Pérez Perdomo: “Hay que tratar, a través del poema, de descubrir lo invisible” / Carmen Virginia Carrillo

Pérez Perdomo: “You have to try, through the poem, to discover the invisible”

Plaza Bolívar in Boconó, birthplace of the poet

A few years ago I interviewed Francisco Pérez Perdomo. I was beginning my research of the poetics of the sixties that eventually became the book De la belleza y el furor. I encountered a polite man, of deliberate speech and vast culture who told me anecdotes about his youth and we spoke about literature. What follows is the dialogue I sustained with the poet of magic and phantasmagoria.

Carmen Virginia Carrillo: Your first publication, Fantasmas y enfermedades, from 1961, came out with the publishing venture of the literary group Sardio. Could you tell us about your incursion in this group?
Francisco Pérez Perdomo: Sardio is the first group I belonged to in Caracas. Sardio emerges from the contact between future members of the group while they were still in high school together. Adriano González León, Salvador Garmendia, Guillermo Sucre, Luis García Morales and me. We were a group of people who were restless.
CVC: Do you think the group had a concrete theoretical proposal?
FPP: Sardio had two great theorists, Adriano González León and Guillermo Sucre. Adriano affirmed that Rómulo Gallegos wasn’t of great importance. That phrase was repeated, maybe not in the same form, but bringing its proposal to the forefront, as happens with any young group that wants to open new spaces.
     When Adriano made his comment about Gallegos a questioning of values and a formulation of principles occurred. This is very positive, because it responds to a restlessness among youth that should never disappear. However, when revising values one can make mistakes when wanting to break with everything that has come before.
CVC: What opinion does Gallegos’s work deserve?
FPP: Gallegos is one of the great figures, he highlights the great dramas of humanity; and yet his writing isn’t one of the most captivating. I’m particularly fascinated by Doña Bárbara because she’s a character that betrays Gallegos.
CVC: In what sense?
FPP: When Gallegos writes the novel he establishes a theme: the struggle between civilization and barbarism. The character he tries to condemn and abolish from the story is Doña Bárbara. However, she’s the most fascinating character because she represents witchcraft and magic. She’s a girl who is raped by bandits, and who unfolds, because her bitterness is joined with her capacity to live great passions. She’s a character that seduces, since she’s able to feel sublime affections; she believes in love and that’s why she encounters conflict, just like Santos Luzardo.
     The latter is not one of the best characters, he represents the petit bourgeoisie, one of those centaur-like plainsmen who have become civilized —for him the university is extremely important—, who wants to fight for the plains where freedom is to be found. Santos Luzardo confronts the barbarism embodied by Doña Bárbara. When she’s defeated by life, she disappears. Doña Bárbara respects the love of Luzardo for Marisela, because she’s her daughter and to destroy him would mean harming her own daughter. There’s an unfolding in the character when Doña Bárbara puts down her weapon and leaves; she becomes the great myth.
CVC: Is there any relation between that mythical world present in Gallegos’s work and in your own poetry, such as the phantasmagorical, magic, the paradoxical?
FPP: I love Gallegos, but my writing isn’t like his at all. The themes, on the other hand, do coincide in terms of the topics since they have to do with magic, myth and witchcraft.
CVC: Regarding your work, the constant presence of certain phantasmagorical elements, the game in which one can perceive a tangible spatiality alongside an intangible one, does it have any relation with the influence of various authors, or is it a more individual search?
FPP: All of us poets are more readers than we are poets. You have to establish a difference between imitation and writing. Imitation is parodic. Influences are fructifying.
CVC: Can your poetry also be considered an heir to fantasy and horror literature?
FPP: I really like fantasy literature. When I lived in Boconó there was no electricity and we would use gas lamps. There were people who would tell fantastical stories, and in the shadows we would see apparitions and we believed in those stories. That stayed with me, along with the taste for fantasy literature.
     My poetry comes from my reflection on reality. Anyone who looks at reality should find vibrations. Reality is vibrational. I think everything has two sides and that one is always hidden; we have to seek out that hidden side in order to discover it. Regarding this hidden reality, you see that objects move and that when you write about something you encounter those two worlds: first the visible and then the invisible. You have to try, through the poem, to discover the invisible. Many people can say my poetry is equivocal because it begins with an anecdote from childhood and, suddenly, that shifts toward the other reality that exists and has another time, which is otherness.




{ Carmen Virginia Carrillo, Tal Cual, 15 junio 2013 }

Los lobos del yermo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Wolves of the Waste Land

     The noblemen rarely leave the asylum of their tower. They watch beneath and around them, a contour of rocks of mineral sterility.
     A black bird flies vertically from the earth and traces an obstinate circuit in the heights.
     Popular imagination sees in the obsessive bird the soul of the previous Spaniard, progenitor of the current unruly youths.
     They were born of a kidnapped girl, charged, until death, with affronts and blows. They keep the memory of her suffering stance.
     The villains censor and reject excess. They hope to manifest their own resentment along with that of their ancestors.
     They helped each other out, badly armed and as a troop, in the turns and corners of a hollow mountain, bordering the tower, and they were able to take down the throng of their leaders.
     The vanquished young fighters resist one against two and back down, without turning the sword, until they can take shelter.
     The villains agree they must assault the tower, the result of an impious war. Their emissaries visit remote villages, in search of men and supplies.
     The enthusiastic and young crowd arrives suddenly, carrying serious weapons, lifting colorful pendants.
     It attacks again and again, retreats in disorder. The aggressors succumb, by squadrons, beneath a rain of cantos and arrows. Their chiefs scold them, raising desperate arms over their heads.
     They organize, during a moment’s truce, the unanimous attack and match up bridges and scales, to beat the resistance of avenues and doors.
     This is how they’re able to break the indifference of the tottering victory.
     They enter the overwhelmed tower proffering threats and imposing them without mercy, until it’s empty.
     The victors surround it in flames, and leave on the ground, as the only vestige, a stain of fire.
     The peasants eventually stop seeing, throughout the entire circle, the saturnine bird.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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

