José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Selected Works, Trans. by Guillermo Parra, University of New Orleans Press, 2012.
This famously dark and linguistically innovative Venezuelan poet can now be read for the first time in English.
Born in 1890, Sucre is one of Venezuela’s most important poets, although scorned by critics until an avant-garde revival of his work in the fifties and sixties. He was educated at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in Caracas, and worked as a teacher and translator for the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry.
The University of New Orleans edited the selection of work by the poet from Cumaná, whose translation was under the care of Guillermo Parra.
The English-speaking world will finally be able to know the work of José Antonio Ramos Sucre, one of the central poets of the Venezuelan tradition, thanks to the translation by Guillermo Parra that has been published by the University of New Orleans Press in its Engaged Writers collection.
The volume, Selected Works, includes two prologues. The first was written by Rubi Guerra and traces the influence of Ramos Sucre’s image in Venezuelan fiction and drama, similar to the influence it had on the book of prose poems Los cuadernos del destierro by Rafael Cadenas. Guerra is the coordinator for literary activities at the Casa Ramos Sucre, administrated by the Universidad de Oriente, and with La tarea del testigo, a short novel inspired by the life of the poet from Cumaná, he won the Rufino Blanco Fombona Prize in 2006.
The second introductory text for the book was under the care of Francisco Pérez Perdomo, who describes the writer born in Cumaná in 1890 as “one of the most innovative produced by Latin American poetry.”Pérez Perdomo critically analyzes the poetry of the author of The Forms of Fire (1929) and highlights those characteristics that turn him into a universal writer, such as his philosophical dissertations on morality or his “incredible reinvention of the language.”
The translator Guillermo Parra is also a poet, and he has published two books in English: Caracas Notebook (Cy Gist Press, 2006) and Phantasmal Repeats (Petrichord Books, 2009). He studied at the University of South Florida and received a Master’s in Creative Writing from Boston University.
Thus, the legend that began to write itself on the 13th of June of 1930, when the “poet of pain”—as Pérez Perdomo calls him—appeared dead by his own hand in Geneva, Switzerland, starts to develop its next chapter in English.--Michelle Roche Rodríguez
...conjectures and fables, symbols, allegories and premonitions, curses, rites, liturgies, cruel customs, tales and legends, extravagant tortures, graceless women, plagues and vengeances. A vast mural of fright and death, bound by spells.—Francisco Pérez Perdomo
Lift a stone and find... a lyrical fabulist. Anglophone readers have, to date, known very little of Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre. With Selected Works (UNO Press, 2012), poet and translator Guillermo Parra brings us 129 short genre-bending pieces (arguably poetry) from three of Ramos Sucre’s most significant collections, Timon’s Tower, The Forms of Fire, and The Enamel Sky. Parra thus provides a long-awaited glimpse into this discrete yet key writer. Parra’s selection, he explains in his Translator’s Note, is based on what resonated with him as a reader as well as what scholars consider essential in Ramos Sucre’s œuvre. But who is Ramos Sucre, and why should we care?
“Ramos Sucre is a master of succinct prose paragraphs that reveal an astonishing narrative instinct,” Parra explains in his note. “His poetic vision,” Parra continues, “is steeped in an antiquity he rewrites in order to subvert and illuminate the present. His texts blur the distinctions between poetry, fiction and the essay. Before Borges there was Ramos Sucre.” Undoubtedly Ramos Sucre occupies a privileged place in an important tradition of Latin American magical realists. But Ramos Sucre’s commitment is not so much to a genre as it is to a certain syntax. And while narratives do rise to the fore as the reader slips from one short piece to the next, it is an obsessive, repetitive, and adjective-laden line that lives at the heart of Ramos Sucre’s enterprise if we are to regard these pieces as poetry. Consider four lines from four different poems:
“I would like to exist amid empty darkness, because the world damages my senses cruelly and life afflicts me, impertinent lover whispering bitter stories.” (“Prelude”)By all accounts, those lines could have been pulled from the same poem. As it stands, they are all pulled from Timon’s Tower (1925), which could explain their similarity. But consider too “The City of Mirages” from The Enamel Sky, which was published some four years later:
“I would lie down in the open air, numbed by the cold. I was glimpsing the messengers of my methodical executioners.” (“The Fugitive”)
“I was defending the water’s repose. I heard it sing, on a certain occasion, a scale of lamentations when it felt itself wounded by a branch fallen from a tree.” (“The Relative”)
“I am hurt by the invincible melancholy of the conquered races. The captives of Muslim barbarism, the persecuted Jews in Russia, the miserable who are piled up at night like the dead in the city of the Thames, are my brothers and I love them.” (“In Praise of Solitude”)
“I was unable to shed the ghosts of sleep in the course of the vigil. The morning would invade my florid balcony with livid veneers and I would repose my sight on indifferent willows in the distance, in a Shakespearean reverie.”Ramos Sucre’s content is unexpected and lyrical, yet the form is unfailingly predictable. What Ramos Sucre elicits in his readers through this formulaic process is first and foremost a sense of security. Page after page, we find ourselves in territory that is familiar: subject, verb, predicate; subject, verb, predicate; subject, verb, and so on. The subject is often an “I.” Who is this “I”? Ramos Sucre, certainly. Humanity, perhaps. When the subject is not an “I,” it is one of the mythical beings that populate his little gardens—the woman, the storm, the doctor, fellow citizens, animals. All almost true to life, but not quite. Who are they? The world in all its indifference. What are they doing? Familiar things that, in the end, are strange things: curiosity induces one to unfortunate nuptials; a graceful lady reads, between smiles, the two pages of one’s invention; the quiet voice of a companion scatters the sirens boasting about some hair, tangled with algae and corals, and quiet in mournful song.
We are the myths. This is the strange world. Look at us, Ramos Sucre prompts. We are stranger than the moon. Our shapes, like Ramos Sucre’s form, are habitual, common, known, mundane; but our content is drawn from a spectral world. We are unreal and worth observing, worth cataloging. Ramos Sucre is picking up where Max Jacob left off with The Dice Box (which would have been around in Ramos Sucre’s late twenties). Ruins of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen linger too in this cabinet of curiosities, and Ramos Sucre’s helplessly steady syntax is the glass that keeps the creatures in as our willingness, as readers, to let the words seep in, to enter our consciousness, loosens and becomes more complete. Ramos Sucre primes to better maim. This syntax hypnotically weaves its way into the mind of the reader, hunkers down, and only later bites.
In the introduction to Ramos Sucre’s Selected Works, Francisco Pérez Perdomo forewarns of Ramos Sucre’s tendencies: “From his language he only demands the potential and efficacy needed to generate and express those strange and delirious universes that fascinate him so much. In order to approach and make more direct and quick his vision of the world, Ramos Sucre has eliminated from almost all his texts, except for the first ones, the particle that [que], in its different grammatical functions, and undoubtedly, he has achieved with this a language that is more intense, more closed and of greater formal perfection.” This formal “perfection” is also, in its way, rigid and exacting; everything is kept on a tight leash and pulled taut, without letting loose so much as a stray comma. Ramos Sucre has achieved a degree of compartmentalization almost unmatched in its relentlessness; his controlled sorrow, this slow leaking of the imagination into hopelessly organized little partitions is undeniably masculine—if the male is indeed, as it is often said, prone to containing and organizing unsettling matters to prevent their defeat of the reasonable mind .Ramos Sucre clings to these structures in what seems like an attempt to remain sound of mind. Pérez Perdomo calls him “the poet of pain”; and that must be true if pain is the consequence of the mind and the soul’s attempt at moving in opposite directions. Ramos Sucre’s analytical mind sets small syntactical blockades that must withstand the tug of his creatures of pain, which seek to dash through and invade the soul.
While the poet homes in on structural pointedness and concision, his subjects range widely and, it seems, possibly uncontrollably. Here cataclysms are neighbors to violet eyes and expiatory cycles share spotlight with extreme seas, deserted vessels, and unscathed light (“The Treasure of the Blinded Fountain”). Pérez Perdomo correctly assesses that Ramos Sucre’s poems are “vast murals” of sorts “ . . . crossed by conjectures and fables, symbols, allegories and premonitions, curses, rites, liturgies, cruel customs, tales and legends, extravagant tortures, graceless women, plagues and vengeances.” The mythological substance Ramos Sucre pours into each individual piece requires a wide-ranging vernacular to account for it. And this, in turn, invites Ramos Sucre to be regarded as a poet for the poets. This collection is one the lyrical minded should visit as they shop for words and mythologies. In Ramos Sucre’s highly allegorical little catalog of evils and bottled sadnesses, we meet Faust, Dante, old and new poets, the Greeks, the Gods; a Petri dish of cultural inventions that all have in common their ability to diffuse emotions while keeping them safely contained. Morals do appear too, at times, but Ramos Sucre isn’t so much a moralizer as he is an observer to this odd world we call our own.
Evil is an Author of Beauty: The Selected Works of José Antonio Ramos Sucre
by Joyelle McSweeney on Jul.26, 2013
Let us begin with a nice thick slice of this peculiar cake, which tastes hauntingly of velvet curtain, exultation and despair:
I suffer an illustrious degeneration; I love pain, beauty and cruelty, especially the latter, that serves to destroy a world abandoned to evil. I constantly imagine the sensation of physical suffering, of the organic lesion.So opens ‘Life of the Damned’, a 1925 poem by the Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre [1890-1930], as translated by Guillermo Parra for the recent (and first!) English edition of Ramos Sucre’s Selected Works. In his own time and for decades thereafter, you will be surprised to learn, Ramos Sucre’s was a decidedly unfashionable flavor, since his robustly decadent, Symbolism-infused work put him at odds with both traditionalist and modernist trends. But oh, my foes, and oh, my friends, it gives a lovely light!
I was anxiously fleeing, with sore feet, through the hinterlands. The snow flurry was dampening the black ground.Ramos Sucre’s work is thick with phrases, sentences as exquisitely arranged as a funeral bouquet. I want to lay down on this lily-bier forever! The logic is somehow olfactory, with one phrase opening into and infusing the next with its odorous stain, like lily-sperm dug deep into a plaque of velvet. And yet there is a momentum to these lines. I feel rapt by the footfalls of the phrases, and as my ankle is snared by the surprising word orders (“incurved by the squall” and, later, “long, amplective reeds”) I feel myself almost transformed into an Ovidian figure, becoming one with the landscape even as I flee into it. Rather than escape, unbearable transfiguration into the vernal embrace of the poem must follow.
I was hoping to save myself in the forest of birches, incurved by the squall.
I was able to hide in the antrum caused by the uprooting of a tree. I composed the manifested roots so as to defend myself from the brown bear, and scattered the bats with shouts and hand claps.
I was bewildered by the blow I had received on my head. I was suffering hallucinations and nightmares in the hiding place. I understood I would escape them by running further. […]
From ‘Fugitive’
Ramos Sucre has enjoyed/endured an almost ludicrously uneven reputation in Venezuela, mocked or ignored for decades before being revived by the mid-century avant-garde. In this fine volume, English-language readers will have the pleasure of grasping Ramos Sucre’s ghostly hand through a nest of competing versions: the opening preface by Rubi Guerra describes the myriad of fictional Ramos Sucre’s haunting Venezuelan novels and plays, while the Prologue by the great poet-critic Francisco Pérez Perdomo gives a trenchant overview of Ramos Sucre’s avidity, severity and commitment to the decadent and symbolist principles of his art. Pérez Perdomo quotes one of Ramos Sucre’s aphorisms, not collected here: “Evil is an author of beauty. Tragedy, the memory of misfortune, is the superior art. Evil introduces surprise, innovation in this routine world. Without evil, we would reach uniformity, we would succumb to idiocy.” He also offers a practical description of Ramos Sucre’s innovations which will help readers come to their own relationship with Ramos Sucre’s work through Guillermo Parra’s thrilling and scrupulously correct-feeling translations. The tone of Parra’s English seems to me an exact complement to the piercing, uncompromising gaze with which Ramos Sucre charges the reader on the back of the book. Attention, Artists of the Future!:
The assault of a boreal race announces the millennium of the eclipse. I insinuate myself in the throng of the victors and reprimand the uncivil excess and joviality. My intrepidity at the threshold of death and the insistence of Virgil confer upon me the privilege of an immune life.YES! Read the heroically assembled and translated Selected Works of José Antonio Ramos Sucre and experience a re-dedication to the diabolical Art-life we have all grasped so desperately amid the tear-gas and tasings of the victors, the idiocy of the prosperity gospel. Let the remains of 2013 ignite in a crepuscular monument to José Antonio Ramos Sucre, to Guillermo Parra, to Bill Lavender and the apparently defunct ( O slain! Slain by capitalist administrators!) University of New Orleans Press for publishing this vital and necessary work. This is success in life.
Jose Antonio Ramos Sucre, From The Livid Country, Trans. by Guillermo Parra, Auguste Press, 2012.
Prelude
I would like to stand amid empty shadows, because the world
damages my senses cruelly and life afflicts me, impertinent lover
whispering bitter stories.
By then my memories will have abandoned me: now they flee and
return with a rhythm of indefatigable waves and they are howling
wolves in the night that shrouds the desert of snow.
Movement, disturbed symbol of reality, respects my fantastic
asylum; so I will have scaled it with death at my arm. She is a white
Beatrice, and, standing on the crescent of the moon, she will visit the
sea of my pain. Under her spell I will repose forever and no longer
lament offended beauty or impossible love.
Jesse Tangen-Mills
An Interview with Guillermo Parra, Translator of José Antonio Ramos Sucre
"The
important thing in translation is to give a taste of another poetry,"
Allen Ginsberg told Guillermo Parra, after sending him to read up on
Venezuelan counterculture poets. He has been studying and translating
them ever since, and he believes there are more reasons to pay
attention to the Caribbean country other than Hugo Chávez's socialism.
In fact, thanks to defensive importing taxes aimed at the massive
Spanish publishing houses that run distribution in Latin America,
Venezuelan readers have begun to turn to their national literature more
often. Guillermo suggested that Venezuelan literature is only
beginning to discover itself.Among those discoveries no doubt is Jose Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930). There is little aside from his nearly four-hundred-odd prose pieces that might be called poems, or essays, or short stories; most involve medieval motifs, allusions to Dante and Shakespeare, all of which edge along metaphor, while never fully giving into it. His selected works are available for the first time in English in book form, thanks to Guillermo Parra's obsession with his work. World Literature Today named José Antonio Ramos Sucre: Selected Works one of the top translations of 2012. In addition, Guillermo has published several volumes of his own poetry, Caracas Notebook and Phantasmal Repeats. We spoke about this new Ramos Sucre translation from the University of New Orleans Press and other things Venezuelan over Skype.
In a roundabout way, Allen Ginsberg led to your translation of José Antonio Ramos Sucre.
I guess you could put it that way. I was at Naropa University's summer writing program, which they had for four weeks each summer. For me, it was a great place to be. I was twenty-two at the time and just starting to write poetry. So this was in the middle of getting my undergrad. I spent a month in Boulder. The seeds of translation were planted for me there. I remember Ginsberg lecturing. Many of the authors he brought up he had read in translation. He said even a bad translation can give the reader a glimpse of what that author's work is like.
