees death in the sinister idea that exalts the livid foreheads. He feels the traveler’s consternation before the grave sign of the ray, scourge of the arid peaks.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.03.2012
La hija de Valdemar / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
Valdemar’s Daughter
The pines appear humble at the foot of the palace that was raised with the exaltation of birds of prey by arrogant men. Its hulk conceals for some time the ascent of the moon after it has evaded the ridge of the mountain. Its imposing fabrication depresses the bold project of the Norseman, who merely approaches in peace. It is in accord with the rugged place where the torrent falls from the silent peak, frequented by eagles, and where the mystery of the neighboring jungle reigns. It receives from the mournful past a tremendous majesty that the prattling elves disturb with the night’s favor.
The concealed flower in a grove is not consumed with more misfortune than the nobleman’s daughter in the modesty of the tower, very close to the restless clouds in the flight of the glacial winds. She delays amid the tempest with the daring of the bird in the vertex of a mast. She alleviates herself from the frozen clime, from the desert landscape, from the dark green tree with the spectacle of the snow. She then recalls the white and cold marble that guards the remains of her mother, at whose side she yearns to rest.
She barely enjoys the company of the familiar deer, whose branched head discourages the tender gala of the mountains and prefers the mirror of motionless lakes. She has him under her feet when she rouses the deep and tremulous anguish of the harp.
She sings the amorous winter lament that attains funereal nuptials with the earth; the wandering of the seafarers on the unpopulated sea; the threat of the deformed fish and the mass of the ice floe; the shipwrecked man’s fainting in the immense night; the white and fierce moon, a nuncio of death.
She escapes captivity by means of the mystical strength of the exalted and solitary song. She cultivates the divine attribute in the manner of the pious exercise that consumes life and hurries time. She awaits the final hour with a melodious hymn for deserving in such a manner the place that the country’s faith augurs amid the winged and errant souls. Fortunate hope, liberal rescue from hard confinement: once free and with the new form, she will follow the birds on the journey to the festive and musical South.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
The pines appear humble at the foot of the palace that was raised with the exaltation of birds of prey by arrogant men. Its hulk conceals for some time the ascent of the moon after it has evaded the ridge of the mountain. Its imposing fabrication depresses the bold project of the Norseman, who merely approaches in peace. It is in accord with the rugged place where the torrent falls from the silent peak, frequented by eagles, and where the mystery of the neighboring jungle reigns. It receives from the mournful past a tremendous majesty that the prattling elves disturb with the night’s favor.
The concealed flower in a grove is not consumed with more misfortune than the nobleman’s daughter in the modesty of the tower, very close to the restless clouds in the flight of the glacial winds. She delays amid the tempest with the daring of the bird in the vertex of a mast. She alleviates herself from the frozen clime, from the desert landscape, from the dark green tree with the spectacle of the snow. She then recalls the white and cold marble that guards the remains of her mother, at whose side she yearns to rest.
She barely enjoys the company of the familiar deer, whose branched head discourages the tender gala of the mountains and prefers the mirror of motionless lakes. She has him under her feet when she rouses the deep and tremulous anguish of the harp.
She sings the amorous winter lament that attains funereal nuptials with the earth; the wandering of the seafarers on the unpopulated sea; the threat of the deformed fish and the mass of the ice floe; the shipwrecked man’s fainting in the immense night; the white and fierce moon, a nuncio of death.
She escapes captivity by means of the mystical strength of the exalted and solitary song. She cultivates the divine attribute in the manner of the pious exercise that consumes life and hurries time. She awaits the final hour with a melodious hymn for deserving in such a manner the place that the country’s faith augurs amid the winged and errant souls. Fortunate hope, liberal rescue from hard confinement: once free and with the new form, she will follow the birds on the journey to the festive and musical South.
La torre de Timón (1925)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
11.01.2012
El protervo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The Perverse Man
We constituted an actual menace.
The clerics would designate us by means of circumlocutions when lifting their prayers, during the divine service.
We decided to assault the house of a venerable magistrate, to convince him of our activity and of the inefficacy of his decrees and proclamations.
He hoped to intimidate us by doubling the number of his spies and his bailiffs by flattering them with the promise of an abundant recompense.
We executed the project stealthily and with determination and took away the wife of the incorruptible judge.
The youngest of our comrades lost his mask in the middle of the occurrence and came to be recognized and jailed.
He was left mute after suffering the torments invented by the ministers of justice and he didn’t emit a complaint when the buskin crushed one of his feet. He died banging his head against the wall of the cell with a sunken floor and a low, tin roof.
I won the jurist’s wife when the booty was distributed, the next day, by chance. Her luxuriance increased the solace of my rustic home. Her scant years separated her from her rheumatic and coughing husband.
A comrade, enemy of my fortune, allowed himself to treat her with insolence. We struck up a fight to the death and I left him laid out from a blow to the head. Everyone else remained silent, advised by the lesson.
The woman was unable to endure the company of a lost man and died of shame and grief after two years, leaving me a newborn girl.
I abandoned her to the care of a few trusted servants, dissolute and cruel people, and I returned to my adventures when the hand of the executioner had decimated the multitude of my faithful.
Many were still hanging from his gallows, deteriorating in the open air, in a scandalous slum.
Finding myself alone, I have decided to await in my refuge the apparition of new adepts, emerged from among the poor.
I direct an unscathed will, in the middle of my years, toward the practice of evil.
The nefarious servants have demented my daughter by means of funest suggestions and examples. I have locked her in a secure room without an entrance, save for a shutter for passing a few items of food once a day.
I occasionally peek in to see her and my sarcasms reestablish her weeping and animate her desperation.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
We constituted an actual menace.
The clerics would designate us by means of circumlocutions when lifting their prayers, during the divine service.
We decided to assault the house of a venerable magistrate, to convince him of our activity and of the inefficacy of his decrees and proclamations.
He hoped to intimidate us by doubling the number of his spies and his bailiffs by flattering them with the promise of an abundant recompense.
We executed the project stealthily and with determination and took away the wife of the incorruptible judge.
The youngest of our comrades lost his mask in the middle of the occurrence and came to be recognized and jailed.
He was left mute after suffering the torments invented by the ministers of justice and he didn’t emit a complaint when the buskin crushed one of his feet. He died banging his head against the wall of the cell with a sunken floor and a low, tin roof.
I won the jurist’s wife when the booty was distributed, the next day, by chance. Her luxuriance increased the solace of my rustic home. Her scant years separated her from her rheumatic and coughing husband.
A comrade, enemy of my fortune, allowed himself to treat her with insolence. We struck up a fight to the death and I left him laid out from a blow to the head. Everyone else remained silent, advised by the lesson.
The woman was unable to endure the company of a lost man and died of shame and grief after two years, leaving me a newborn girl.
I abandoned her to the care of a few trusted servants, dissolute and cruel people, and I returned to my adventures when the hand of the executioner had decimated the multitude of my faithful.
Many were still hanging from his gallows, deteriorating in the open air, in a scandalous slum.
Finding myself alone, I have decided to await in my refuge the apparition of new adepts, emerged from among the poor.
I direct an unscathed will, in the middle of my years, toward the practice of evil.
The nefarious servants have demented my daughter by means of funest suggestions and examples. I have locked her in a secure room without an entrance, save for a shutter for passing a few items of food once a day.
I occasionally peek in to see her and my sarcasms reestablish her weeping and animate her desperation.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
{ José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989 }
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