El cruzado / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Crusader

     The trees, of naked column, spread their vigorous branches upwards, repair for the front of the castle.
     From the turrets hangs a parasitic shrub, with thin leaves. Corpulent birds climb on them, with ironic gargoyle faces.
     From my high window I watch at my feet the ondulation of the forest and, in an angle of the horizon, the spasmodic flash of the lightning.
     The days of military service have long passed. I defended remote sinking kingdoms against the Muslim. We were executing and suffering a war of surveillance and open fields, perpetual and merciless. One night of consternation I left my brother in arms, between birds of prey and lying on a precipice. The moon was peeking through a brusque opening in the clouds.
     A piece of inner advice reclaimed me to this home, once peace was convened. I knocked down holm oaks and oak trees to seal off, behind me, the trails and lanes of the jungle. I picked, for my chambers, the hall for hunting trophies, where a nebulous mirror stands out.
     Boredom and monotony strengthen my natural bitterness fleetingly relieved by the interlude of mundane commotion.
     I felt a fainting of the will, a supernatural rapture, the effect of an unknown presence. I lost track of time and its passing.
     Once one of my happiest comrades wanted to see me, and he was able to by guessing the paths and climbing over the impediments placed in the road.
     Disillusioned ambition had made him repose, conferring authority upon his discourse. He had penetrated the secrets of wisdom.
     He referred me to the traditions of my house, the abuses of my ancestors and their bitter end. My early orphanhood, my crusader’s deeds had been enough to rescue me from fate. I had to put an end to my race, passing on to a better life without descendants.
     By his command I approached the nebulous mirror, momentarily brightened.
     And there I looked, astonished, upon my old man’s face.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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

Siglo de oro / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Golden Age

     The gentleman emerges from the church with long strides. He greets the ladies with gentle measure, abbreviating ceremonies and commitments. He approves of their elegant dress and declares them in accordance with languishing beauty.

     From the river, watcher of the morning and mirror of its lights, blows a chill and rigorous wind. It shakes the willows, and penetrates the solitary streets, throwing up whirlwinds of dust.

     The gentleman retires to his deserted house. He puts the hat down and walks through all of it slowly, absorbed in the meditation. He notes and considers the beginnings of old age.

     His own were extinguished in contemplation or were lost in adventure. He himself has recently arrived from executing bravery in Levantine waters. He decants his boastful youth in the Italian cities and courts.

     Along with his devotion he has a happy wisdom, a walker’s sagacity, gathered from so many occasions and predicaments.

     The gentleman sits at a table. He listens, through contemporary letters, to the jocund voice of the Sicilian muses. He puts into writing a festive history, where people of quality, followed by their servants, adopt, for entertainment and in voluntary retirement, the customs of the peasants.

     The gentleman feigns discourses and controversy, accents and memories of the classroom, in reference to amorous anxiety.

     He administers fortune and troubles, aid from coincidence, and leads two equal fables to their denouement, in simultaneous weddings of masters and servants.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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

Para empezar: no moriremos de poesía / Guillermo Sucre

To begin: we won’t die of poetry

To begin: we won’t die of poetry

no one has the word even if they speak
or everyone has it even if they’re quiet

poets in their time arrive crookedly

I’m going with those who are leaving
and I’m not coming back

I announce to those who announce nothing

the poet’s eye takes hold of the world
reappearing

condemned to reality by the reality
we invent
(reality, reality, don’t abandon me)




{ Guillermo Sucre, En el verano cada palabra respira en el verano, Buenos Aires: Editorial Alfa, 1976 }

Escribo con palabras que tienen sombra / Guillermo Sucre

I write with words that have shade

I write with words that have shade but don’t give any shade
as soon as I begin this page insomnia keeps burning it
not words but what they consume is what keeps occupying
     reality
     the place without place
the agony the game the illusion of being in the world

the illusion is not what makes reality but rather the splintered gust—
simulacra where the ceremonies take place exchanges of brilliance
     of emptiness of desire

there is no place anymore for writing because it is the place itself—
     of what is erased
we don’t discover the world we describe it in its stubborn elusion

I won’t go back to the sea anymore but the sea lives in that absence
     which is the sea when the word says it
     and it spills onto the page like a hand
I will no longer be in the forest I will be in the page I write and I
     glimpse the branches the wind passes
there will be no more summer only the sun that devours memory
     and the great night comes with its sand that covers our eyes
          and we can only read what was not written




{ Guillermo Sucre, La vastedad, Ciudad de México: Editorial Vuelta, 1988 }

Con los ojos de la penumbra: Notas sobre la poesía de Guillermo Sucre / Gabriela Kizer

With the Eyes of the Penumbra: Notes on the Poetry of Guillermo Sucre

Photo: Lisbeth Salas

From his personal stamp in the “Testimonio” of the literary group Sardio to his essays on Latin American poetry, and throughout the six collections of poetry he has published so far, Guillermo Sucre has investigated the complexity of the poetic fact (action): his searches, the tensions in his relationship with reality, language and the literary tradition. As en essayist, the writer frequently channels the poetry reader’s attention towards the plot and resonance of texts; only in that plot, in those forms —he tells us— could we find the poet: his imaginary and irreducible I, created and transmuted in the word, conditioned to (impassioned by) it. This annotation allows us to glimpse two traits that María Fernanda Palacios has pointed to in her essay on Sucre’s poetry: impersonality and marginality. Perhaps in these is where the poet’s temper is measured: his equal mistrust of subjective and emotional emphasis and of all aesthetic pretensions (illusions); his anxiety for a “rigorous consciousness, trembling with lucidity and with demands”; his eccentricity or way of being in the margins (“those who write to stand out / not to find an exit —is there an exit?”), his critical passion.