Then I graduated college in December 1995 and immediately moved to NYC. I lived in New York for most of 1996 and was working at a health food store on the Lower East Side, which by chance happened to be a few blocks from Ginsberg's apartment. One afternoon, he came in to shop with his assistant and I said hello to him, mentioning that I'd studied with him at Naropa. He didn't remember me, but was very polite and shook my hand and told me he wouldn't be going out to Boulder much in the future because of his poor health. That year, I occasionally would see him and Peter Orlovsky, alone and together, walking around the Lower East Side, or at readings at the Poetry Project, though I never spoke with them on those occasions. I have a vivid image in my mind of Orlovsky sitting in Tompkins Square Park one morning reading the New York Times.
He told me about the Venezuelan literary group The Whale's Roof, or El Techo de la Ballena. One of its members was Francisco Pérez Perdomo. In fact, I was able to use his essay about José Antonio Ramos Sucre in the anthology.
What was The Whale's Roof?
A collective of mainly writers and some painters that was active in Caracas in the '60s. Writers who very much identified politically on the left, and were inspired by Fidel Castro's arrival in Cuba, and the sort of impulse that was giving not just to Cuba but to Latin America. They were very inspired by the surrealists, like as I suppose so many in Latin America have been.
You've written a great deal about Roberto Bolaño. Does The Whale's Roof come up in The Savage Detectives?
I don't think they do, but in Juan Villoro's El testigo, a character mentions them in the book. Since you mention Bolaño, I think they would be an equivalent to the Infrarealists. The only difference is that Bolaño's group was younger. The guys from Techo were relatively well connected. Some had already published books as a group. They published a magazine, they had art exhibits, and readings. They were very active although loose-knit.
At the time in Venezuela there were guerrilla fighters that had emerged in the early '60s. These guys were in favor of them -- not directly involved -- but advocating or supporting them. Even though at this time in Venezuela wasn't a dictatorship, these guerillas emerged because they felt excluded. Many had helped over throw Marcos Pérez Jiménez in '58. And when elections were established communism was excluded. That pissed off a lot of them, and they took up arms. Techo definitely were a manifestation of this global counter culture. I believe that Juan Calzadilla -- he's still alive -- was Ginsberg's contact in that group. Juan Calzadilla was in Cuba, at the same time that Ginsberg visited in '65. That's where they might have met and then had a correspondence. Techo did read Kerouac and Ginsberg. That's why they invited Ginsberg to come to Caracas to give a reading. In an article by Juan Calzadilla I translated, he compared Techo with Colombia's Nadaísmo.
The Roof of the Whale was part of that critical group that helped bring Ramos Sucre to readers. Ramos Sucre had been not ignored, but not really read. His complete works were first published in 1956. But these guys really helped bring him back, or establish him.
What did they like about him?
I don't know necessarily what it was that drew them in. But they saw him as taking his own path and doing something no one had ever done in Venezuela in terms of poetry.
Can you situate Ramos Sucre within his social context?
Born in 1890, in the city of Cumaná, the oldest city in Venezuela. It served as its port until the end of 1800s. So Ramos Sucre comes from this lineage, the Sucre family in particular is quite prominent. I guess it's the equivalent of aristocracy. He's a direct descendant of Antonio José de Sucre, a commander of Simón Bolívar's army, considered very crucial in Venezuela's revolution. He died very young. Sort of a heroic figure. Just the other day, I was talking to a friend who mentioned to me that he had read that Ramos Sucre's mom would constantly remind him he was a descendant of this guy.
Ramos Sucre's father died when he was fifteen. So the family had this prestige and came from a wealthy background, but they were basically poor after the father died. Ramos Sucre was a top student at his school, and so the way he was able to go to Universidad Central de Venezuela, a close friend of his, also a poet, Cruz Salmerón Acosta, ended up telling him to come to Caracas and said, What my dad gives me will cover you too, so come to Caracas. And as soon as Ramos Sucre got there, he started publishing in newspapers.
What's Caracas like around then?
He arrived there in 1911. That would have been right in the middle of this long dictatorship with Juan Vicente Gómez who was there about thirty years, right before the oil was discovered. Caracas was very, very small, the biggest city in the country, still the city of los techos rojos because of the colonial style of most of the houses. It was very isolated from the rest of the world. There was the port of Cumaná and there's one in La Guaira. It was still a pretty small area and walkable. There's an anecdote that Ramos Sucre used to go walking around at night. Very different from Caracas today or even twenty years after his death.
Also, I would say socially conservative. One interesting factoid is that many of Ramos Sucre's texts were published in the newspapers, because there was censorship or self-censorship. One of the consequences of that was that many short stories and poems were published in the newspapers during those times as a way to fill up space.
Being a Sucre opened many doors for him, as a descendant of this guy, but he also impressed many writers, intellectuals that he came into contact with, with his brilliance and hard work. If you look at the history of his publications it just kept growing and growing. There weren't really publishing houses, so he wasn't publishing books. I suppose the newspaper is where your name would get out.
Then he got a diplomatic position, right?
He worked as a high school teacher, then he got a job as an interpreter in the foreign ministry. He did both of those things in Caracas along with studying and writing. At the end of his life, in 1929 he was given this position as a consul for the Venezuelan consulate in Geneva, Switzerland. He took it, and that's how he ended up dying there in the summer of 1930.
He stopped in Hamburg, then Italy. Basically he went to two different clinics to help him with his insomnia, which he had been suffering from for several years. That was a big thing for him. The suffering from that eventually led him to suicide. There's only one biography of him, so there's a lot of stuff missing to put together the pieces of his life. One topic that hasn't really been looked into is that he was taking sleeping aids. The kind of sleeping aids on the market at the time were opium-based.
Is there any evidence of the kinds of literature Ramos Sucre was exposed to in Europe?
The only documents that we have are the few letters that have been published. He mainly wrote to his brother, a cousin of his -- who it seems he was close to. In those letters he mentions impressions. When he was in Italy he thinks that Goethe was in that town Merano in his journeys. I have a feeling those months were just months of anguish and stress for him. In a letter that he wrote, he says, I haven't written a word in two years. So, in other words, although he published two books in 1929, according to the letters he didn't write afterward. However, in the anthology I did include one poem he wrote in Europe. It's fascinating because it was not included in any of his three books. This was a poem that was published in El Universal, the newspaper he often wrote for, in 1931, in the middle of an article by a friend of his, José Nucete Sardi, who was writing about his friend a year later. His friend got the poem from someone in Ramos Sucre's family. He wrote it and he dated it, Geneva, 1930. He doesn't mention anything about Europe, but he does mention Leopardi, a poet that he very much identified with.
I imagine if things would have worked out for him, he would have cured his insomnia, stayed in Europe, and it would have been incredible for him. He was so well read in all the classics. For his love of Shakespeare, a trip to England would have been top of the list for him.
It's strange that alot of his material feels like it takes place in Europe. He doesn't say it explicitly, but it was the impression I got.
Yeah, he hardly every mentions Venezuela, in terms of place names. It takes place in a sort of bookish universe. It's one of the reasons that I find a connection with Jorge Luis Borges. Everything starts with reading for them. They write as readers first. Ramos Sucre taking characters from Shakespeare, or mentioning other authors. Interesting enough, in Caracas, he had three different booksellers that he would order from. He would order books through them. Two were in Paris and one in London. My impression is that he would have been up to date on contemporary writing in Europe. They know for instance that he had several copies of Baudelaire, and that he read in the French.
How did you go about obtaining the rights?
With Ramos Sucre I was lucky because the rights were in public domain. It was shocking to me to realize a translation into English had never been undertaken. There had been translations in Portuguese and French, but not English. For me, for the process, it was important to go to Cumana, see his grave, take walks in downtown Caracas. Go to the National Library and see the first editions of the books that he himself published. I was going back and forth to Venezuela alot then, but I didn't have a contract for this book, so I was just working on this among other projects. Things kept falling into place.
When did you start working on the anthology of Venezuelan poetry?
That's obviously not published yet, but this magazine Typo is going to put out an excerpt from it with twenty different poets this summer. So some of it will come out soon. I'd say I started on it around 2005. It starts in my mind at least with my blog Venepoetics in 2003. Through writing the blog -- which I started as more of an extension of my diary -- it became more translation oriented. I started it with the intention of writing about Venezuelan poets and translating some of their work, and then I started becoming a translator. I'm not like this expert translator. I still feel like I have so much to learn.
What do you like about translation?
These last two or three years, I've been focusing much more on translation. I still write, but I haven't been publishing my own stuff. It feels you're being an actor. I like that feeling that I can disappear behind this work, and I'm still being a poet, working with language, having those fun moments -- which is why I write. It gives me a mask I can put on to enter this other person's work. I can compare it to maybe what actors like about acting. They can live these other realities through acting. It's the same for me with translation. It's that pleasure of inhabiting someone else's work and a way to educate about myself something I really love, which is Venezuelan literature.
You've described the contemporary lit scene in Venezuela as thriving.
I'd say in the last decade or so, one of the things that I've noticed, there seems to be a lot of activity going on in terms of publishing, readings, book presentations. I think blogs had an effect in the mid-2000s in terms of Venezuelan writers. That's sort of fallen off, but through Facebook and Twitter there's still a lot of contact.
The topic of Chávez comes up endlessly.
That was the next question.
One of the results of the political conflict or sort of confrontation over the last decade, is that it's been good for writers and readers somehow. It's a difficult situation in Venezuela, but people have reacted by going toward writing and reading as a way of understanding the country.
Then censorship isn't a major problem in Venezuela as many people think in the States believe.
What do you mean?
Well, if all this publishing is going on and this dialogue is happening via words, then there's not much state censorship. Maybe there is of journalism, but not of literature.
Definitely not. I should also mention there's an import control established by the government that restricts how many books people can import. It makes it hard to import books. That means books from Spain, in particular. Not as many have been flowing over in recent years. Consequently, some people have said that has forced Venezuelans to read their own writing more. But I would say the literary communities, writers in Venezuela, are very divided. Politically divided. Within the writing communities there are a lot more gray areas. There are still bridges of communication among writers that you might not find in other sectors of society. Some Venezuelan writers or readers or intellectuals will tell you they don't think it's a boom, just a really active time. I want to make it clear that I was born in the States. My dad's from Caracas. I lived in Venezuela a total of seven years. My views are from someone not living there every day.- Jesse Tangen-Mills
Apuntes sobre Ramos Sucre / Américo Martín
“I would like to exist amid empty darkness, because the world damages my senses cruelly and life afflicts me, impertinent lover whispering bitter stories.” (JARS, “Prelude,” Timon’s Tower)
Were we to guide ourselves by such a confession, the poet from Cumaná José Antonio Ramos Sucre would fit more within Romanticism than Modernism. The tormented solitude, the feeling of being overwhelmed by the world that pursues him, the bitterness more virtual than real and the early immolation, sing to Romanticism, a soul weakened and pessimistic without a discernible cause.
Ramos Sucre’s Romanticism is in his way of living, his visionary pathos and suicidal vocation, along with his admiration for the French poet Gerard de Nerval—Ludovico Silva considered them twin spirits—who was a distinguished representative of French Romanticism.
“I found myself lost”—writes Ramos Sucre in The Airs of Presage—“when I was served as a guide by the French poet Nerval.”
But if we study his writings of careful syntax and easy fabulation, we will find the modernist. Do his evasions serve as proof of his affiliation with that Modernism that rebuilds and takes delight in an imaginary past? His fondness for the past is not a precious imposture but rather a propensity toward constructing a world of fantasies. As his words reveal:
“...seeking consolation from disgrace and rest for the spirit, I often wished for a retreat to the distant country where I could live alone far from the contemplation of so many crimes.”
According to close friends, Ramos Sucre lived in a confused atmosphere. Isolating himself from reality and suggesting another one more vast is a nuance taken by Modernism from French symbolism. And yet, Ramos Sucre’s anxiety to break the mold places him at the threshold of the avant-garde. His stylistic audacity and his rejection of meter don’t allow easy definitions. He is a modernist moving toward the avant-garde with romantic traces.
*****
Ramos Sucre maintains a certain parallelism with Góngora. Both of them became flags for movements of rupture: the Generation of 27 in Spain and the Sardio Group in Venezuela. Góngora was a great poet, recognized as such even before his elaborate period. He had been a man of simple and brilliant versification. But the darkness of his later strophes was not an imposture. The preceptist Francisco Cascales said that from being a “prince of light he had become a prince of darkness.”
Three hundred years later, the Generation of 27 (Alberti, Guillén, Lorca, Altolaguirre) recovers him from a semi-oblivion of three centuries, an exaggeration at heart. As with any emergent force, those of the Generation of 27 wanted to affirm themselves beyond surprise or scandal. Placing Góngora in the scepter, in response to a past that had been hostile to him, they were repairing an injustice. There hadn’t been one.
Although Góngora didn’t need saviors, after vindicating him so much those young writers opened 20th century Spain to the innovative literary avant-garde. That historical daring will repeat itself in the Venezuela of the Generation of 58, with the brilliant literary flowering embodied by the groups Sardio and Tabla Redonda. This time the figure rescued isn’t sinking in a past of centuries; he died in geneva barely 29 years back and in the words of Carlos Augusto León:
“He was accompanied in equal measure by the admiration and affection of a small group and the incomprehension of many.”
Ramos Sucre didn’t have many readers. Misunderstood, solitary, rootless, noctivagant and with death as a project and destiny: he was ideal for reproducing in Venezuela the rescue of Góngora by the Generation of 27.
He was probably isolated even further by his blasphemies, ingenious but puerile:
“—God is cruel to the poor.
– God lacks practical existence.
– God is the relegated and lazy sovereign of a constitutional monarchy, where Satan serves as Prime Minister.”
*****
Ramos Sucre would have felt assaulted by the tribute of those Venezuelan writers who resuscitated him for unexpected struggles. It was death, with all its literary potentiality, that claimed him.
“I saw growing beside him, the shadow of death.” (Fernando Paz Castillo)
“Ramos Sucre’s writing is the project of his death.” (Víctor Bravo)
“The only thing the aesthetic super-ego communicates with the profound ego of the poet is the feeling of death.” (Ludovico Silva)
Literary schools are similar to legal codes. They freeze progress in order to establish parameters of comprehension, but they are immediately surpassed by incessant artistic creation. To say that Modernism is the equivalent of evasion toward Hellenic mythology turned out to be an error, based on the impact of Azul, the first of Darío’s books. The Nicaraguan bard himself wrote Cantos de vida y esperanza in order to distance himself from Azul and Prosas profanas. And as Torres Ríoseco said:
“Darío’s works contain another note by which he is not only the poet of swans, but also the poet of America.”
Modernism was liberating because of its cosmopolitanism, audacious metaphors, intrepid use of language and its ease when facing consecrated models. Once these premises are accepted, there is room for the objection to the aristocratic influences in the first modernists, elegant evasions and art for art’s sake taken from the Symbolists and Parnassians.
*****
The reaction of the poet from Cumaná against literary forms was not spontaneous but rather intellectual. Wanting to renovate the rules he reduced and eliminated the relative THAT, “at times” a compliant resource not very open to formal creativity.
But, c’mon!, “at times,” and when it’s eliminated for no reason it imposes a dark distillation.
Ramos Sucre’s works are not legion. Biblioteca Ayacucho gathers them in a single volume, not particularly thick. One can read his entire oeuvre, and I have done so several times, in a short while. Did he write in prose so as to not submit to the strict Castilian meter? It would be daring to doubt his ample knowledge of the rules of language, which is why we should ask another question: was he a poet, an essayist, a literary exegete, an aficionado of hullabaloo in the manner of Gómez de la Serna? Critics have consecrated him as a prose poet but I’m not completely sure about that. His writings are very attractive because of the sharpness of his opinions and their formal beauty. Poetry undoubtedly predominates in some of them but in others it is the didactic, informative and epigrammatic purpose.