The occasion only allows me to note certain essential images, and to barely sketch the way these are prepared and move through his books. If we attend to the chronological order, Mientras suceden los días (1961) begins with an epigraph from Octavio Paz: “Words that are flowers that are fruits that are acts.” This succession, besides showing how within the events of the poem what is different is reconciled and blended, invites us to conceive of the image as a center of energy: it opens a field in which words, things and acts exist (to name is to be, to do, to become?) in a dynamism that gives way to transfigurations and correspondences. The first verse — “Tied as always to your dark river symmetry that flows in my hands”— already brings the intense line of this poetry: can the speaker be tied (prevented from moving) to the flow of a river in his hands? And can that dark river possess the attribute of symmetry? It can. The climate in the penumbra, memory and instant, fire and water, flow and crepitation. Each field is worthy of the other. In fixity we grasp the movement capable of deploying life (the “insaciable copulation”) of desire. But that “motionless vigor” is also a “devouring transmutation of forces,” a “vast dementia.” And under the sign (fate) of the vastness, the dilated space exposes the lovers, and the solitary voice that reveals them, to “what is most real,” to the ancient and secret air of the roots of the earth or the stars or the middle of nothingness. With everything, the force that precipitates also tempers itself. A lucid lamp, thoughtful, hesitant, will simultaneously be a calmness, the containment of an intimacy and a vigil, all continuous in Sucre’s poetry. Under this light, consciousness tests and inquires from the word — “language of exile.”

Exile, referring to the situation of language in poetry, perhaps alludes to a condition that submits it to displacement, to the loss or absence (from the world, from reality, from life?), by which it ceases to be a blind custom in order to plunge into the consciousness of itself. This distancing is elucidated in La mirada (1970): as the (dis)encounter between the act of seeing and what is seen or named transpires, the verse prolonged “with spells” of Mientras suceden los días is provoked; thus the poet, just as he wants to “make the transparency” in which the beauty of the world shines, recognizes himself in the split: “I suffer the hypnosis, refraction, / dilation / of another glance I no longer am. / And from this mirage perhaps my language appears.” But that language, originating in an optical illusion full of magnetism, in the glance of the other (the stone, the wave, death also plot his vision), in the permutation of a personal manner of seeing the world for another in which the I and what no longer is are equally the object of a glance that likewise is unable to be what it contemplates. That language, does it reach a certain reality? Does it lose the world when it dilutes itself within it? What is it able to do, what does it name, what does the word consumate or consume in the poem? “If we truly exist” —asks the writer in Serpiente breve (1977)— “why do we believe ourselves to be illusory?”

In his poetry collection En el verano cada palabra respira en el verano (1976) the glance becomes figuration on the page. A news sense of space disperses and interrupts the signs, condenses or spaces the lines, makes verse and prose coexist. Although what most concerns the poet never ceases to display, as Lezama Lima would say, its “enigmatic reverso” (in helplessness, happiness; in plenitude, dispossession; in disdain, humility; in sharpness, the invisible; in pride, humiliation; in splendor, death), refuses or attenuates the vertiginous succession we alluded to at the beginning: words “are not big flowers that are beasts (that are solitary suns I think).” A type of suspension or interregnum that is filtered with the breathing of the summer, of insomnia, occasions a certain subtle and profound transformation whose vibration is propagated into La vastedad (1990) and La segunda versión (1994). One could point out the emergence of another light or of the “fair dominion” of a light that has been weaving itself with penumbra, “with the eyes of the penumbra,” as if the glance, less dazzled by the glimmers, less blinded by the splendor, incorporated zones of shade and of pause that strip it (relieve it?) of the spectral; also the radical experience of the present merges with memory in an instant of unprecedented beauty: “you lift your eyes not as though you are about to see the afternoon: as though returning from already having seen it.” It’s difficult to give an account of the strange tone that memory has in this poetry, but undoubtedly it ends up configuring that “place without place” which is the vastness, since the poem that “wants to drift / forgetting it is only words” is always marked for a coming back, a return where exile is served: “to come back is not to take shelter in the house / but instead to get lost in the long memory of the house.” We could add that in this movement the voracious and annihilating force mitigates itself in a solicitude of veracity which is not an affirmation but an erasure (“a page you are writing by erasing it”). Experience of space, it is clear, and a no less profound and abysmal experience of time: in what unravels us, the task of “unsaying and contradiction;” in what we are ceasing to be, the recurrence of the mistake, the return to the origin, to “what must be written anew.”

José Balza, in his study of Guillermo Sucre, after expressing the company and consolation of what for him a book like La segunda versión means in these times of hatred and opprobrium, discerns that “secret earth,” the suffering Venezuela that comes like a rumor from the first poetry collection, now illuminated —intuited, pressed— in its pugnacious, violent, dramatically contradictory, even unthreaded plot. It is superflous to say how disturbing and moving the following image is, the desolation by which we inhabit it today: “The howling of lights rises; changes / the scene; the guards, the high walls / even higher; the cells open / or close to a lost and / empty space. No one will be able to leave anymore. / The night has laid down sordidly once again / once again the streets in solitude / shine in the threat and the knife.”




{ Gabriela Kizer, Papel Literario, El Nacional, 2 June 2013 }

La poesía de Sánchez Peláez se lee en imágenes / Carmen Victoria Méndez

Sánchez Peláez’s Poetry Is Read in Images

Photo: Manuel Sardá

Twelve artists reinterpret the author’s work by means of the languages of contemporary art. The group show combines media such as installation, video, assemblage and photography.

“I don’t want to swell up with words,” wrote Juan Sánchez Peláez. The verse exists not only in the verbal sense, but also in the physical world, at least starting this week, when the artist Ricardo Báez reveals the installation with the same title that forms part of the group show Antología visual [Visual Anthology] that the gallery GBG Arts will dedicate to the poet starting tomorrow, with the participation of 12 artists curated by Alicia Di Pasquale.

Each artist reinterpreted a poem by the author in a visual manner, through media such as assemblage, video installation, video art and photography. Báez’s piece is placed in the entrance of the gallery and functions as a threshold between the world of the word and that of the image. The artist codified the alphabet in a scale made with black ceramic bars. In this system, the letter “A” is 2 centimeters tall; “B,” is two centimeters taller; and thus successively, until reaching “Z,” which is 52 centimeters long.

This was the method he found to translate the text into the language of minimalist, abstract and three-dimensional art. “Since I was formed in the world of design and typography, I’m interested in seeing how the letter can be represented in another form and how poetry can be turned into an object.”

Sánchez Peláez’s text “The Circle Opens” sent the photographer Daniel Benaím to the series The Fix Is In. “I read several poems and couldn’t find a relation between my work and the poetic oeuvre. Until I stumbled on this phrase: “[...] can’t you hear as if there were a great breeze in the branches, can’t you hear the senseless words of a mandolin? May the happiness we had and the plateau return.” These words took me to New York, where I created a series that has to do with natural spaces I rescue from the urban.”