There is no poetry in his brief essay on Walt Whitman or in his acidic commentaries regarding Lugones, but in Las formas del fuego, on the other hand, the prose is saturated with it. Theseus seducing the queen of the Amazons. Later on wandering deliriously, he threatens to transmute himself into a wolf. Theseus, the Amazons, the lupine temptation. Is that modernist evasion?
*****
TWO FINAL ANGLES. DEATH AND BANISHMENT:
“Inside the precinct a fearful and dark space extended itself, and a glacial cold that came from very far away prevailed. (...) I moved above it lightly suspended by invisible wings. (...) But when I felt behind me the clamor of life, like that of an abandoned and loving bride, I turned back in my steps.”
“...the memory of that woman makes my heart palpitate, the only being who seems to live in this place of silence nature, tired of activity and anxious dies.”
{ Américo Martín, Tal Cual, 8 December 2012 }
He was barely forty years old when he encountered death. He literally encountered death, he sought and found it. He committed suicide in Geneva with an overdose of Veronal, a sleeping pill known in the United States as Barbital and in many other places as Barbitone, and which was commonly used throughout the world between 1903 and 1950. Different authors have explained in many ways Ramos Sucre’s will to end his life, but almost no one has noted that his wasn’t the only case in the Sucre family. My great uncle Alejandro Sucre Urbaneja, one of my grandfather’s older brothers, committed suicide in Paris, and several did the same throughout the years. Of course the insomnia that pursued the poet accelerated that decision, but it wasn’t the only cause. Knowing that he was a great poet, an authentic poet, and not obtaining the most minimal acknowledgment from his contemporaries, was also a factor that contributed to his decision. Arturo Uslar Pietri, around the time when I was one of the judges for the Rómulo Gallegos Prize he was awarded (1991), commented to me that in his time Ramos Sucre was considered a simple high school teacher, and moreover a bit crazy, and no one considered him an important writer, and because of that it was a great surprise for his generation when he was exalted in the sixties, when members of literary groups such as Sardio and El Techo de la Ballena consecrated him as one of the most important Venezuelan poets of all time. He was born in Cumaná on July 9, 1890, the son of Jacinto Ramos Martínez and Rita Sucre Mora, who was the grandniece of the Grand Marshal of Ayacucho, Antonio José de Sucre (daughter of Francisco Sucre Sánchez, who was the son of Jerónimo Sucre Alcalá, the older brother of Antonio José de Sucre). When he was ten years old, after having studied his first years at the school of Jacinto Alarcón, he moved to Carúpano, to the house of his uncle and godfather, the priest José Antonio Ramos Martínez (1837-1903), a teacher and historian with an ample oeuvre. There, the child Ramos Sucre attended the school of Jesús Martínez Mata until, because of the death of his father, he had to return to Cumaná, shortly before the priest Ramos Martínez also died. In Cumaná he attended high school at the Colegio Nacional (today called Liceo Antonio José de Sucre) and, at the same time, he dedicated himself to the study of languages and attained a notable autodidactic culture. He was an excellent student, and because of that he was designated assistant to the Principal José Silverio González Rivera. Before graduating with a degree in Philosophy (1910) he already dominated with fluency English, French, Italian and German. Due, among other things, to the closure of the Universidad Central de Venezuela ordered by the dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, he wasn’t able to immediately begin his undergraduate studies. In 1913, after having studied Greek, Danish, Swedish and Dutch, he entered the School of Law, and in 1917 he graduated as a lawyer, and seven years later received the title of Doctor in Political Science. However, he never litigated or practiced as a lawyer. During that time he taught classes in various schools, among them the Liceo Caracas (later called Liceo Andrés Bello). He was also an examiner at the Liceo San José de Los Teques, founded and directed by the eminent educator José de Jesús Arocha (El Tigre). In 1915 he is designated as Translator in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the management as Foreign Minister of General Ignacio Andrade, father-in-law to one of Juan Vicente Gómez’s children. He worked there, at internal services, until 1929, when he was designated General Consul in Geneva. In Caracas, he gained a deserved reputation as a solitary man and even a misanthrope. His name appears among the contributors to the magazine Válvula, which also includes, in its only issue (1928), Arturo Uslar Pietri, Antonio Arráiz, Fernando Paz Castillo, Miguel Otero Silva, Eduardo Planchart, Carlos Eduardo Frías, Luis Enrique Mármol, Nelson Himiob and José Nucete-Sardi among others. It was the greatest expression of the avant-garde in the country. Between 1921 and his departure to Europe he published numerous poetic texts that constitute a unique corpus in Venezuelan literature, and with little relation to the poetry that was being created in Latin America. He was reacting against the scarce originality of the literature of his time and he was seeking other universes, as would be done years later in other latitudes by great writers, like the Argentines Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and Roberto Arlt (1900-1942), whom he anticipated in time. His oeuvre has been catalogued as “postmodernist” and “pre avant-garde,” but in actuality, it is very difficult to classify, aside from being strictly personalist. Added to the difficulty of classifying his work within one of the literary movements of his time, is another obstacle that is even more important: that of locating him within a determined literary genre. His texts are not exactly poems. Nor are they short stories or narrations. Some have spoken of “lyrical prose” when referring to them. In any case, it is a matter of works with a great expressive freedom and a unique vision in the world, which can perhaps be related to literary movements that emerged in Europe after his death. One of his characteristics is the use of several poetic voices rather than the first person. His direct bibliography consists of Trizas de papel [Paper Shreds] (1921), Sobre las huellas de Humboldt [On Humboldt’s Trail] (1923) and La Torre de Timón [Timon’s Tower] (1925), which includes the previous tomes, as well as Las formas del fuego [The Forms of Fire] and El cielo de esmalte [The Enamel Sky], both from 1929. Monte Ávila Editores and Fundarte published important anthological editions of his oeuvre in the sixties and seventies. In the middle of the European summer, impossibly tormented by insomnia, he appealed to an overdose of sleeping pills to end his transit through planet Earth. { Eduardo Casanova, Literanova, 22 September 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 Arcade 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.
Correspondences between Rimbaud & Ramos Sucre
I’d like to make a few observations about the Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre tonight. I’ll give a brief summary of his life and cite two critics who’ve noted the influence of Arthur Rimbaud on his writing.
Ramos Sucre was born in Cumaná, Venezuela in 1890 and died by his own hand in Geneva, Switzerland in 1930. He published five books and pamphlets in Caracas between 1921 and 1929. His texts are hybrids that employ elements from fiction, poetry and the essay. Many of these texts first appeared in Caracas newspapers and magazines throughout the twenties. In December of 1929, he travelled to Europe for a position at the Venezuelan consulate in Geneva. On his way, he stopped in Hamburg, Germany and Merano, Italy, where he stayed at sanatoriums he hoped might cure the insomnia that had plagued him for nearly a decade. Overwhelmed by his deteriorating mental health in Geneva, he took an overdose of barbiturates on his fortieth birthday and died three days later. His body was shipped back to Venezuela, where he was buried in his hometown.
One of the first critics to note the affinities between Rimbaud and Ramos Sucre was Francisco Pérez Perdomo, in the prologue to an anthology he edited in 1969, the first mass-market edition of his poetry. Pérez Perdomo wrote: “Ramos Sucre’s writing has a satanic, Dionysian tone just like some of the characters in his texts. […] and the uxoricide of “Life of the Damned,” frequented by the specter of his victim that will one day succeed in exterminating him with its rancor, recalls the infernal groom of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell. A supernatural, fantastical world invades his texts.”
In his 1975 essay “Ramos Sucre and Us,” the philosopher and critic Ludovico Silva discussed the poet’s aesthetic lineage:
“The line that goes from Baudelaire to Rimbaud, which is to say, the line from Petits poèmes en prose (1864) to Une saison en enfer (1873) is perhaps the clearest literary source for detecting some of the most characteristic traits of Ramos Sucre’s universe, both in its purely formal aspect as well as in the behavior of the poet himself. The elongated and voluptuous prose, friend to a certain contemptuous Satanism; the landscapes in which
tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,
Luxe, calme et volupté.
an almost complete indifference to the concrete social and historical references in which the poet lives (more accentuated in Ramos Sucre than in his French antecedents, who at least spoke about Paris) and, finally, the ironic manner of intermingling worlds of Olympian happiness and Hellenic clarity with somberly Christian worlds, of a “Christianity in ruins” that, according to Nietzsche, is a distinctive sign of poetic modernity; all of that is a clear symptom of a profound assimilation, on the part of Ramos Sucre, of the poetic message of those great French poets.”
In his poems and personal letters, Ramos Sucre never mentions Rimbaud, as he does other writers such as Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare or Leopardi. But he is known to have purchased many titles on a regular basis from two Paris booksellers, who shipped their merchandise across the Atlantic. Considering Ramos Sucre’s voracious and eclectic reading habits, his decision to exclusively adopt the prose poem form—when no one else in Venezuela had done that—and his use of transgressive or “satanic” imagery, Rimbaud can provide a helpful key to his work.
My reading of Rimbaud has been shaped by the Louise Varèse translations that New Directions first published in the forties. I’ve occasionally borrowed from Varèse’s somewhat antiquated diction and sensibility when deciding on what tones, words and images to employ in my Ramos Sucre translations. Reading Ramos Sucre these past five years, I’ve begun to pick up his trace in some of my contemporaries. Not that they’ve read him necessarily but rather his work has seeped into my sensibility as a reader. So for instance, when I read Jon Leon’s recent book The Malady of the Century (Futurepoem, 2012), I can’t help noticing Ramos Sucre lurking in some of his sentences.
Addendum: Three Views of Ramos Sucre
Winter Fête
Arthur Rimbaud
(tr. Louise Varèse)
The cascade resounds behind operetta huts. Fireworks prolong, through the orchards and avenues near the Meander,—the greens and reds of the setting sun. Horace nymphs with First Empire headdresses,—Siberian rounds and Boucher’s Chinese ladies.
***
Gospel
José Antonio Ramos Sucre
The mystical commotion had startled me. I was in the presence of an aerial vision. The symbols of faith gained a spiritual form and emitted voice.
I fell on my knees under the radiant sky.
A message of health, music from chaste silence, the earth surprised everyone, the inveterate aridity consoled.
The escape of the devoted dream caused a unanimous lament in the far ends of the dark valley. The humble ones told themselves they had been hallucinated by a meteor of vain light and they complained about their shame and abandonment.
***
La Isla Bonita
Jon Leon
I’m with four or five people on an elevator with a glass door overlooking the entire ocean that hovers above a ruined city like an Egyptian stela carved into the wall of the air. I’m wearing Surface To Air denim and patent leather Florsheims. Everybody else looks dimpled. I think I shouldn’t text you this. I text you this. Standing on the rail looking at a panoramic plaque with three girls I picked up at Wasteland. I did them both not five minutes ago with Rick in the changing room. Jenny Kayne shorts, Body Glove T-shirt. Came hard on her extensions. I’m thinking this as I step off the elevator into a crowd of minaret dancers faux-banging each other on the marble floor between a circular glass buffet. It’s not an actual club but I hang around until Marla beeps me. Marla beeps me. I call her back from a payphone on the hotel balcony. Tell her I saw five blondes peel a banana backwards from the foot of my satin sheets. I tell her I’m a part of this. Are you a part of this.
—Talk given in Cambridge, MA on 17 August 2012.
José Antonio Ramos Sucre
A throng of ants had practiced its galleries in the floor of our campaign tent. They would insinuate a caustic saliva in the veins. We defended ourselves by suffering a glaze of palm oil.
The aridity barely allowed the sycamore and the aloe.
We were profoundly visiting the deserts of an unhappy race to supply ourselves with ivory and perfumed tree bark. We hoped to increase all at once the treasures of commerce and the medicinal resources. The jewels of the flora would have to be used in mitigation of human sorrows.
The natives had divided into factions and were consuming themselves in an endless war. The victor was hauling prisoners far away, where they could not desert, and selling them into slavery. A single cord joined them by the neck. Fright dominated the villages reduced to ashes.
A few blind men had been diverted from death or captivity. We picked them up to take them to an inhabited and fertile place, where they might live off compassion. We navigated by tow-line, along a dry river, for a week.
We announced ourselves by means of rockets when we spotted the neighborhood of straw houses, where we hoped to lodge the destitute. The straw houses, of a circular drawing, prolonged themselves in subterranean lodgings.
A minister of the king came to ask us the object of our journey. I urged him to mediate in courtesy of my civilizing interest.
The king called me to his presence and gave me an abundance of resins, of balms and leaves. I took advantage of the interview to awaken his mercy, referring to the case of the blind men.
He was extremely amused by knowing this and decided to show me the precise merits of his gift. He essayed the effect of the narcotic leaves with the unfortunate ones and they died amidst an enchantment.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The gentlemen, aged by the attentions of government and the necessities and fatigue of the encampment, climbed the porphyry staircase. They had disseminated themselves so as to move forward with greater idleness. Each one had chosen his confidant.
They were delaying their steps on purpose and anticipating a reverential voice. They posed on a terraced roof dampened by the night dew and remained within sight of a pale horizon.
The king had convened them for a tribute to the memory of his daughter, the first year of her death. He had no other descendants and agonized imagining his kingdom’s future.
The gentlemen doubted when recalling the pensive virgin. They had buried an empty coffin.
They returned their thought to the king’s wedding, on an unforgettable date. A lunatic had assaulted him in the nuptial dance hall and denied his name amidst the torment.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
I went out into the hills, at the dawn hour, with a few outlaw horsemen. We stopped to read the poster in which they were threatened, fixed on a stone roll, insignia of the city government.
I retained in my power the veil of a Muslim woman. Its owner had dropped it on me in a gesture of goodbye from her balcony, on a serene Tiflis night. Her relatives were flying towards the circle, with their hand on the sword’s hilt and the swift horse. The veil of transparent silk gave off a magic sheen, ornament and prestige of my person.
The chief of the horsemen wouldn’t lose me from his sight and pointed out the group’s mistrust in a secret language, art of the gambling den and the prison. The penury of the suit was out of place with the nobility of their horses and the luxury of their firearms. They preferred the ancient flint rifle.
I only accompanied them for a few brief instants. The soldiers and police agents had caught up and surprised them like thieves. The Muslim woman had denounced the squadron’s course and the means of saving myself. The enemies paid heed to the silk veil and diverted from me their shots.
The obstinate horsemen fought to the death. The sight of jovial morning animated them to defend themselves, to cling to life. The horses, far from the space of their plains, lent a futile assistance. The wounded and the prisoners were thrown head first into the mountain’s precipices.
They were enraged while calling me a traitor.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The children who died before baptism greet the apparition of the moon, the infernal numen of three visages, and they are the restless and malignant spirits. They return to being, when the day is born, mushrooms, parasols of the devil.
A witch disciplines them cruelly and guards them against the ceremonies and the symbols of Christianity.
The novice of chaste profile wants to save the host of unhappy children and leaves the convent, armed with resolution. The Virgin Mary has consented to fill her absence, dressing as her, according to how it is told at each step in the Middle Ages.
The novice reprimands the perfidious witch and prohibits her from relinquishing her figure like an owl, messenger of sterility.
She drags the crowd of innocents with her and reconciles them with the faith of Christ. They never incurred in mischief nor gave further news of their existence after they were trained to sing the praises of Mary.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
Sorrow
The handsome young man was left lying on the snow-covered ground, amidst the trees dried out by the winter. He had emerged from the masked ball, animated by the passion of jealousy, to demand vindication. He received the sharp steel sheet in his chest.
The lady dressed in blue velvet, motive of the discord, witnessed the course and denouement of the bloody conflict. They attributed to her in secret one of the noblest surnames of France.
The magic one with the scarlet doublet sustains the dying man in his arms and listens his final words, enunciated with the weak and anxious voice of an infant. He lends the assistance of a defamed science.
The guilty woman gathers in the palace of exquisite architecture. Its authors and builders had been inspired by fauna. She babbles in fear as she considers the news of a plague that cruelly assaults beautiful women and is born in the ports of Levante.
The lady succumbs in the hall with the porphyry floors, beside her white greyhound. She has glimpsed in the penumbra of the lodgings the mortal figure of Empusa, a larva with envious eyes and the head of an ass, rejected by Mephistopheles.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The knights, subject to a difficult vote, had built a round church, recalling the Holy Sepulcher.
They lived in a space oppressed by the low sky, of dead colors, and embraced tribulation and kept a fast.
They would equip themselves for the labors and dangers of the militia by means of inexorable penitences and stare at the inanity of glory in the image of the lizard amid the ruins, painted on the cheek of a scrawny head. They wouldn’t train for the chance of hostilities using with the simple animals the artifice and detour of the hunt, in which the ancients saw the simulacrum of war.
They would despoil themselves of severity to celebrate the birth of the Savior and amuse themselves with the apology of the ass, a cheerful ceremony, and choosing as their own sovereign, for that day, the most beautiful girl from the place, who was prepared to wage her authority for charitable ends.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The ship had the name of a flower and of a fairy. It was quickly dividing the elastic surface of the sea. The cabin boy announced with a screaming voice the island of the storm birds. Its rocks were drawn in the tenuous sunset, simulating the relics of a city. They signified the war of the elements on an immemorial day.
A cloud of smoke was breaking up, a brief distance from the floor, in a series of different orbs. A treacherous being was entertaining himself burning green firewood in a deceitfully altered atmosphere. From where the unusual figures of the smoke came.
When we touched ground, we discovered the author of the fire. Nature had tried in an involuntary and blind manner to sketch a human creature. The malignance of the possessed one was gleaned from his rudimental physiognomy. He locked up the wind in a wineskin.
We treated him boldly and without respect and left him unarmed and contrite. The name of our ship awoke from its lethargy and redeemed from its captivity a company of aerial forms. They followed us on the return trip and their presence took up no space at all.
We led them to the foot of a mountain and they penetrated the core of some trees, so as to hide. A lagoon was surrounding and defending them with its gasses.
They were left under the charge of a bird free from the necessities and limitations of life.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The farmers stopped to listen to the noise. They had arrived from the depths of the horizon, each on their own path, and were crowning a plateau. They found themselves disconcerted.
The dogs were fixedly staring at the floor and their panting was clearing away the dust.
The murmur was growing at each moment and resembled that of a city precipitated to its ruin.
The farmers frighten off and kill a sanguinary bird, tormenting a bull who has escaped death, wounded by the sacrificial axe.
The sun emanates the saffron veil, a summer effect, and presides the salvation of the bloodied victim.
The farmers observe the respect of life and abhor their neighbors’ practices. They conjecture their loss amidst a portent.
The farmers embark on the road to their village and reserve for the one favored by the sun a fertile shore.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The king listens unhappily from his rank to the reprimands of a relative exempt from duplicity and privileged by old age and by the sign of death.
The censures uttered amidst agony attain the value of a threat. The old man laments the subjection of the kingdom under foreign rule and its confiscation of the Lombard speculator. The pirates, subjects of a child king, exterminate the ships and step on the flag similar, in the song of the bards, to a meteor from the storm.
The old man addresses the discontent of the nobles, their malignant withdrawal and their projects arranged in whispers. The villagers and citizens, ignorant of idleness and other advantages brought about by commerce, wait in their vile wooden houses for the sign of sedition. Wealth persuades one to meekness.
The king suffers from the will and endures the warning. He returns to the palace and gathers in his chamber to breed valiant thoughts under the suggestion of a bronze eagle.
Faithful messengers successively appear with news of gathering the seditious ones. They mistrust the king’s composure and look at him as vanquished and subject to dishonor.
The authors of the disturbance enter the chamber tearing apart the doors and windows with the effort of their shoulders and hands dressed in iron gloves. They print on the wooden floor the arrogant foot, wearing a fierce spur, to second the excess of a hirsute face and sing-song voice. In moments of anger they pull their thorny beards. They order the king’s captivity in a subterranean passage, a type of dungeon or quagmire, and they execute in that instant and in a unanimous manner the brave gesture of adjusting the hand to the waist.
The king is a widower and has only one child. The disloyal tutor entertains himself by carefully cutting the prince’s eyelids with surgical scissors.
The name of the king can be read on a lead engraving adhered to a coffin.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The orchard leads to the obstructed river, of fertile shores, where the drainage and thickets loom.
The vegetation is delirious as a consequence of the nebulous air. I remember the growth of a cosmic force, free from measure, usurper of limits.
The girl directs a stone to the bird of strident throat, frequenter of the flatulent swamp.
I set aside mischief to contemplate, once more, the red fauces of a basalt crocodile. They make up the gutter where the granite pool pours out, residue of a luxuriant mansion, attacked by the virulent vapors.
Voluble fears astonish and paralyze the childish romp.
A sleepy saurian emerges from the estuary and insinuates itself amid the trees that have been knocked over or carried by the swell. It delivers the sure attack, of atavistic calculation. It reestablishes the calm of the forest, suppressing pusillanimous moans.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
Marie Antoinette has just called me by means of her confessor, a cleric of honest virtue. She wants to entrust me with a message for the representative of a provincial city, an enthusiast of the Queen’s defense, obstinate in gaining for her the nation’s consent.
Marie Antoinette has allowed herself to be persuaded by the gentlemanly representative and becomes cautious. She occupies her time in raising her children and withdraws from the malice of the courtesans.
I traverse, in fulfillment of the order, a twisted sidestreet, where a single lantern burns. That’s where the malignant people of other ages would gather to arrange the adventures of homicide and rapaciousness.
I found the representative in his modest study. He was organizing the books piled on the table. I discovered the origin of his ideas reading the title of a few volumes about man and his destiny, gathered in essays and dissertations of a prudent philosophy, of British aspect.
I placed in his hands a rich present and the sovereign’s effigy, drawn by an infallible paintbrush, careful in reproducing the glossy face.
The representative refuses the magnificent gift. Due to his gesture of surprise, the crowd of sonorous coins, manufactured of regal metal, spills onto the floor.
He puts away the portrait painted with jealous skill, and beautifies it with a violaceous flower, where the ancients read the interjection of lament.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
I remember the village of my birth. In its arid hills the broom of Leopardi would agonize. The breeze from the plateau would irritate the hunger of the wolf with a bloody mouth, stuffen the hands and infiltrate a perfidious dream, image and prelude of death.
The wolf would pursue a few clamorous birds, with round eye and an ivory beak. It felt the crisis of the atmosphere and the change of season and was blinded with rage in the presence of an unearthed moon. Watching it, I contracted the habit of the vicious bite.
I would read without order or concert, in my earthen cabin, immersed in the penury of the native place. The clouds hung from the fierce sky, obscuring the race of time, equalizing day and night, and drowning the voice of the hour of sleep.
A gentleman inserted himself in my barren floor and could not figure out the path to return. I dressed him in a fur jacket, a gift from a bear hunter, and saved him from perishing in the cold. His gratitude changed me, two years later, into a student at a school for surgeons.
My classmates would mock me in a festive manner, and provoke my opinions and sentences so they could applaud them with ironic astonishment. They diverted me from consummating my studies and attaining my license, accusing me, twisted with envy, of carrying out vivisections on patients. The university dignitaries published, when they expelled me, the motives of their displeasure, conferring upon me an ominous fame.
I found refuge in a miserable district, close to my tenement, where some severe people were reared. The mountain ridge of exhausted torrents was carrying the weight of the horizontal sky. An ocre vestige would illuminate the lean shepherds in their task of looking after a flock of goats.
I lived grievously from the illegal practice of my profession. I occupied an isolated and solid building, of a rusted color, flooded by the earth’s. The geometrician spider would suspend its tapestry with impunity.
I fell in love with a sincere virgin, preoccupied with the defenseless creatures, similar to her temperament. The candid garb and the adornment of flowers on her forehead insinuated the figure of a victim. I took her away from her parents’ house. She regretted having followed me and succumbed after giving me the third child.
I was thinking of reforming my trade, without scruples in the extermination of clients, and came to founder in misery and vilification. I was trying to save, by means of a surgical treatment, the breathing of those affected by angina. I tested it, without sickness as a motive, on my two oldest sons and left them without a voice. They would moan disconsolately, putting me in the position of having to fustigate them.
I recall the last of my sterile efforts, when I inflicted a cut on the throat of my other son. He was breastfeeding and couldn’t stand on his own feet. He maintained his happy smile until the moment of sacrifice.
The neighbors attended my mourning, surrounding me with compassion. They forgot about themselves and their reasons for accusing me. I had mutilated or mortally wounded them. They marveled at my perplexity and indifference.
At that moment I was conceiving the decisive project of my ruin. I was compaginating the notes of my experience and the lucubrations of my ingenuity in order to address a body of doctors in the neighboring city. I besieged them with appeals and threats and persuaded them to hear me in a solemn session.
I appeared elegantly dressed and disheveled and barefoot. I climbed onto a dais and frightened off the ladies with my indecent and haughty language. I would alternately force and lower my voice, reducing it to a murmur.
The gendarmes were invited to the suppression of the disorder. I bruised their face with blows. They brought me here, amidst a crowd, with my hands tied behind my back.
Locked in a cage and sitting on the chest with my old surgery books, I refer visitors to the malignancy of my colleagues.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
He had paid in false coins the price of my house, leaving me barefoot and out on the street.
I started earning my living again with a pathetic job. I had to remain in the rice paddies for ten hours a day, sunken in the tenacious mud. The hat with the figure of a parasol barely protected me from the summer sky. Around that area is where the typhoon wind ran, strong enough to twist the trees and pull the Europeans’ ships onto land, animated and blackened by a carbon fire.
I denounced my case with the magistrates of the province. They were desperate from repressing the cheaters and thieves. They had exhausted their imagination inventing terrible punishments. They would gradually amputate the offender’s person until reducing him to a torso or they would stretch his neck in a wooden clamp. Any movement could separate the victim’s head.
I resolved to abandon my job as a farmworker and follow the trail of the author of my misfortune. The magistrates encouraged me by paying me a modest salary.
I passed on a raft to the island of Hong Kong, seat of the English pirate and refuge for the continent’s highwaymen. The police agents, ignorant of the country’s character and language, would suffer mockery and thefts.
I occupied myself with guiding them amidst the crowds and confusion of the gambling dens. I visited the opium dens and applied blows to each one of the depraved men with deranged and emaciated faces.
A courtesan put me on the path of discovery. She approached me cheerful and spirited, running about and laughing. The porcelain face would light up with laughter and her hair imitated the form of a bird with its wings outstretched. A few scamps were burning petards in front of her house.
She gave me the details of a subterranean gambling den. Moral precepts, stamped in pennants and banderoles, denied the character of the place. The island’s wealthiest businessmen would venture their fortune by the timorous light of a paper lantern. The author of my disgrace served as a banker and money changer. Long flowing robes, of yellow color, accentuated his peaceful obese man’s gestures.
I handed him over to the British gendarmes and obtained his restitution to the magistrates of my province.
I was invited, as a reward for my services, to choose the manner of his execution.
He ended up on his knees and with his forehead on a piece of crockery.
An elephant, on which I rode, pressed down and cracked his head open with one of its front feet.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The Convict
The village where I spent my childhood was never going to grow and become a city. The stone houses barely defended against the glacial temperature. They had been built according to a single outdated model.
During the brief summer I would leave my father in his habitual retreat and leave the settlement to run after some idle ducks on the prairie. I hoped to reach them in their escape along the ground. My indolent neighbors never bothered to chase them.
I could try no other means of hunting the birds aside from catching them with my hands. I lacked a bow and a sling and rocks could not be found in that district.
My father ended up dying from an exiguous and tenacious fever. He had found himself in the case of drinking water from the swamps. His organism was reduced to the cavernous voice and brilliant eyes. He provided for my child’s disability until his final breath.
I would have perished from inanition had I not been succored by a military officer destined to be garrisoned in a more pleasant town, established in a spacious roadstead. He held my hand on the day of the burial and took me with him. The detractors called me the deported man’s son.
I grew up in the shadow of the charitable military officer. He would become violent when he saw me being slovenly and pusillanimous. I resisted following him when they took away his appointment and transferred him to a port on the Black Sea. Sorrow impeded him from speaking when he hugged me for the last time.
From that moment on I fell into mendacity. The advice I received from a dissolute man encouraged me in crime and brought me to prison. I dedicate the usual hours of the day to transporting heavy lifting stones to my shoulder.
The counselor of my misfortune visits me over the course of the immobile night, when I lie on the floor of my cell. He fascinates me in a peremptory manner with the sounds of his flute originating from a hanged man’s tibia.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
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)
“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)
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)
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)
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)
The sun, halfway through its journey, introduces an oblique ray through the windowpane. No other sign of the day’s course appears.
The thick and triple windowpane defends the gentlemen’s hall from the exterior noise. The shutters remain carefully closed and only one of them allows the infiltration of the oblique ray of sun. The furniture pushed up against the wall, peeks out amidst the penumbra. They might be attempting to free themselves from the veil of centuries of dust.
The spider from the stories, sensitive to the rhythm of a prisoner’s flute, throws itself to the floor, trusting its threads and sure of its equilibrium. The spider has contributed its web for the gloves of royal persons and has warped the veil of the Virgin during the summer nap.
Holes and vaulted niches interrupt the wall at each step. There hides, perhaps, some perfidious and unruly warrior.
One of my grandfathers used a helmet with a crest of flames. He had received it from a mage, according to what he declared during the delirium of an infernal passion. That imperishable helmet remained on earth after Proserpina was abducted.
That same grandfather occupies my thoughts. He presides with an impious gesture a memorable tragedy and propels it to its denouement.
Close to the walnut table subsists the Córdoba armchair to which his consort is accustomed. He forced her to swallow a poison.
The porter of this mansion one time allowed entry, at this same hour of stillness and humidity, to a woman of resolute disposition. She wore an historical fashionable suit and her face, of illustrious beauty, uncovered signs of weeping and rage. She occupied the Córdoba armchair and vanished into the air leaving no memory of her visit.
She had penetrated without waiting for my license. It is useless to oppose latches and obstacles against her.
I have left the gentlemen’s hall in the same order as that moment.
No one can enter there before her return.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The horse descended the pyramidal hill and entered the streets of the abandoned city. It was white and had an abundant mane. It would stop to listen with a saddened air to a rumor born in the entrails of the earth.
It occasionally took up a martial trot. The branch of a thorny bramble would suppress the whirlwind of its hair.
Some birds of insatiable voracity, proceeding from the desert, had camped atop the buildings and were closely watching the small game. They resisted the pounding of the rain and the gale by retracting and compressing their plumage, until attaining the appearance of a spear or of a spindle. They had caused the hunger and flight of a tribe of gypsies, preventing them their consumption of the hedgehog, the mole and the shrew.