Rosario Lezama approached the artist’s work through painting, assemblage and video. Her piece Reconstrucciones deals with the topic of migrations and transculturalism. “I remembered that I had a friend who was giving Spanish classes to groups of children from China. It seemed interesting to me that some of the lessons they received include poems by Sánchez Peláez. I chose a short one and we had the children recite it.”

Marco Aguilar translated the poetry into stains by means of video and photography. He did it based on conversations with poet friends. The artist achieves a parallelism between the way authors choose words and the composition techniques of the work of art.

José Vívenes relates the assemblage El grito (de los mutilados) [The Scream (of the mutilated)] with “Experiencias menos objetivas” [Less Objective Experiences], a text based on the painter represents by cutting out the image of the characters he portrays. Sandro Pequeno made a visual synthesis with several poems by Sánchez Peláez in which the word “corazón” [heart] is repeated, and which he reinterpreted in a series of glass pieces. The installation also includes recordings of the honored poet reading his verses. Alfredo Herrera, a poet and visual artist by profession, will exhibit a monotype accompanied by a recording in which a fragment of Sánchez Peláez is heard.

Nayarí Castillo, Efrén Rojas, Michael Roy and Joaquín Urbina also participate in the collective show whose conceptual axis was to encompass the greatest quantity of media possible. “What can we do with literature in such a visual world was our premise,” says Di Pasquale.




{ Carmen Victoria Méndez, El Nacional, 29 May 2013 }

Falleció el trujillano que hacía poesía para descubrirse / Michelle Roche Rodríguez

The Man from Trujillo Who Made Poetry In Order to Discover Himself Has Died

The author of Los ritos received the National Prize in Literature
in 1980. Sunday marked a week that he had been hospitalized.

Last weekend, death took away a veteran of Venezuela’s main literary avant-garde groups: Francisco Pérez Perdomo. After a week in the hospital, on Sunday morning the man who spent his life seeking himself in poetry died.

“I write with the conviction that as I do it I continue to discover myself and others (...) You can’t write just for the sake of pure narcissistic delight. Pure poetry is an aberration. I think poetry should definitely have a projection: it is the testimony of a human being who needs to communicate, if not, he wouldn’t publish,” he told El Nacional in 1988, during an interview for the book Los ritos.

The poet born in Boconó, in the state of Trujillo, in 1930, became known in the Venezuelan cultural scene during the decade of the sixties, thanks to his participation in literary groups such as La Mesa Redonda, Sardio and El Techo de la Ballena. Twenty years later he received the National Prize in Literature, in 1980. In the nineties he was named the director of the Revista Nacional de Cultura.

His poetry collections include Fantasmas y enfermedades (1961), Círculo de sombras (1980), El sonido de otro tiempo (1999), La casa de noche (2001), Antología mínima (2003) and Eclipse (2008).

His work was marked by the presence of the spiritual. In an interview published in Papel Literario on 6 July 1980, he was described with the phrase “the temptation of darkness,” because death, or more specifically what goes beyond the human, was his constant obsession.

“What is eternity, an abrupt cut or a prolongation of life?,” the poet asked himself in that article. And while the literary world mourns, Pérez Perdomo begins to answer the question that marked his life.




{ Michelle Roche Rodríguez, El Nacional, 28 May 2013 }

Desde la eternidad / Francisco Pérez Perdomo (1930-2013)

From Eternity

Under the shade of that
millenary tree, eccentric,
taciturn and feeble,
with wrinkled skin,
he looked toward the immensity.
The music of the spheres
dropped to what could
be men, errant,
whose qualities dared
decipher the future. Nothing
could be done in this sense.
The future was a fate
that never let itself be deciphered.
Falling in their own traps
were the majority of human
beings, simple,
who were thus anxious.
The dreams of fate were
different and diverse
in their nature. We could never
know anything
about our voluble and fickle life.
An enormous wing of silence
was moving through the heads
of men. A somber
peace then appeared
over them, among us.
They were merely dreams seeking,
among men,
their immortality. Despite
that, there were shades
wrapped in their coat
fluttering backwards,
on the other side of the moon.
An unknown and variegated eye
observed him, fixed,
from eternity.




Francisco Pérez Perdomo (Boconó, 1930 - Caracas, 2013)




{ Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Eclipse, Edición de autor: Caracas, 2008 }

El festín de los buitres / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Feast of the Vultures

     He had lost the sense of safety and daring after sacrificing his wife. He had surprised her in an interview with the enemy and inflicted death upon her without hearing the first explanation.

     He had been left alone and nearly inert. The migratory tribe had succumbed in the dispute with the regular armies. The survivor had no other goods besides his horse and a cart entrusted to the strength of his dogs where he would take shelter from the rain. He would have died of hunger had he not dared to eat the uncultivated roots and the food gypsies made the most of in their indigent diet.

     At each instant he received a warning from fate. He eventually ceased recognizing the noise of his own steps and he spun on his feet to defend himself. An apparition would tend to interrupt his sleep, violently destroying the door of his home amid the dismayed pack of hounds.

     The outlaw decided to abandon himself to the mercy of events. He fortuitously came across a pitiful beggar on the day he fell prisoner and was victimized. Old age had turned her into a crane with crutches.

     The beggar wanted the end of the continuous war, where she had lost her sons, and she lent herself to the task of spy.

     The victors arrived through different routes and dispersed the final gesture of defense. They injured it to satisfaction.

     The beggar limited herself to sealing the hero’s face with a fistful of dirt.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

El clima del nopal / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Climate of the Nopal

     The hermit narrates the events and incorporates himself to the army of lacerated and hopeless characters. He confesses himself the author of at least one rapture and suggests, by means of a living elocution, the fright of running away at full speed, within reach of the stones and bullets.

     He pretends to be dedicated to the memory of Mercedes, who would constantly censure his youth and the author, once she died, of his retreat from the century and of his repentance and humility.