I followed the steps of the horse and got lost with him in a field of henna, divided by a river. I always saw in front of me and on the line of the horizon a few cabins with a conical shape. Their inhabitants, of mild temperament, lived in misery and nourished themselves with raw and rotting fish. They suffered the excesses committed by a caravan of bandoleers, who had deserted from a distant prison and were affected by the mutilation of the nose and ears.
The residents of the cabins would prostrate themselves in front of a despotic witch. They led me to her home, resembling a stable.
I had felt pity upon seeing her, when I was little, on the edge of a pine forest. She was busy gathering old branches to defend herself from the insalubrious cold. I spontaneously helped her in her task.
She had thanked me for my help and kept vigil day and night for my protection. The white horse had been her emissary and had brought me to her presence, hidden from the criminals.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The fugitive women prostrate themselves at the feet of the king and express themselves in labored voices, without putting in order the story of their disgrace.
The king is unable to understand them until he steps aside with the most serene one and speaks with her.
They could not suffer the opprobrium of their gentleman. They were horrified by his lank mustache, by his citrine face, by his belly lowered onto his dwarf legs.
I immediately went out to prevent the king’s generosity and dissuaded him from saving the fugitives.
I had dominated, in those days, a sedition among the women of my seraglio. They let themselves be advised by a malicious and deformed eunuch, whom they compared to the zebu.
I had inferred upon him the worst affront among Muslims, throwing at his face one of my slippers when I was enraged by a cannabis potion.
The supplicants were returned to their owner by my advice and under my direction. They marched on foot, tied together by their hair, through an ardent expanse of sand and under the lash of one of my slaves.
I put them in the hands of their master and recommended to him a memorable punishment.
He took them out, amidst the popular clamor, sitting backwards on camels gnawed by mange.
Some old ladies came to see them, addressing them with shameless nicknames and throwing fistfuls of trash from the street at them.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
I was the seneschal for the queen of the banquet. We had constituted a jocund society of brief existence, recalling the statutes of the jovial republic established at the beginning of the Decameron. The fervent cicadas disturbed, at times, from the olive trees.
Pages or, that is, vain attendants were training the women’s favorite dogs for dancing. We were crying from the laughter as we contemplated the gesture of a crane with imitative instincts. We were reproducing a few moments from the extravagant genius of Aristophanes.
When I returned from the countryside to the city, redeemed from the faun-like petulance, the magnates of my relation and company came to my encounter, merchants habituated to hereditary wealth. For a moment they abandoned their distinguished behavior and the dais from where they would proclaim their dignity and they enunciated a single measured phrase, as a sign of condolence. My noble lady had left this century.
An unknown hand had deposited, before my desertion, a crown of livid flowers on the table of her chapel. That crown, adhered to the dead woman’s forehead, also descended to the kingdom of shades. It enhanced the languid face and made it seem like that of a saint in the routine art of a monk.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
I’m startled by remorse when I fix the slender and seraphic image, leaning out from the limbo of oblivion. From the churches rose the prayer of the bronzes toward the infinity of the mist. I was defending the similarity of the faithful maiden to the passion flower.
I would visit her at her ancient home, under the watch of her decrepit relatives and protectors. They would stop me with the object of referring me to elegant episodes, the apogee of the city converted into wretchedness, the pride of the notables and the virtue of the ladies in the presence of a conquering army, attentive to the honor and service of the crown of Castille. A woman of her lineage, of chaste beauty, came to die in those agitated days and the young men of one and another partiality united in grief. The elderly described for me, without realizing it, the funerals for Juliette.
They were praising for me the love of a dreamer for a lady of solemn gestures, the writings of a vivacious pen and the bizarre release from affection upon receiving the report of his journey on the gravedigger’s cart, in the middle of a plague. I wanted to clear up the selfless man’s bravery by reciting in the senile committee Petrarch’s humble, tearful note in the orle of his Virgilian manuscript upon the occasion of the death of Laura, in its plenitude equal to an epidemic.
I lived at my whim in the air of ruin and of legend and neglected to alleviate the maiden of innocent soul from her boredom. She limited herself to the sacrifice of mass at the first light of day, at a tenuous hour, and would travel to a visit of condolence in the tyrannical carriage of a sad virgin in the century of Cervantes.
The tempest is born in the uncertainty of the ocean and for a few moments assaults her demolished tomb. I would not be able to count with certainty her ultimate sorrows, but more than once have I imagined her on her knees and with her hands clasped, overcoming by means of the voice the wall of a lugubrious confinement.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
I was peacefully suffering the displeasure of the freezing skies. A livid splendor, the stray sun, was being born under the horizon and illuminating the glacial city. The water of the meteors was blackening the monumental houses.
A reflective monk, possessed by arrogance, knew the secrets of mechanics and of natural magic. The head of an automaton announced the future and I consulted it without remorse.
That day I received a punishment of arcane origin. You were passing from this life hidden from me and without hope. I came to lose myself in the shade and in the dust of a fragile palace, I followed the errors of a blind ghost, of an effigy glimpsed under the tenuous gauze of Eurydice, and I returned to the same plaza of entry, after a febrile round.
I began the return to my homeland amidst the rumor of an immense misfortune. The men were deserting the cities, fleeing from the plague and from the derision of fear. The fires of the rich mansions were numbing the condemned wolf.
Some virgins of your friendship, inspired by the example of your virtue and dressed in the attire of the blind ghost, of the aerial shade, set me on the path to the place of your sepulcher, they brought me to my knees at the foot of your alabaster image.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
I omitted the name of the Florentine beauty when I referred the story of her perfidy with one of the pages of the Decameron. The woman had allowed me, with such reserve, to celebrate her display of ingenuity and I was able to contribute an issue to the magisterial rhetoric of Boccaccio. I proposed to divulge the disappointment of a presumptuous and gallant young man.
The story spread quickly and found cheerful auditoriums and awoke malignant elucidations. From whence was born the rancor of the one who was mocked and his asperity toward my reputation.
He approached to defy me in my own house, at the close of the night, and was frightened off by the fierce gesture of an automaton posted at the entrance stairwell and destined for the task of figurine in a peasant festival.
This occurrence freed me and I found myself in the event of transmitting it to the braggarts and pedants of the Comedy of Art. The generous Boccaccio had regretted his own hilarity.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The magistrature and the nobility were quarreling continuously in the forum of the free city. They would gather in the habit of irritating with tributes and slander the villains of the environs, hurling them to desperation.
I lived far from the hostilities and in the presence of a discursive monk, my counselor in matters of courtesy. He would point out for me, in more than one sensible passage from the Gospel, the clement smile of the Virgin Mary and would invite me to think of the tribulations of Blancaflor, sold to the pirates. An act from my childhood was enough for the perennial jubilation of his life.
The nobles had dismissed an intransigent judge and were parading him around in a cart pulled by cows, amidst the clamor of the throng. His daughter then moved to rescue him, without any other authority besides that of her innocence and astride an impulsive horse. She divided and dispersed, by merely announcing herself, the tumult of the unworthy.
I gathered in my hands a flower that fell from her hair.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
Glory
The ascetic lives subjugated by a funeral image. He applies himself to discerning the matter of salvation and doubts he will grasp the doctrine of grace. He forgets his custom of producing seraphic hymns.
He loses himself in the contemplation of the crucifix with a desperate semblance and reaches the sidereal limit of sanctity. Albrecht Dürer could assign him, as a student, the lion of Saint Jerome.
The ascetic repulses the ghosts of fear. He abandons the bed of pebbles, in the sepulchral night, and turns to a voice emitted in the portico of his home. He represses a demon with the head of an ass.
The ascetic divines the terminus of his fatigues and the success of his terrestrial journey in a vision from his matutinal sleep. The Virgin Mary, refuge of the penitents and relief for morbid consciences, spread from her lap the violet, the amaranth and the silver iris, recompense of the mystical troubadours.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
Rancor
The music of the spinet, solace of an impatient soul, flies off to lose itself in the infinite. The artist distinguishes, through the window at her balcony, the fatigued river and the tempest of a variable sky.
The musical instrument had come from Italy, years earlier, by means of the sea. The natives of my province agreed on the care of its fabrication and desisted, this time, from becoming enemies of each other for a trivial cause. The artisans had put the wood of an eternal coffin to good use.
The artist never showed herself. A jealous drama had ruined her house and divided her progenitors. The brothers kept her out of sight from the young men and quarreled with me when they surprised me on the avenue of her mansion. I lived in suspense by the effect of the anxious songs and endured the arbitrariness and did not adhere to the resentment of my grandparents, wounded by that rival family.
The artist had been born of an illicit passion, opprobrium of intransigent honor. I came to discourse on the aversion of her own against my ancestors and conceived a dark and perhaps unjust legend.
The artist’s brothers accepted my condolences without caution when she succumbed to an exasperated illness. The portraits in the mortuary hall directed at me a penetrating glance and impeded the definitive reconciliation.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Sacrificer
The morning illuminates the ruin of the ships.
The caudillos remained vigilant throughout the night, on a coastal overlook, dejected in the thought of defeat.
The victims of the last dispute reveal, across the bosom of the earth, the paralyzed visage and the abandonment and lassitude of death.
A throng gathers to moan around its leader. It censures the turpitude of fate and reveres the hero’s dignity and his countenance of a beardless god. The face of the mourners is flooded in the light of a bonfire eclipsed by the day. The voice of the sea seconds the scene of the weeping, observing a ritual compass.
The caudillos take leave anticipating the fatuous discourse of the most provect and they proceed, without previous concert, to demand succor from Achilles. The supplicants alleviate the young man’s venomous ire and persuade him to accept duty.
The reconciled one proposes to himself the vindication of his own and the satisfaction of the manes of the hero, amid the inconsolable mob. He orders the restitution of Briseis, accusing her, secretly, of being a missionary of discord.
The captive arrives soon afterwards, ashamed of her ignominy, securing with the help of a herald the timid step.
Achilles grabs her by her right hand and situates her beneath the threat of his spear, scorning the attempt of a plea. He annuls resistance with blows, before inflicting the mortal wound.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
Myth
The king knows about the mutinies and disturbances provoked by the discontents throughout the capital. At each step he receives a messenger of gloomy semblance. He strikes up a startled dialogue regarding an ambiguous piece of news.
The sovereign imagines the devastation of a fertile zone and the extermination of its farmers. A wild tribe has taken advantage of the kingdom’s confusion and has invaded it in carts armed with sickles. Some shameless witches, counselors to the savage caudillos, vociferate their prophecies amid the black residue of the bonfires. Through the heated air a red sun, of a warm country, is distinguished.
The men of the wild tribe transport some leather tents on the backs of their disfigured dogs, avid for blood, and establish themselves with their women, throughout and comfortably, in caverns practiced in the ground. They reserve the tents for their chiefs.
The king consults in vain the remedy of the state with the old captains, of pontifical beard and brief elocution.
The prince, his son, ensues to interrupt the council, where a grievous silence reigns. He invents the healthy means and recommends them in an easy discourse. He possesses the virtual idea and the redemptive verb. He has just left the company of the bewildered.
The veterans withdraw ceremonious and hopeful and bind themselves to his orders. The young man’s presence suppresses the fluctuations of victory and neutralizes the rebels’ stratagem.
The hero has faced the danger with the assistance of an enthused throng.
The day of his return, the beautiful women intone, from the terraces of the capitol palaces, a hymn of secular antiquity in praise of the rainbow.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
Words have to keep being
Words have to keep being what they are
what they have always ceased to be
there are not two languages: the same word that speaks
is the one in silence
but there are two silences: the same word in silence
is not the one that speaks
each word displaces another one that we never manage
to say
To be outside the here
To be outside the here that is within what
is written
writing like a mirror: not the image we project
not the image that reflects us
writing like a mirror without an image
we are not what we write
the image writes for us already at the limit
at the insertion the intersection of two reflexes
both false / true
to write not the order but the rhythm of life
a rhythm we know ignore and recognize
only by the breathing of writing
The Proscribed One, 1930
the summer returns but the longest day
won’t be mine any more
outside I see the light the night that prefigures
now I don’t know save what I was
the vast earth and the dust cloud of the gallop
a merciless and violent homeland
the disdain the enamel of a neutral
passion
I want to die already
now I don’t know what I know save what I am
words the populated silence
to G.Y.B.
The Accomplice
I feared the presence of the Castilian woman. I was mistrustful of her austere morality and her indifferent pride.
She had dismissed several suitors of savage humor, military coarseness. They disdained the moderation of gesture and the sound judgment of discourse.
She had retracted herself from society, adopting an even, insipid life. She attained, at the same time, the satisfaction of punctiliousness and the reestablishment of the estate.
She preferred me among the domestics and family members. I had won her esteem by attending to her jealously and without precipitation. I would retire from her presence after responding to her in strict terms.
She made an appointment with me once to tell me about her resentment against a licentious cleric, raised on acorns, and captured my willingness for the purpose of her vengeance.
We invited him to a hunting party and I myself chose for him, from my lady’s stables, a cunning horse, full of nasty habits.
The three of us departed along an avenue toward the open countryside, in the presence of dawn.
The Castilian woman reminded me of the agreed upon scream.
The disloyal brute threw off its rider head first, after executing a series of vehement leaps.
I approached the inanimate face and advised we return, considering as fruitful the journey.
Spring had sewn modest flowers, during the night, along the breadth of the green fields.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
Delirious Story
The prince of the proscribed kings was abandoned on a skiff, after they were vanquished in the desperate conflict.
He was sailing amid the canticle of the savage waves, toward the shipwreck island, visited by birds.
He made port directly where the adept of an abhorred science awaited him, arbitrer of elements, adorned with a garland of oak. He had left his retreat, among the ruins of immemorial fortresses, upon suspecting the arrival of the predestined one.
He had to transmit to him the teachings entrusted to the memory of a formal sect, fearful of writing them down.
The boy grew merely by breathing a vital air. He commanded the militia of birds, eager to please his innocent will and give him messages of superior origin.
His gentle life conserves the accent of a single grief, from the teacher’s unexpected evasion. The island at that moment of the afternoon was lengthening its triangular shadow over the violaceous sea.
The moon, flooded in the squall, inspires in the solitary one the image of a distant woman, with a friendly soul.
He looks for her in an unsinkable vessel, of argentine wake.
She lives, embracing a hope, in the highest chamber of a tower.
The proscribed one discovers his only sister in the vigilant woman.
He learns the origin of their separation and recovers, through her notices and with the means learned on the turbulent island, the brave subjects of his progenitors.
La torre de Timón (1925)
The Magician’s Penitence
I received numerous warnings of celestial origin when I began to initiate myself in an irreverent science. They were dissuading me from following the demand of truths superior to the fragility of man, and threatening me with the loss of happiness the same day I had it within reach and with the expiatory prolongation of my days.
Proud meditation had rapidly impaired my organism, anticipating the signs of old age.
I saw in the ruin of my health the final warning of an indignant power.
I regained my strength retiring to the solitude of an estate, defended by cliffs and ditches. From there I departed later on, in search of new impressions, to a kingdom of traditions and ruins. And, under a shattered portico, I found an adolescent woman, with ecstatic eyes.
After frequenting her placid manner so often, I healed from the previous anxiety, enjoying a promise of well-being.
One afternoon I referred my past arrogant curiosity to her.
My words alarmed her imagination: they ratified shapeless fears of dangers glimpsed or dreamed during her withdrawn childhood. That fright began the abolition of her thought and was the stimulus of a long agony.
I continued ahead when the coming of the fatal threats began. I was looking for a pleasant spot where I could pay the rest of the irrevocable sanction and await the deferred terminus of my days.
I came across this country submerged in nocturnal silence. I chose to edify my retreat the shade of this jungle, a tapestry unfolded at the foot of the mountains.
Above the jungle and without reaching the mountain heights, a few birds of fatigued wings occasionally fly.
La torre de Timón (1925)
The Ballad of the Passerby
How I remember the village cemetery! Inside the walls tarnished by inclemency, a few crosses nailed to the ground, and also above burial mounds and occasional marble. The pile of unburied coffins leaned against a corner of the building, broken into rotten pieces and splinters. Dense vegetation was unrolling a carpet trampled noiselessly by the walker.
From that damp earth, packed with human remains, the insect was sprouting in masses for the laborious march or the quick flight. The trees of dark foliage, weighed down by the drops of frequent rain, were blowing rumors of prayers, a reflection of the oracle of the Greek holm oaks. One or another distant voice was growing sharp in the half-dead afternoon, foundering in the pale silence with the solemnity of the errant star, precipitated into the sea.
The clouds spread across the sky, like a procession of angelical novices, turned golden by the occidental sun, that inundates the sanctuary with fantastic light through the Gothic stained glass windows. Mountains of docile slope, disposed at either side of the valley of repose, dressed in thin fog, that frolics in fast Valkyrian horses, leaving a sudden rainbow as a sign and remnant of the escape.
Afflictive abandonment enhanced the horror of the place, advised an attachment to life, drove away the sickly delectation of the image in the grave, displaying in this the terrible misfortune, according to the pagan reason. The light of the colorless day was seconding the strength of that appearance, being the same one that in Hellenic fables instigates nostalgia for the earth in the cortege of sighing spirits through the vain asphodels.
La torre de Timón (1925)
Vision of the North
The mass of snow navigates to the impulse of the frenzied sea, displaying the iris in each diaphanous angle. It trembles as if it were shaken from below by the push of titanic chests; but the trepidation does not drive off the bird, lofty and retired to the highest point of the wandering block; beforehand it exalts its strange behavior, as though it were a centinel that sights danger, observing a wide zone.
The fleeting gusts don’t manage to ruffle the plumage nor does the crash of the waves frighten the immobile head of the pilgrim bird, whose repose figures the trance of the penitents. It sails imperturbable through the uncertain ocean, beneath the discordant atmosphere, interrogating provisional horizons.
The bird emits no song at all, but rather conserves the fearful muteness of a bad omen that is exalted in legends and tragedies by the apparition and conduct of prestigious and vengeful characters, those who by the abandonment of laughter and words exclude humanitarian sympathy and familiar simplicity.
Returning from a long journey, warm aromas and vague rumors circulate, and waves roll embraced by a flagrant sun, the ones that attack and crumble the bulk of ice, with the stubborn intention of sirens opposed to the path of an ambitious boat.
The panorama diversifies from this point onwards with the mirth of burning colors, and with the delight of vivacious trees and noisy beaches, revealing for the bird its misplacement, keeping it from knowing torrid distances, recommending its return to the native plateau; the bird takes off in a long flight, and turns to preside, from a crystalline height, the concert of polar solitude.
La torre de Timón (1925)
Heroic Times
At Bolívar’s demand the most errant of armies left the Oriente province. Toward the Centro province it proudly advanced, dispersing and disconcerting the enemy in endless combat, which would flame up like sudden fires. Its leaders had terrifying names of sonorous barbarism: Bermúdez, Azcue, Arrioja. In them was accomplished the concept of heroism, whose standard Homer bequeathed us, because young and unfortunate were the paladins at that hour like the protagonist of the Iliad. The first of all, Santiago Mariño advances, who brings a lion by the mane: José Francisco Bermudez, who in his life gave the most fierce, overwhelming display of Venezuelan valor. Liberty did not count among its ranks a more splendid gentleman than that ill-fated rival of Bolívar, prodigious in sacrifice, bold and dashing as a Byron. With a lyre, he would have been the image of Apollo. This man reached the highest military rank in a single sweep, fortunate at the beginning of his career, as if favored by a spirit: at twenty-four he was a general, and preceded Bolívar in redeeming Venezuela.
He later waned because of his foolish insubordination, and this waning in the story has been unjust. The alleged crime of his rebellion is a minor fault. The disobedience of the young caudillo finds its explanation and even its justification in regional jealousies, quite natural in those days, since the provinces that eventually constituted Venezuela had until then been true independent nations, under the common rule of Spain. Of the liberators, only Bolívar had the vision of the great homeland, and he hoped to extend it and he did, perturbed and ephemeral, between two oceans. Perhaps he felt the great influence of those generous and delirious apostles of humanity, of the great homeland without borders, who appeared so frequently in the eighteenth century. The rest of the liberators, for reasons of education, were disposed to urge on such vast ideals.
Laureano Vallenilla Lanz is the one who considers Don Simón Bolívar in this, his almost unheard of phase of unifier. Because of the urgency of his will, because of the ascendancy of his genius in the ungovernable soul of his lieutenants, because of Piar’s sacrifice, Venezuela is a single nation from the stairwell of the Andes to where the Orinoco rejects with its waters the Atlantic. He twined the mistrustful hosts under the Venezuelan flag, surrounded by death in a hundred fields, like an idol satisfied by hecatombs. And he did more: centuries ahead of his time, he deposited in the fecund and mysterious heart of time the seed of future great evolutions.
La torre de Timón (1925)
The Nobleman
I have gone to ride outside the city, at the start of a placid afternoon. The fields display the ambiguous and fragile colors of a mirage.
I reconstitute the passage from a sad war, where my youth was exhausted. I left without an escort, far from a threatened fortress, to the open country, amidst the astonishment of my comrades in arms. The proud memory now compensates the feeling of the preterite years.
I executed the feat a day after the memorable occasion. The most fraternal of the comrades had led me to the presence of his fiancé. I corresponded the fresh woman’s urbanity by remaining mute and with my eyes lowered. I retired by faking a sudden absence of attention and memory.
I decide to end the vespertine stroll and return to the refuge of my house, to compose, according to my custom, the living and hallucinating representation of that interview, where the agony of my unequal soul begins. The glimmers of lightning mark the edge of the August night that has just begun. I think of the signs of fire, premonitions of misfortune, deciphered by a visionary in the hall of a cursed king.
I return through the modest and unlit street, where I have chosen my dwelling. I lead the mount to the place of rest and lock myself in the hall defended by old and resounding doors.
I suffer, submerged in shadow, the blindness of a marble statue and its immortal sadness.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The Heretics
The maiden leans out to see the fields, to interrogate a tremulous distance. Her mind suffers the vision of the riders of extermination, described in the pages of Revelation and in a commentary of black stamps.
The popular voice decants the rain of blood and the eclipse and warns of the similitude with marvels of years past, contemporary to King Lear.
A captain, surly and insolent with his king, fixes the campaign tent, of crimson silk, amidst the ruins. The soldiers, the devils of war, reveal the soot from the fire or from hell on their arid complexion and red hair. A schemer, usurper of the Harlequin suit, persuades them to licentiousness and supplies them with pinchbeck and paper coins.
The maiden moves the crowds away from the enemies, spending her nights in prayer. They retreat in front of an indelible undergrowth, after vainly exhausting themselves in the aperture of a trail. The blow of their irons could find no seat and was lost in the emptiness.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Vengeance of the God
The excess of the inhabitants marred the fame of that pleasant land, dressed in flowers, broken by wild fountains, loved by the gauzy cloud and the paternal sun. It had a weird stone’s name and the sea as tributary in pearls.
The God watched over the men’s crimes in the undeserving country, and hoped for the birth of a messenger of health and concordance, far from them, in the most umbrous jungle. He is born one night from the breast of a flower, by the lightning flash that paints a luminous stigma on his face. He’s raised under the care of the birds and the trees and by the kindness of the beasts.
Those men receive the mission of virtue with daring actions and excesses and they pay the envoy with a trance of ignominious death. The God punishes them making the wealth of the land they sully bigger. He nourishes it with fatal treasures that are the unfolding of the sleeplessness of greed, who divide the people into angered bands of rich and poor. The new gifts infest with vengeful hatreds and populate with expiatory bones.
La torre de Timón (1925)
The Sons of the Earth
The nomads, reduced to indigence, had fixed their field tent amid a plain corroded by fire. The horses, practical in the art of finding grass under the snow, were biting and crushing the blackened straw. They had been released from a few innoble carts. A fortuitous dust storm was coming in from the horizon to waste the efforts of the blacksmiths and the veterinarian surgeons, trades vindicated to satisfy the questions from the police.
The natives of the country, faithful to a tyrannical dogma, were guarding the pilgrim’s actions and accusing them of being impious and rapacious. I would not venture into their camp save on horseback and armed with a curved sword and after fitting myself down to my ears with a cylindrical cap, made of sheep’s hair.
The nomads claimed to be offended in their rudimental credo and were soliciting the help of some obtuse divinities, phantoms of the desolate chaos. They referred the origin of their race to the invasion of a comet, at the beginning of the centuries.
They decided to move on during the last oscillations of autumn. The crystals of the precocious snow were starting to fly. The gusts of wind from the pole were dissolving an unburied virgin’s shroud, in the stygian night, at the edge of the world.
They damaged, before their journey, the faith of the indigenous people with the sacrifice of a dog in the manner of the crucifix. In that way, they consulted the success of their thoughts and required immediate arrival and succor from the night. They invited it to mercilessly fustigate the pair of crows of their taciturn cart.
The famished host headed towards the encounter with a precipitated sun.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Infallible Blind Man
The indifferent page proclaims from a raft the countryside cereals. He negotiates the narrowness and vortex of the sedentary river. A rice paper hat defends his smooth, sculptural person.
An old man with empty eyes executes a desolate music on his bamboo shepherd’s flute. He lives off alms at the entrance of my lacquer and porcelain trinkets store. At one point he refers to his captivity in the hideout of some highway robbers embittered by his sight, distrustful of his practice of the terrain.
I exercise the even business of a shopkeeper in a withered city. I attain no amusement save the death of a beggar on the street and the cremation of his cadaver amidst a racket of scamps or otherwise the torture of a parricide sagaciously crushed and quartered by the executioner.
The page owes me his rearing. I saved him from succumbing amid some ruins, during a war with the pirates of Europe. The invader’s arms devastated the marble bridge of a metropolis and printed the dye of charcoal and soot on the effigies of some decorative lions. I discovered the infant in a wicker basket, abandoned by his servers in an orchard of camellias and hydrangeas. The smoke from the battle was offending the lofty wisteria, of aerial garland, with a blue flower.
The old man with the empty eyes encourages my hope in the effects of good and promises me fortune’s grace. He ignores my diligence in defending a privileged child.
I have followed the conduct of a fisherman in an honest episode and I imagine the visit of a princess with an ivory semblance, afflicted by the loss of a son. Her faculties should rescue me from penury.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Monologue
The knight of the disorderly thoughts registers the sea. He leans back on a perennial rock. He drops from his hand onto the floor the hat and the sword.
A feudal bird, of ashen livery, dominates the desert air. How many battles were fought within view of the towers!
The knight discovers the image of his life in the solitude of the haughty bird. Does he not succumb in bitterness and refuse society since the abduction of his beloved, on the day of an incursion by the infidels?
The knight thinks of redeeming her and trusts in the mercy of a happy fate, lavished in contemporary reality. He has ruined himself with misfortune and wanders amidst the lucubrations of an evaporated understanding.
He invents, amid sighs and smiles, the end of his inquietude. The accidents of his fortune and the imaginary unraveling are found in more than one pilgrim fable for children, recited in a vespertine phase.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Churl
I lived in the shadow of a church in the devout city. The air of a faint sky would stir up the dust and spread it around the severe confines.
I would muddle myself in the pleasures of a free life and lose my senses while sipping a depraved liquor all alone.
I belonged to a fraternity of rogues and I would raise and serve myself with their renown. I wasn’t able to perform with lucidity and would refer pusillanimous heists and robberies.
The most faithful of my companions guided me in the assault of a palace. The adventure became my repentance and the loss of his life. He was precipitated from a large window.
I picked up in my attic, that same night, a lacerated child. He would call me blowing hiccups and sighs of pity and grief. I cursed his round eyes and his stork nose. His head was a mountain of obstinate hair.
I strained to facilitate his life and make his infancy prosper and I would surround him with the solicitude of a philanthropist. He angered me with his voracity and his prickly character and I sent him away filling him punches.
The abuse of my impatience brought, according to my conjectures, a quick unraveling. I persist in maintaining the identity of my frequent friend with the perverse child.
My capture by the apparitors of justice came on the day after my rage. I was pressed to confession by means of the whip and the wheel. The surgeon retired me from the chamber when the syncope threatened with death.
The judge moved to pity me and celebrated the aid of a person in the discovery of my cell. He reproduced the gesture and the habits of my previous counselor.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
Ballad
The dwarf envied the fortune of Amadis and deliberately mistook him for the knight who was robbed and sacrificed at the foot of the tree at the crossroads. He would run through the drowsy roads, backwards and riding the dirty goat, the one who screamed, and he would disseminate horror to the far reaches. An acrobat had drawn the mount on a card.
The idle dwarf directed himself in such a manner to a mountain pass, a place distinguished by the death of a maiden, and solicited from a false creature the punishment of Amadis and his nymph. An old woman concealed her Gorgon mouth, a buckle with a single tooth and imitated the noble appearance of Oriana. Her dexterity couldn’t manage to reproduce the eyes of celestial vagueness, lifted in mute thought, afflicted by the paladin’s absence.
I came to the presence of Oriana and gave her good tidings, throwing myself at her feet. Her enemy didn’t come out ahead imitating her gesture and Amadis was to be found far away and was not one and the same with the gallant man sacrificed at the foot of the tree, at the intersection of thoroughfares.
The foolish witch and the despicable dwarf wasted the scheme in separating the chaste lovers and fell out with Satan and denied him the shameful tribute. The master of the celibates and of the egoists, censor and falsifier of human effects, had provided succor, inert. He reduced the accomplices to secrecy, wounding them and twisting their cervix, humiliating them with the treatment inflicted upon poultry yard birds.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Frontier
The noblewoman authorizes the servants, simple maids, in the use of the crossbow and the bow. She distinguishes, forcing her ear, the kettledrums of the Moors.
The Castilians have divided themselves into factions and forget their malice toward the infidels. A violent prelate accuses them of befriending the adversary, overlooking their lewd manners, preferring the shade of the palm and the jasmine atmosphere to the glare of the pulverulent journey.
A leper with a scornful countenance does not limit himself to offending the serenity of the fountains, but instead breaks into the invader’s enterprise, assuming the service of pilot. He has been trained among the Jews and heretics of Languedoc and he disseminates their guilty doctrines. The illness precipitates him from greatness.
The prelate knows of the conflict by an original means. He struggles to repress an anxiety, a sudden fright, and goes to the secret of the sanctuary, to reverend consultation. A trickle of blood divides the corporal, the Eucharistic cloth.
The prelate heads toward the plaza, gathers the parishioners in a warlike fashion and induces them to a victorious enthusiasm.