     He describes the farm where she passed from this life and was left on her back, without help or company. A gust from the north would break the big windows at each step, dispersed the perfume of the incense and extinguished, in front of the ivory crucifix, a candle with faded light.

     He goes on to celebrate his irrevocable purpose of living as a penitent, from that moment forth, in the hole of the mountain, amidst a scanty and ashen weeds.

     The hermit concludes his discourse and surprises me by mentioning his companions and the reproach of his lateness. He convenes them by means of a copper whistle.

     I saw myself threatened, in a limited space, by a wheel of aimed rifles. I couldn’t raise my voice amid the uproar of the knaves.

     The captain persuaded them to respect my life and he took me out safely along cliffside roads, without abandoning the monk’s habit, and appropriating all my money and the promise to sail the return to my homeland.

     He was shooting his gun against some birds of prey gathered, above me, in a furious scramble.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

El viaje en trineo / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Journey by Sled

     The copper and silver lay buried in a sterile zone, where vegetables reached a scant arborescence. The tiny birch tree and the lichen could not manage to liven the vista.

     A continental river remained paralyzed by the ice for more than half the year. A few unformed boats, of rudimentary art, were falling apart amidst the strict climate. The authors of their fabrication gathered the pieces by means of hemp ropes, without the aid of iron. Those ships traveled heavily balancing their three masts in the livid air.

     Apathetic men, dressed in reindeer skins, they were waiting at the mouth of the river. Some birds of sordid beaks were tearing apart in their presence the corpse of a polar whale.

     Those unkempt men were dying from filth and scurvy. They were not accustomed to using salt and they would eat fish without gutting them.

     I had arrived to that place while carrying out an order from the British government. I had to spy the activities of the Muscovite agents, who were insistent in our destruction. I had laboriously adopted the customs and languages of those uncultured nations and nobody would have distinguished me from among the Mongolians with saffron-colored faces.

     I immediately noticed the ineptitude of our enemies. They had not yet discovered the method for applying to the industry of armor the metals treasured in the ground.

     A few riders from the Caucus had penetrated the territory of an innocent tribe caught off-guard, subject to the uncertain authority of the emperor of China and careless in paying him the tribute of forty jackets made of white fox fur. He was said to be a devotee of the infernal spirits that take refuge in a mountain made of sand.

     I persuaded the tribe to resist the invaders by lavishing money and firewater. I gathered a crowd together armed with pikes and walking sticks and I led it towards an assault against a small redoubt of wood where the enemy was hiding. The czar neglected the inferred amends to his servers and he incorporated them to his guard of honor.

     I procured to increase my knowledge in the natural sciences when I convinced myself of the incapacity of our rivals in the dominion of Asia. I headed towards a place made famous by the discovery of Antediluvian animals. On that occasion I started a friendship with a Russian naturalist, born on the Baltic coast and educated at Riga.

     Along with his university preparation he displayed the credulity and superstition of a pope. He would become copiously drunk to celebrate Sunday and he’d roll on the ground letting out an exhausting hiccup. He would habitually ingest a black bread, sour, aromatized with anise and cumin and sprinkled with a caustic sauce.

     He realized, notwithstanding, the reason for my visit through that desert and he could frustrate my forced labor.

     He had awakened my jealousies by telling me about the discovery of a new breed of cedars from Siberia.

     I managed to poison him during the course of his drunkenness, giving him as a meal the meat of a mammoth fossil.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

Miércoles de ceniza / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

Ash Wednesday

     She stands out amidst the contest of the naïve faithful for the severe majesty her faded beauty enacts. The final gala of youth appears with the sorrowful splendor of the afternoon, and her hair grows dry and is turned white by the implacable autumn that tears out the tremulous leaves. The melancholic memories of her youthful years suggest the nostalgia of splendid celebrations in a stately, abandoned castle, and to darken her eyes with tears comes, in the antechamber to old age, a message from the radiant past in the memory of antiquated music.
     Oblivion, relentless sentinel, guards her window, and before her no longer succumb the pleading demands, like murmuring and humble waves at the foot of an inaccessible rock. Her soul avoids mundane agitation, and moderated by disappointment, flies like the swallow in mourning to gather itself in the mystical atmosphere of the temple. There she remains captive to the music that surges and dilates like the slow smoke of the incense, and she abominates the century amidst a rumor of funereal Latin.
     Her soul has been occupied by the thought of what is divine and immortal since the mirror for her faded beauty received the pessimistic censure of the skull, and since then she dresses with the somber colors that symbolize the desolation of our life and are proper for lamenting the unavoidable ruin of time. The insult of the years does not darken the mirror of her eyes that shine with living splendor, as though by virtue of a perennial rite. They lend her face a religious gravity and exhibit it exhausted and penitent as though her life extenuated the cult of a dour numen.
     Repentant of profane colloquies and avid for sorrows, she keeps the confidence of her troubles for the inflexible cross. By wishing for her forehead, in pious imitation, the crown of bloody thorns she drives away the memory of celebrations. To expiate mundane illusions she satisfies the extreme of the amendment and elevates above the desert of her life, to light the rest of her journey, the candle of cadaveric light.


Translator’s Note: This poem was first published on 21 October 1917 in the Caracas magazine La Revista.




La torre de Timón (1925)




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

Caracas a través de Los impresentables de Raymond Nedeljkovic / Caneo Arguinzones

Caracas Through Raymond Nedeljkovic’s Los impresentables

Photo: YVKE Mundial

Raymond Nedeljkovic (Caracas, Venezuela, 1979). Undergraduate degree in Literature from the Central University of Venezuela (UCV). At this institution he participated in the workshops given by professors Luis Felipe Castillo and Rodrigo Blanco Calderón. In 2010 he was a member of the fiction workshop at Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, under the direction of Carlos Noguera. He received honorable mention in Fiction in the Semana del Estudiante UCV 2002 contest, and third place in Poetry in the 2008 edition. He was the Coordinator of the newspaper about journalism Palabra y Media (2005) and of the web page of TeleSUR TV station (2006-2008). He currently works as an editor for the team of the Presidential Press of the Ministry of Communication and Information. With Los impresentables he won the VIII Contest for Work by Unpublished Authors, in the category of Fiction, as well as the Municipal Prize for Literature 2012.