The mob of the humble runs to suppress the siege and admires the heroine atop the wall. A sad old man with a lofty tunic proclaims the arrival of sanctity and valor within a single person. In dreams he has seen, guided by a youthful voice, the coat of arms of a diamantine splendor, thrown at the foot of a cross.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Totem
I had lost a year in ceremonies with the king of an occult country. The sagacious courtiers would annul my solicitude and suffer the venting of my protest with a neutral smile.
I would procure to intimidate them with the name of my sovereign and emphatically describe the infinite resources of his armada. They thought they were safe in the precincts of their mountains.
I would entertain the uneasiness critiquing the family statute. I would take pleasure in dealing with the infantile women and happy children and would discover the effects of a childhood that relied on capturing the quick present. A passage in verse, the first matter entrusted to memory, written on a silk sash, would insist in a picturesque manner on successive reality.
I have never seen such solicitude for the simple creatures of nature. The children would reveal an indulgent spirit in their familiarity with the cicadas and butterflies gathered, throughout the night, in a wicker cage and they would entertain themselves with the pirouettes and whirlpools of some fish of ephemeral substance, circulating in an obsidian aquarium.
A courtesan, a species of seneschal, visited me once with the message that the inconveniences of my embassy had been overcome. I had to witness, before my return and as a sign of friendship, a party intended to reconcile me to the genius defenders of the territory. The courtesan walked off after adjusting his authoritarian fan on my shoulder.
The party was limited to reciting in front of a unicorn fallow deer, symbol of happiness, painted on a scarlet canvas, a few hymns of abolished signification. Some bald priests kept printing a similar sound on their brass tambourines.
One of the officiants renounced the long dress and the unpleasant instrument with the purpose of facilitating my exit. He governed my rustic raft for an entire day, lever in hand, depending on the course of a tumultuous river.
The unicorn fallow deer, sign of a happy omen, was seen over the peak of an extinguished volcano.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Straggler
The tempest invades the night. The wind imitates the puffing of a cetacean and beats the doors and windows. The water sweeps the channels of the tile roofs.
I have left my bed, and have leaned, to watch the street, out the window of the living room in ruins. The meteors light up a white panorama.
I’m alone in the reestablished darkness, keeping vigil over the earth’s sleep.
My companions, accustomed to the commotion of steppes and deserts, abandoned me perfidiously in this village, stage of a risky journey. They refused to admit me to the benefit of their wealth, holding for themselves alone the secret of their metals and stones. They would mention a green and salty lake, hidden in a jungle of pines, threatened by the thick fog.
The village is the encampment of a ferocious band. Men with yellowish skin circle uneasily, sword at hand, conical hat soaked.
I encourage the hope of returning to my meridional soil, close to the sea burnished by the sun.
I have negotiated my escape with a needy man, of the vilified aboriginal race.
He offers to guide me through unused roads, behind the backs of homicidal highway men.
He and I will definitely escape from this place, where the victims on hooks invite the birds of prey, raised amid the grim clouds.
La torre de Timón (1925)
Himilco’s Journey
The squadron’s admiral stepped into the temple. He was worn out from the tribulations of the journey. He was coming to carry out the vows enunciated, under danger, in an unknown sea. At his side he carried the volume where he had consigned the navigation’s portents. He placed it in the hands of the priest, whom he approached modestly and with dignity, preparing him with a reverence. That tale would have to be inscribed, with a chisel, at the foot of the country’s idol, in honor of the maritime city.
The ships would reach port broken and uninhabited. The sailors became scarce amid a continuous sea, close to the abyss, at the edge of the world.
Some of them received loathsome burial in the heart of the waters. Many lost their lives under the effluvium of a morbid sky, and their souls lament the ground of the native country from an ignored coast.
The survivors sighted, on the sunset path, the kingdom of the afternoon, islands fenced by wonders, and discovered the refuge of the sun, exhausted farmer.
Some barbarians captured on the continent, pilots of dismasted ships, spoke marvels of their visit to a warm country, beyond the vespertine mirage; and those men of fierce semblance and grey eyes, raised under a furtive sun, motivated with their insidious fables the beginning of the return.
La torre de Timón (1925)
The Old Man’s Son
A few burin lines would be enough for the likeness of the elemental landscape.
Some lean tree, stick skeleton, sign of honor, was living on the burnt ground.
Black mountains, of a translucent profile, were enclosing the valley.
My house would disappear, at the end of an uncertain day, amid the inundation of the fluid night.
The subterranean noises would last until the advent of the delayed sun. Superhuman forces were removing the stone from the sepulchers.
I was dividing the uniform life between reading epics and tragedies and the habits of an unsettled youth.
I conceived the image of an infanta, threatened by the silentiaries in the palace of fear. I would only kiss the fringe of her mantle on my knees.
One day I ventured to the pastime of hunting on a venerated day, notwithstanding the warnings of my progenitor. The old man of the infallible sayings, an aficionado of narration, would rest in a majestic chair of primitive art.
An invisible trumpet, lost in the mountain, strayed the dogs of my pack.
After a fruitless day, I penetrated to rest in the chamber of an illusory home. The chimeras surged gently from the darkness of my drowsiness. I thought I was visiting the palace of fear, where the infanta of my passion was confronting, in punishment, the trance of death. The ministers and servants were warning and imposing the secret. The exhausted lamps were releasing long hairs of smoke in the hall covered in black cloth.
I awoke, close to morning, in the middle of the countryside.
My head was resting on a stone. My hair was humid with dew and, on my face, the light of a diluted moon.
La torre de Timón (1925)
The Impious One
The abbot’s deer has taken refuge in the church, freeing itself from the sanguinary dogs. It hears, from its refuge, the scream of the hunter. It rests from danger under a veiled light, glimmer of infinity.
The hunter intimidates the humble people, pointing them out to the frenetic pack. He laughs spectacularly at his gentleman’s caprice.
He climbs the church steps, path of its portico, on a horse with firm steps. He calls the hounds, from the threshold, by means of an irreverent horn.
The abbot, made indignant by the irruption of the sound, resists the profane man, scares away the feral pack.
The horse sets off on a sudden race and disappears in a precipice, taking its rider with it.
The hounds howl around a charred quagmire.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The Kingdom of the Cabeiri
Some black birds with bloody eyes were lodging amid the demolished marble. They were inflicting the affront of vulgar harpies. They would saunter with small leaps and raise an inelegant flight.
The plain of the city abounded in malignant shrubs cited, for the memory of vengeance and bitterness, in more than one wise book.
A bust with an absorbed glance, circled by a garland of ivy, was rising at each moment on its broken pedestal. The floor of the violated gardens had provided shelter, a century earlier, to the victims of a historic epidemic.
The light of day was regurgitating from a rupture in the globe of the sun, and the night that lasted as long as those in the winter, was under the domain of a star, of an incomplete and leaning orb.
Some deformed little men were sprouting from the floor, amid the nocturnal heaviness. They were coming out of an aperture similar to the trap door of a stage. Their eyes were oblique and their lank and thick hair invaded the wide zone of the forehead. They responded to my appeal by employing a lewd gesture and I had to assert to them my fist on the hard face, as though made of stone. My hand is still bleeding.
I did not count on any other friendship save that of a disconsolate woman, attentive to my well-being and to the memories of a superior world. I wouldn’t know how to say her name. I would forget, at the beginning of each morning, her discourse.
She herself put me on the road to the sea and pointed to a star that never set.
Soon after releasing the sails to the prosperous wind, I saw rise, from the place where she had said goodbye to me with lamentations, an interminable spiral of smoke.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The Blind Man
The theologian had become withered and feverish. He was meditating without respite a mortal idea and leafing, in search of relief, through the folios piled on the lectern or spilled on the pavement.
The authors of those volumes had grown old in the retreat listening to the warnings of a timid consciousness. They would leave their cells to awaken, with their arguments, the amazement of the universities.
The theologian was demanding assistance from a bloody crucifix, after registering with his glance the images of some three-headed devils armed with tridents, in memory and representation of the capital sins. A sculptor from the Middle Ages had used such figures when composing an abbey’s filigree.
I insinuated myself into the penitent’s friendship and pressed him to confide in me the reason for his inquietude. He tried to retract me from the question alternately using subterfuges and threats. At that moment he was strolling under the stimulus of a pressing hallucination.
I ended up remaining on my knees as I directed toward him the most impassioned plea.
He imposed his hand on my forehead and allowed himself to associate me with his terrible vision.
The view of the infernal tortures profoundly fixed itself in my senses and followed me day and night, plunging me into desperation.
I found my health by voluntarily going blind. I have abolished my eyes and I am free and consoled.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
Clock of Princes
The deposed king is staying in the palace of the one threatened by the same fate. They recall and comment, famed old men, the vicissitudes of their respective careers. They stroll the platform for some fresh air by the river.
The waters, born of an invisible spring, hide the frontier margin.
A minion spy interrupts them. He displays the appearance of a servant supplied with a flabellum. He arrives under the pretext of driving away a wasp.
The priests notice the reluctant sovereign, an enthusiast of the amenity and tolerance of an overflowing civilization. They maintain friendships with hardened tribes, open to insinuation, adapted to the precipice and thickets of their mountainous home.
The wild adepts appreciate the exercise of arms above refinement and leisure.
They surround the city and assault it where a sentinel came down from his post to the countryside, in solicitude of a forbidden love.
Columns of quick smoke are born from the disseminated fires and proclaim them.
The kings witness, resigned, the end of an exhausted era.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The Camp of the Carthaginians
The enemies were attacking us in a cowardly manner, from their mountains and cliffs. The crags of that place simulated monoliths and columns, and at the very least they equaled a man’s height.
The surgeons, imperturbable when facing the lament of the wounded, were working day and night extracting the most insidious arrows, equipped with lateral nails in the shape of fish-hooks.
One of those men descended, in the secret of the night, to the pavilion of our chieftain and killed him without provoking suspicion or alarm. We were admiring such a prolonged sleep.
We captured the invader as he was escaping to his satisfaction, leaving the line of our camp far behind. He resisted, without exhaling a single complaint, the most painstaking tortures. He wasn’t perturbed when the torturer, an assistant to the surgeons, amputated his hands and soldered his arteries applying an incandescent iron.
The leaders of the army gathered in a venerable senate to choose the new chieftain. One of them was opting for the appointment of a carefree and clever chief, capable of remedying the difficulties of the soldier. He saw in youth the guarantee of victory and he made an effort until I was named as the favorite.
I was the youngest of the captains.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The Guide
We were succumbing to thirst in the warm territory. A breath of fire was rising from the reverberating sands, belt of a salty lake.
One of our own threw a stone into a bitumen pit and provoked a fire and successive stampedes.
We were searching the domicile of the true race of Iranians, under the direction of an indifferent guide.
We had to climb a limestone mountain and take shelter in a city of mountain runners, destroyed by earthquakes.
The horses were dying from eating a trailing wormwood or from the venom of scorpions.
We didn’t see any signs of habitation in that journey, only the relics of campaign pavilions and other ephemeral dwellings. The chalky and monotonous place had sickened with tedium, twenty years earlier, a colony of exiles.
The hardened hunters of the city isolated in the volcanic zone abstained from bothering us. They wore wide pants, gathered at the bottom in spats, and at their waists they displayed a disquieting arsenal.
They lived in the present, limiting, stoic or covetous, all necessities. The spirited mood and rudimentary judgment suggested the temperament of birds of prey.
The taciturn guide, enemy of jubilation, retreated from us with a warning of the day’s end.
We immediately heard the welcome in the song of Ferdowsi’s nightingales.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The Heroine
The hunter has been able to steal himself away from the suspicion of the combatants.
He leaves the city established on the plain, above the two opulent margins of a single river, trusting its towers and the advantages of its jewel and tapestry commerce. The women wear versicolor quilting and display the image of the moon’s arc on their cylindrical tiaras.
The hunter solicits, for his beloved, news of the war’s course. Electra has met with the most generous among her Trojan commanders. Hector was traveling in company of his wife and assiduously following her litter, imposed on the shoulders of content porters. The hero was riding a black horse, from the infernal lineage, a present from a pale numen, oppressor of nostalgic shades.
The hunter once brought the report of the city’s assault and referred to the massacre of its youth, as they lay unarmed in the abandonment of sleep.
The fire releases, for entire weeks and from a long distance, its blackened embers.
Electra never consoled herself from the fall of Troy.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
Risk
The orchids were cultivated amidst the fever, on trees covered with parasites and corroded by ants. The sun multiplied the resources of the humid soil and animated a harmless vegetation, hiding place for perfidious animals. I distinguished amid the darkness of the thicket the phosphorescent eyes of wild animals.
I dismissed the danger and climbed with determination the steps of a broken pyramid, dissembled amid the jungle.
An eagle, enemy of terrestrial bugs and dragons, had posed on a granite mask, of excessive proportions and hollow eyes, destitute of eyelids. It was reminiscent of the obvious and direct glare of certain monsters of nature. The granite mask, embellished with a few adornments, would have equaled exactly the image of a princess from the time of the Pharaohs, surrounded by lunatic admirers in a museum in Europe.
The presence of the eagle was enough to dissipate the curse spread by that relic of a bloody idolatry and frustrate the menace of the consecrated wild animals.
An old man from that district had insisted on looking after the success of my exploration and had promised me the assistance of his volatile people.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
Slum Sorrow
In the poor home with a naked floor, lit by a miserable lamp, the women congregated to cry. Alternately strong or extenuated, their tremulous sobs never ceased, drowned and confused words were escaping from their shaking chests, gestures of pain were pleading to mute skies. Around a small coffin the clamor was growing and reaching delirium; it contained the body of a child struck down by death from slum life. In a corner the recently abandoned toys were gathered in a bundle, beside the poor tools of feminine industry, and, in an ironic offering at the feet of the Crucifix, the drugs on the uncovered table. Noble sacrifices failed in protecting his life: the consumption of miserable savings, the days of anxiety, the nights of vigil. That day, when darkness prospered even in the deep twilight of the bleeding sun, death came to protect the minor and benign shadows, sealing its victory with cold paleness.
What came to that mansion, as to many others, was a tremendous evil, like the one that by divine order decimates Egypt’s first born, it barely left a poor house without mourning. By its influx innumerable children received the bosom of the earth as a crib, sent off by moaning choruses, lamented with brief and clamorous wailing, the wailing of those who in a life without peace have worse enemies than death.
Following the general destiny of the sad who, with urgent poverty, don’t know the delight of the tearful memory, the mourners from the poor home, lit by a miserable lamp, also lamented with passing desperation. The hoarse voices moaned until the departure of the little cadaver; but forgetfulness, before the expected urge of the next day, made an invasion with the calm of the first august and flushed night.
La torre de Timón (1925)
The Return of Ulysses
Penelope summons the maids to interrogate them about the suitors’ latest outrage and about the trap directed against the life of Telemachus.
Penelope is seated in an authoritarian chair, seat of the patriarchal kings, and lightly poses her shod feet on an oaken footstool.
Penelope conforms herself to the fright of the muttering women. They interrupt each other at every step to turn their suspicious face and conclude their reference with entreaties and votes for the fickle numens.
Telemachus departed in demand of his progenitor, under the council of his casual guest, of eminent bearing and veracious discourse, and with the auspices of an eagle applied to break the host of some miserable birds.
He sails toward the palace of a remorseful king, occupied with the memory of his own and safe from their deplorable end. He gathers fragmentary news during the welcoming feast and admires the treasures of distant origin and their owner’s modesty. He remains in ecstasy under the immobile glance of a granite mask, uncovered on the shore of a deified river, amid lotuses and palm trees.