How did you get started in literary matters?

My beginnings in literature go back to the student contests at UCV: while I was there I received and honorable mention in Fiction and a third place in Poetry, I think around 2007. But my big opportunity came later, with the Contest for Works by Unpublished Authors at Monte Ávila Editores in 2010, when I won the Fiction category. It was my first publication, and at the end of that same year I was a finalist for the contest at the Society for Authors and Composers of Venezuela (SACVEN), that publishes the winners and the ten first runners-up in an anthology.

What was the creative process like for composing your book?

It’s hard to assume the task of the writer, to maintain the constancy, the discipline and to maintain the habit of writing. I think one writers and the book continues on its own, it speaks for you, and beyond that is where the writer exists. The book makes its own way. The short stories in Los impresentables are written from around 2005 onwards: I had a series of stories compiled when I was finishing my undergraduate degree in Literature, I was blocked with the topic for my senior thesis, I didn’t know what to do. Then it occurred to me to write one in the area of creative writing and so I approached Luis Felipe Castillo, who was my professor at that time and later became my tutor. I began to work from there: I gathered these stories, made a selection and forced myself to have the discipline to rewrite several of them that were half-finished. From that point emerged what forms the base of this book.

Does Los impresentables follow a certain structure?

Caracas gave this book its form. It’s a book that traverses the city, that’s how I’d define it: what gives it unity throughout most of it is the urban stories, about the reality of the capital city, and to a certain degree one’s own experience as a citizen of Caracas. I think there’s quite a bit of violence in my stories, acts of violence occur in about half of them, maybe more, it’s a violent Caracas. Maybe because the book has a great deal of autobiographical elements, and at the time I wrote those stories it touched me quite intensely, in a personal way. But of course, it’s only one focus out of many that can be given to Caracas.

How does the violence of Caracas traverse the short stories of Los impresentables?

It’s the violence we see in Caracas on a daily basis, but also the political violence, like the one we lived during the events of the Caracazo, something we see reflected in the story “Disfraz de zombie” in which the protagonist narrates how he was a victim of the police repression that was unleashed during those days. [Translator’s note: The Caracazo was a spontaneous, popular uprising on February 27, 1989 in Caracas.] In stories such as “Coleccionista de ventanas” we see a Caracas where president Bill Clinton appears, along with a phrase he said when he arrived at the airport: “Todo está chévere en Venezuela” [“Everything’s cool in Venezuela”]; a quotation that I employ in order to reveal the Venezuela that was asleep during those days, when politics were presented as a mere spectacle. It’s a Caracas that isn’t necessarily the one we know today, since other stories take place in the Caracas of 1967 and, actually, they’re inspired by a story my mom always tells me about the jewelry shop Francia. It’s a Caracas in various time periods. “Apenas una niña” is a very harsh story about that daily violence the world’s capital cities suffer, in which I explore the theme from the vantage point of a child’s tenderness, but when the protagonist is already an adult: it’s the memory of what she was when she suffered that traumatic event, when she was barely a child.

Why write short stories?

The other day I read an interview with a literary critic and he was speaking about a writer, whom I prefer not to name, who’s published a couple books of short stories; the critic said that this writer had reached a mature level and was ready to write a novel. I don’t see it that way, I think that a short story is a perfect version of itself, it’s not something that needs to mature. In my case, short stories are perfect for what I want to tell, for several reasons: brevity, tension, the depth I’d like to give my characters... above all starting from William Carlos Williams, one of the poets I most admire, and in whose poetry I’ve always seen as being very narrative. He’s a big influence on this book, a language that always seeks simplicity, closeness, intimacy in some form, and that believes in the power of poetry as an exercise in contemplation. I tried to imbue my stories with these elements.

How has it been to publish your first book through Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana’s Contest for Work by Unpublished Authors?

When you see your own book in bookstores you feel a certain form of obligation. It’s a big deal to be published. The positive aspect of it? To meet a stranger who’s read your book and makes a good comment about it, people who identified with the things you wrote, knowing that what you wrote meant something to them. It seems incredible to me to turn any corner —I’m speaking about Caracas, which is the city where I live— and find a Librería del Sur with more and more books and a greater variety of authors, and finding a convocation for literary contests, organized by the State in its multiple cultural and editorial organisms. In all the events the State organizes, like the International Book Fair, for example, you can see the access that many voices didn’t have previously; voices that are now revealing themselves and didn’t before. It seems very valuable to me, everything that’s been promoted in regards to culture in the most recent years of the Bolivarian Revolution. From each space there’s a struggle, mainly to confront a model and some characters who were very comfortably installed in their reality, and who didn’t seem to want to give space to what burst onto the scene, which is the opening and the access to culture for more people. And I say to confront, but to confront with ideas, with arguments, to try to convince without exclusionary ideas, so as to not damage what’s advancing: a greater inclusion, a wider dissemination of culture and literature. But it’s complicated, because there are two forces struggling against each other and you’re there trying to mediate, to offer ideas, to defend the things you believe in.




{ Caneo Arguinzones, Monte Ávila Editores Latinoamericana, May 2013 }

El justiciero / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Righteous Man

     I was a rigorous prelate. My authority weighed without contemplation over a fortified district. My palace governed the frontier river, of irregular course, altered by the precipice and the cavern. My standard, in the figure of a triangle, emitted with vigorous accent the concert of escarpments, redoubts and watchtowers.

     I wanted to impose, in their precise signification, the goat’s thorns of my coat of arms.

     I would be especially harsh with crimes of condescension and of frailty. I lived immersed in the ventilation of the problem of grace and free will, and was subtracted to the spell of sensible nature.

     I ordered the inhumane punishment of stoning when I became aware of the case of nun who had fallen in love and I remained impassive to the pleas of her kneeling relatives.

     The unfortunate woman walked to the place of punishment to the compass of a deaf music and carrying in her right hand the candle of penitence.

     I grew ill from an incurable disease when I received, on the next day, the visit of the victim’s progenitor. The old man had learned, in the company of birds, an affectionate art. He lived, until that moment, on the edge of a grove within the vicinity of nightingales, and he had defended them from the innate malice of the sparrow hawk.

     The birds had referred to him, in trills and chirps, the story of that ancient enmity, noted, from the dawn of history, in more than one venerable theogony.

     The old man was strumming the bass-viol of a philharmonic angel, seen by me in a miniature allegory of paradise.

     His reprimands, at the moment he walked away, demolished my severity.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

La guerra / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

War

     The man of rudimentary intelligence went out to hunt far from his inundated plain, at the start of the day in a primitive age.

     He guided his steps to a canyon of volcanic origin, inhabited by tense dragons and deformed and lazy birds.

     He chose, during the trajectory, the most solid stones, to arm his sling.

     He emitted screams with the greatest strength, using his hands as a loudspeaker.

     Another man appeared, dressed in a sheepskin coat and ready for the fight. He was vociferating from the top of a hill. His face was lost in the forest of hair and beard.

     The combat lasted, without being decided, for an indefinite amount of time. Trickles of blood were painting the face and chest of the rivals.

     A woman cautiously falsified the defender’s foot and precipitated him from the heights. She was avenging herself for an abject submission.

     The victor takes her under his authority and imposes upon her shoulders the sum of the plunder. He guides her towards the plain through a brief slope.

     He is unconcerned for the overwhelmed back and the bloody feet of the captive.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

El knut / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Knout

     Secular servitude inhibited, for generations, the thought of the peasants.

     They would allow themselves to be thrashed without objection or protest. Their masters would cut their hair unevenly and multiply them by joining them together in pairs without consulting their will.

     I attended one of those weddings. The peasants and their women had become intoxicated with a virulent alcohol and they danced holding hands to the sound of an elemental music. Many of them would fall face first onto the naked ground, stammering a song. The lord could not suppress his loud laughter.

     They ate from wooden vessels a glutinous flour, of acidic flavor, and would remain choked up for the rest of the day.

     They worked faithfully and with plenty of carelessness and clumsiness in exchange for a scant salary and they would rest on the lawn of the parks. The police would interrupt their nocturnal sleep with blows from swords.

     The winter’s first snow was enough to exterminate the multitude of the dispossessed. They left piled together in carts to the outskirts of the city where they were incinerated without waiting, at any time, for them to die. The official at the civil registry didn’t bother to keep an account of the deaths. The peasants ignored if they had a name and answered to any nickname whatsoever.

     The chance of a rainfall afforded me the knowledge of a maiden from that throng. I was captivated by her defenseless gesture and her lymphatic blandness. She would part her uncombed blonde hair in the middle of her forehead. She had taken refuge under a colonnade of my house.

     Her brother, a character with an exhausted complexion and a wild and precocious beard, came to defend her from my treachery.

     I decided to avenge myself for their resistance by increasing their misfortune. I went to the chief of the garrison, my companion in Bacchanalian life, and persuaded him to the conscription of the young man.

     That officer, of aristocratic origin and select education, had gained renown for being severe in discipline and insensible to the suffering of others. He would entertain himself imposing dilacerating beatings. The soldiers would return ethical to their homes.

     The young recruit came to be counted among the enemies of a tyrannical superior. The oficial had died after ingesting, with his soup, fragments of glass.

     I forced the suspicions directed against the destitute man and improved the defense of his companions.

     He was declared the author of the homicide and sentenced to fustigation. He passed to a suburb, where the soldiers cleared a path and discharged against him quite a few energetic lashes. The recruit was dragged, this way and that, tied to a rifle armed with its bayonet, by which he could wound himself with any evasive movement.

     The screams of the victim chilled the executioners with fear. The lashing uncovered in no time the skeleton.

     The task lasted close to an hour, when the regiment’s doctor interposed himself to discern the pulse and certify death.

     The recruit’s sister, forced to appear, fainted during the course of the punishment.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

La conseja de los alabarderos / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Council of Claqueurs

     The king’s minister had accused the selfish purposes of the cardinal who was muddied by pleasures. At every moment they would confront each other, animated by a venomous hatred. They had been born in the heart of the same dynastic family. Their servants had squabbled at the foot of a prison tower.

     The cardinal, accustomed to seduction, had insinuated an unworthy discourse in the mind of the minister’s daughter, under the secret of confession. He did not prosper in his evil, but instead emerged disillusioned and offended.

     He chose a second route for the disgrace of his antagonist and directed the passions of the frivolous king in prejudice of the inflexible woman.

     The minister is disposed to the defense of honor and suffers in his person and property. He does not survive, in the cell’s darkness, the amputation of the ears and the tonsure, legal affronts of the falsifiers.

     The minister’s daughter faints in the hands of a few innoble religious ladies. She hears the reference to her misfortune in the risible serenade of those partial to the cleric. She is lost in conjectures and hallucinations and discovers a gathering of capering rats around the butterfly of light. They dance back to back and prance about, in the manner of witches.

     The religious ladies persuade her to immobility and to the abandonment of her resistance. They announce to her the decease of her progenitor and show her the needle used to sew her shroud and destined to join together the curtains of her prisoner’s bed.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

El musulmán / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Muslim

     The mosque had tumbled to the ground during the extermination of the faithful.

     The blond pirates had mutilated its towers and covered over the decorative letters where the name of the prophet could be read with stucco. They mocked the filigree conceived and realized by our ancestors in a series of enthusiastic centuries.

     The muezzins, humiliating their foreheads in the dust, announced the cloud of bloodthirsty falcons.

     They arrived after a voyage of six months, lucid and with their skin peeling from the scorching heat of the torrid seas. The wind was dividing into whistles as it ran between the tense sails. The cabin boys were blowing the sirens, hanging from the masts with agility.

     We didn’t dare fight them on the coast, choosing rather a clearing with easy access for our cavalry. We were utterly slaughtered. Our heroes had mad faith in a spectacular battle, of steel crossed in singular combat. The flame of the iron wits vanquished the frank resolve and matted the floor with the victims and plunder of a
simoom.

     My older brother was left among the prisoners and suffered a sad fate.

     The victors chose him as a target for their pistols. His corpse, hung from its feet, rotted for several days amidst a swarm of crepuscular jackals. He had dared, despite his manacles, to challenge a principal chief.