The remorseful king recounts his journeys and forays, his shipwrecked arrival as a beggar before the throne of the sovereigns of dissimilar race and the frequent risk of succumbing to thirst amid a paralyzed sea.
The suitors gather once again for the orgy and vainly inquire the whereabouts of the old rhapsodist, anxious to dispel their unanimous sorrow. They retire solitary and fretful when they hear, from the kitchen workers, the news of the fire’s ineptitude and of its wasting in the quick and ephemeral blaze of a fatuous fire.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The Predestined One
The reverberating sound of the bugles warns of the queen’s arrival. She comes from overseas and offers the consort, freely chosen, no treasure nor domain, but that of beauty.
The politicians rage when they consider the sovereign’s disinterest.
The knights remain amiable and prudent. In the last war they have ordered the silence of the canons so as to fight with more gallantry. Are they perhaps the knights of the Holy Grail reluctant to declare their own name?
The queen is energetic and brings victory with her. The sparrowhawk was serving as sentinel on the day she was born and startled the gathering of witches, nourished with moribund meat. The author of the discord among the men retired to the abyss, climbing down a ladder with a vertiginous spiral. The nefarious counselor was reading in the dark.
A precocious chieftain, of childlike semblance, is born of the happy nuptials. He announces the escape of the infidels from the bridge of his galley, destroyed, pointing to the limit of a smoke-filled space.
The kingdom’s chronicler consigns in a manorial language the exploit of the Squire of the Sea.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Rescue
The elves would visit the moon at will and entertained the gaze of the peasants, at such a great distance, with the simulacra of a terrified rabbit.
The willful elves would torment the peasants and their farm animals and they would cover the furnishings with rust. They had been released, a century earlier, from the magistery of Paracelsus.
The unfaithful elves had divulged to the four winds a gallant error of Queen Mab and would point out her illicit favors in dealings with Ariel. The offense directed at the queen afflicts Shakespeare’s indulgent soul and influences his precocious death.
I perceived the temperament of the peasants as I was convalescing from a fever in their vicinity. I was serving as a pedant in a trivial theater.
The most credulous of them solicited my advice in a frightful case. He asked me if he should retain as a captive the master of the futile elves, who had been caught in a wolf trap and was notable for his bisulcate feet or if he should forgive him in exchange for a sum of rubies.
He paid no attention to my sentence of holding him and alternating asperity with gracefulness and he received a risible prize.
Plinius refers to the precious stones originating from the abject residue of the lynx.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Exorcist
The innocent monk was making an effort to guide the youth’s actions. He was inducing him to condemn the examples of arrogance, frequent in the house of his elders.
The youth was persuaded to charity and abstained from witnessing the punishment imposed on the rebellious peasants in the rural distance.
The innocent monk had slipped in amid the seditious and invited them to compromise. A subject with a grave face, distinguished with the attire of an academic dignity, came to the center of the density and enveloped him in a web of profane arguments.
The upstart wounds the monk in his most ingenuous affection, seducing the young student. He dedicates himself to facilitating his straying from customs and takes pleasure in having precipitated Faust in a vain foray. He stirs up the groups of fugitives and encourages the men toward severity. He amuses himself with the ohs and tears of human beings.
The innocent monk hopes to prevent his enemy’s cunning so he finds out the name and habits of the demons. He correctly guesses Satan’s second name and insists on his gossip and barber’s verbosity by reading a few talks of king Jacob, the apprehensive son of Mary Stuart.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Lay Brother
The seneschal, observing the council of Ambroise Paré had saved us from the poison by means of sulfur. We felt, however, the consequences of a wine of metallic flavor.
The courtesans, dressed in white satin, remained indifferent and turned out to be free from evil. They had been born in Venice and were helping the ambassador of their republic, the greatest spy in history. We didn’t suspect the interest of this character in following our steps and we enthusiastically received in our presence the red-haired women of lily-white faces. We lived enchanted with Italy and had even reached the point of defending, sword in hand, the name of Vignola, denying the havoc of his doctrine in French art.
The king’s servers, solidly armed, appeared on the highest landing of the staircase and came down to arrest us without danger. We were entering in an insensible manner a type of lethargy and we attributed it to a polyp served at our table, notwithstanding the censure of the doctors of Antiquity. We would interrupt the infernal drowsiness with screams of fright and fury and we diverted the attention of the fortress sentinels.
I was separated from my companions and submitted to a more humane treatment. I have accepted from the king an invitation to embrace the priestly state, hoping to imitate the levity of Rabelais.
I haven’t been able to find out the situation of my accomplices. Diane de Poitiers is accustomed to selling the enemies of the king of France to the sultan of Turkey, for twenty crowns a piece.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Hermit’s Journey
I assisted the deer of prolonged age in its agony and gathered the bronze necklace, loosening it from its cervix.
The gentiles had attributed to the deer a prodigious longevity, as referred to in very learned writings, and Our Lord awakened through one of them the vocation of Saint Hubertus.
No one had been able to follow the trail of the deer of prolonged age. The humble and nameless blackberry bushes ceased tangling in front of me, the day I found him in his final hour. A few flowers fastened onto my monastic petticoat, sewing a fringe on it, and disturbed me with their beauty. I know how to defend myself from the enchantment of creatures.
I had in my hands the head of the decrepit deer and its ruin was manifested when I loosened from its cervix the antique necklace, of secret labor and astonishing effect, by which it would become invisible.
Once that garment of its strength was despoiled, it exhaled its life with a moan.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Orthodox
I was traversing the grave country at the request of the decadent monastery. I remember the pause and the monotonous humming of my ox cart on the pebbled road and how it overturned in the muddy river. The natives were dying from eating the fish from its paralytic current.
A few black birds, of petulant baldness, were frolicking in the incisive grass and on the backs of some lean horses. Their flight was repeating, in the violent blue, the strict order of the phalanx.
The reverse of the times was plunging the villages into misery, advising indolence, the abhorrence of life. An impassive woman, with arid eyes, was presiding her children’s game in the grounds of a cemetery obstructed by the thicket. The suit of noble antiquity and the domestic distaff were seconding the ascendancy of her face.
The abbot was waiting for me before the building, at the foot of a withered walnut tree. His voluble discourse retracted me from asking for a place in the lodging for pilgrims. He was lamenting the egoism and parsimony of the parishioners.
I gathered, during the visit, frequent motives for suspicion and deviation. A few monks were drawing sickly images, following the custom of a fanatical art, and the most uncivil of them would repair to the authority of Saint Basil, for the purpose of recommending filth, as a sign of penitence.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Casuist
The delirious king presides over the court and judges the controversies at the foot of a silver poplar, in the territory of funereal vistas.
A loquacious bird, a present from a rustic man, imitates the human voice and imprints an obliqueness to the king’s fortuitous thought.
The Jewish doctor, student of an Italian school and inspired by its leonine verses wants to regain his health. In that manner he fulfills the merits of Charlemagne, author of the culture, forebear of the royal houses. He appreciates the effects of the hellebore of the ancients, the discovery of a simple man, and wonders at its flowers native to the mantle of patriarchal winter or from his flowing beard.
The king feels, after sunset, the murmuring flight of souls soliciting infinity and imagines himself in an allegorical jungle, where an impossible beauty is distinguished in the tenuous landscape.
A fairy, according to the troubadours, comes furtively from Britain, the country of the seven forests, to occupy the invalid mind. A bishop recognizes in the spiritual form a likeness of the Virgin Mary and abstains from correcting the extravagance of the king in resplendent garments, a lover’s custom. Saint Eligius, fond of chivalrous piety, would wear the richest quilting of Asia, during his life in the castle of king Dagobert.
El cielo de esmalte (1929)
The Secret One
The student hands over to the magnate the ballads where he refers to passionate tribulations. He has deserted the classrooms in order to get ahead in the art of the guitar and celebrate the garments of his beloved in the modesty of night, without protecting himself from the concern and curiosity of the neighbors.
The teachers, with revered capes and perspicacious eyeglasses, reprimand and repress the young man.
The lyrical compositions discover the accent and apathy of hopelessness, the desire for an inaccessible happiness. The author compares himself to an oxherd with a humble and clandestine life, jostled and made desperate by fate.
The magnate takes charge of the ideas spouted against the young man’s fame and censures him, in terms animated by sympathy, for wasting time. He reserves his writings in a sheep-skin folder and courteously says goodbye to him, following him with his glance, in secret from the beggars.
The pious magnate, warned by the caretakers of the religion, stops sponsoring the student, when he watches him go away arm in arm with an equivocal and strolling character, dressed in a scarlet jacket with steel buttons.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The Chimera
The virgin, seduced by the world’s entertainment and lost amid the idle pursuits of the imagination, has adopted the name Vivianne, and grasps her lute invoking the succor of the fairy. She imitates the assurances and ease of romance.
She dreams of redeeming and conquering an enchanted prince, victim of the curse of envy, humiliated in the form of a toad and marked on his forehead with the image of a shining circle. A lagoon, with a poisonous breath, defends the gallery of her hiding place. The virgin manages to break the sortilege by staying on her knees, an entire night, amid some ruins, far from human help, and under threat of feral worms. The virgin resists the ghosts of darkness and her victorious canticle, the menace of some diabolical birds, marks the measure with dawn and flames of a devoted color.
The virgin interrupts the voluble music, likeness of the course of its delirium and shuts away the lute in the ebony box, with a resonant cover.
The virgin watches the appearance of a vessel and the assurance of a bird from her bridge, and goes with startled voice toward the uncertainty of the messenger.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
The Shoal
Ariel had taken refuge in an acanthus of the Corinthian capital. An architect, grateful to the seductions and memories of Italy, had erected a palace of reliable lines and classical inspiration.
The king had given it as a present to the astronomer of his court, versed in the predictions of the spheres. In front of the palace, edified on a desert island, the ecstatic sea stretched out. A wandering soul had preferred that panorama to the celestial venture. The fishermen referred to this legend and to the one of the nocturnal hunter, sentenced to pursue an unreachable prey until the universe’s final cataclysm.
That astronomer had blinded the king’s understanding and was assiduously animating him against his family. He denied the nation the avenues of the throne.
He shrouded the kingdom in an untimely war and promised brilliant fortunes, reserved in the ground, to outfit a conquering armada.
Fate silently prepared an abyss for the projects of grandeur and the ships were dispersed, as a consequence of a greater fear, on the day of the battle.
That moment occasioned the disappearance of the pernicious councilor.
The island of his domicile sank a few feet beneath the surface of the sea and became a reef hostile to navigation.
Las formas del fuego (1929)
All translations by Guillermo Parra
The novel La tarea del testigo, by the Venezuelan writer Rubi Guerra, published by the imprint Lugar Común, will be presented at the new Lugar Común Bookstore, in Altamira, Caracas, tomorrow at 7:00 PM. The presentation will be given by the writer Michaelle Ascencio.
This novel won the Rufino Blanco Fombona Prize in 2006 and was published in a second edition by Lugar Común last year. It is a work that narrates the final days of the poet from Cumaná José Antonio Ramos Sucre, transfigured into a fictional character that transcends his biographical and literary transit and installs himself in the consciousness of contemporary history.
His final days in Switzerland, the anguish of insomnia, the nostalgia for his native land, the sickly introversion, his passing through European sanatoriums and his final agony are narrated with a language whose concision, luminosity and subtlety serve as a serene channel for a tormented creative existence.
Framed by an oneiric climate, at times nightmarish, of evocations and persecutions, La tarea del testigo is an impeccable recreation of one of the greatest prodigies of Venezuelan poetry, José Antonio Ramos Sucre.
Rubi Guerra (San Tomé, 1958) has worked as a journalist, published short stories and novels and has been a cultural promoter in the fields of film and literature in the Oriente region of the country, where he was the founder of the Sala de Arte y Ensayo Ocho y Medio. He has also been a literary consultant for the Casa Ramos Sucre in Cumaná. - venepoetics.blogspot.com/
The novel that recreates the poet’s three days of agony won the Rufino Blanco Fombona Prize
It should be said right away. The man who watches José Antonio Ramos Sucre is Rubi Guerra. And this is not just a spoiler, but also a way of understanding the work of the author born in San Tomé in 1958 and, especially, the book of his that Lugar Común has just published, La tarea del testigo. The novel that won the Rufino Blanco Fombona Prize in 2006 returns to those three terrible days in 1930 when the poet born in Cumaná lay dying.
Guerra’s fantasy about the insomniac author
“Sleeping is not a physiological necessity but rather a state of the soul, a virtue,” he writes in the novel that confronts the protagonist with memories, nightmares, hallucinations and ghosts emerged from his poems. The idea for the 110-page text that includes three supposed short stories by Ramos Sucre reproduced in the novel, ones he offered the person to whom he was writing his letters, occurred to him 28 years ago, when the Casa Ramos Sucre cultural center in Cumaná was inaugurated and Guerra tried to write a play.
The title of the novel itself alludes to the writer who watches the writer (the “witness” of the other’s work), but returns to an idea the critic Julio Miranda considered central in Venezuelan literature of the final decades of the previous century: the image of the “dreamer,” of the man who walks between sleep and waking through the city. And, like the center of a five-pointed star, insomnia articulates the dyads of sleep and waking, madness and death, adding to these the motive of the golem, typical of Gothic literature since the time of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe
What difficulties did working with the figure of the poet entail?
Many. The first was the prurience of real names.
Are Ramos Sucre and the Consul the same person?
When I began, yes. I soon realized the Consul required his own identity, but that identity couldn’t be completely separated from the model that inspired it. That’s why the character is never mentioned as José Antonio Ramos Sucre; I use the initials, or the diplomatic position, which point out the similarities, but also the differences. Finding the tone for the letters was also a difficulty; I wanted them to look like the actual missives of the poet in the rhythm of the sentences, and at the same time that they be different.
Besides this novel, what relationship does your fiction have to the work of the poet?
It’s not an obsession or anything like that. It’s an unfinished task. A short story in my first book, from 1986, includes more or less ironic references to “Life of the Damned”; and the short story “The Library,” from 2004, has an adolescent Ramos Sucre as its character. For a while now I’ve been researching the poet’s childhood and youth without a specific purpose yet; I might write an essay, or a biographical account, or maybe it’ll just serve to satisfy the curiosity I feel for that time period. I prefer to think that my fiction is sufficiently diverse for me to get close to the poet’s work without being absorbed by it. Hopefully.
Insomnia and the possibility of loving are themes that cross the novel. What do they allow you to explore?
Beneath those themes there are two other ones that are central for me. They may not be central for other readers. In the one hand, there’s the matter of the fragility of reality. In our daily life we tend to distinctly separate what’s real from what’s not. On one side we have events, our waking life, the rationality of ideas, even a certain rationality of emotions and feelings; on the other, dreams, the moment between waking and sleeping, fears and irrational desires, hallucinations, chemically-altered states, memory (which isn’t fixed at all, but rather a moveable, unstable construct), imagination. In my case, each time I wake up I feel I’ve been tossed from one world into another, from one reality to another. The other theme is the presence of evil. Not metaphysical evil, but an evil of human origin, that’s expressed as violence, as contempt for life. To say it in a few words: the evil that always triumphs because it lives within each of us.
{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 1 September 2012 }
Superb! Generally I never read whole articles but the way celebrity dresses, tattoo shops, climbing shoes you wrote this information is simply amazing and this kept my interest in reading and I enjoyed it.
ReplyDelete