     I discreetly visited the mosque of our devotion, before departing from my captive soil, and I rescued my brother’s relics, paying the victor for them with the present of a few antique arms and a sumptuous quilt. The muslin, elastic and transparent, would pass through a needle without crumpling.

     I chose for my exile the home of a neighboring town. A voluble plant, captive of our jungles, weaves itself around a dry tree and adorns it with its scarlet flowers. I brought it with me to keep in memory of my house.

     I requested service in a flotilla of pearl fishermen and I traverse a crystalline gulf.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

El entierro / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Burial

     There was once a keen and conceited young man. He had come from a civil war, exceeding himself in a bloody day’s journey, shedding light upon the martial lineage in the presence of an ambitious caudillo.

     He held in his hands the government of a village.

     He went out one night beyond the village to enjoy a reserved and silent landscape. The moon was peeking over an edge of the sierra.

     The young man distinguished, in the ambiguous hour, the passing of a cortège. A few jokers were leading the way, carrying a bed on their shoulders and announcing the news of a death. They were locals of mischievous lives and alcoholic faces.

     The young man heard his own name upon asking about the deceased. He easily persuaded them to abandon the lugubrious farse and to disperse in demand of their homes.

     They gathered, the next night, for the same diversion within view of the fading moon, and reiterated the warning of the young man’s death. He dispersed them sword in hand, with cuts and insults, and arrested the guiltiest of them.

     A party was given, within a few days, at the home of a rural nobleman.

     The hero was submissively lavishing attention on the beautiful girls and braiding garlands of fleeting flowers for them.

     A massive and disheveled man penetrated the hall and went up to the young man. He came from the wilderness and cliffs and he was venting an indiscreet aggressiveness.

     The unknown man seemed invulnerable to fire arms.

     The struggle was decided with the dagger and concluded, after a few troublesome moments, with the death of both adversaries.

     The locals, of mischievous lives and alcoholic faces, were absolved of their arrest and ordered to take away the young man’s corpse.

     No one was able to identify the importunate one.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

Ricardo Azuaje: Escribir para mí es compulsivo / Eduardo Cobos

Ricardo Azuaje: Writing Is Compulsive For Me

I began writing at around age fifteen, but more seriously at nineteen. At first, like everyone, I wrote poetry. Then short stories very influenced by García Márquez and by Francisco Massiani. The latter was a voice that felt very close to me; he had a big impact on me when I read him between the ages of sixteen and seventeen: Piedra de mar, Las primeras hojas de la noche and El llanero solitario tiene la cabeza pelada como un cepillo de dientes. Also another Venezuelan writer, Norbith Graterol, with a short novel titled La invención del fuego, which I must have reread several times. There’s Renato Rodríguez with Al sur del equanil, first, and then El bonche. But the truth is I read everything: pulp fiction, many Latin Americans, Julio Cortázar above all. His novel Hopscotch was very important for me for many years, although it’s been a while since I’ve reread it. I also read the Venezuelans from the collection El Dorado from Monte Ávila Editores. I particularly recall Marzo anterior by José Balza; a book by Oswaldo Trejo, También los hombres son ciudades, and Iphigenia by Teresa de la Parra.

In 1978 I left Caracas to study literature at the Universidad de los Andes. I chose the major of Classical Literatures which only had five students enrolled, almost everyone chose Latin American Literature. I was very attracted to the possibility of living alone and changing cities. At the time I was more dedicated to politics than to anything else. However, Mérida was very important because that’s where I began to write seriously. I wrote a first novel in some high school notebooks, which I sent to José Balza. He simply said they were unpublishable, but that the possibility of a writer existed and he encouraged me to keep going. So, as time went on, I published short stories in a few university magazines. I was able to place on in the magazine Zona Franca, then another one appeared in Papel Literario, more or less in the early eighties. But the possibility of publishing a book was given much later.


First Books and Caracas As Sustenance

In the mid-80s my first book of short stories is published, A imagen y semejanza (Monte Ávila Editores, 1986); most of the stories in that collection I had written between Caracas and Mérida, with the exception of “Sanguinela gens,” written in La Gran Sabana. In fact, that was a thicker book. There have also been attempts at long novels, which haven’t been completely successful, because my fiction tends to be short stories that go on much longer or novels that resolve themselves quickly. And really, despite the fact I’ve made a few, I don’t intend to make short novels. Actually, the first one, Juana la roja y Octavio el sabrio (Fundarte, 1991), which is published independently, was going to be included in A imagen y semejanza.

The protagonist of Juana la roja..., Octavio, has a more or less programmed life, he knows he knows he’ll get his Law degree and that he lives with a certain amount of comfort, but he rebels. And this might be one of the most frequent characteristics in what I write: almost all the stories have something like that, at some point the characters become aware of what’s happening and they rebel; they also know that this behavior can lead to failure or calamity, but at the same time they know that, suddenly, they’ll return to their normality, which is to be aware of their surroundings. That rebellion is what makes people more human. Of course, it’s not original at all, we’ve seen it in the stories of Anton Chekov or Raymond Carver, those types of things, common people who suddenly act after a momentary trigger, it illuminates them for a moment and they see life as a series of flashes.

Another constant that’s found there is Caracas. My family came to Caracas in 1972 from the state of Guárico; but in some way or another my entire experience has revolved around this city. So much that when I first left for La Gran Sabana in 1983, I would come to Caracas every two months and spend a couple weeks here, which is to say the contact was permanent. That’s the relationship with Caracas, which has been an important sustenance of what I do; and yet, more than urban texts it has to do with how one lives life here, the unsatisfactory relationships in work and in love, structured life, because in the end you’ll die and nothing will happen. In any case, there’s always an initial idea in my stories, something I want to develop, and if need be I’ll do research. For example, in Juana la roja... I wrote almost from memory about the time period the novel is set in, which is 1982, and I wrote it in 85-86, and I more or less remembered the year of the events in Cantaura. Later I went to the newspaper archives, so the information came after the first draft.
[Translator’s Note: In October of 1982, the Venezuelan military attacked a guerrilla encampment near Cantaura in the state of Anzoátegui, killing 23 people.]

Likewise, with La expulsión del paraíso (Memorias de Altagracia, 1998) there’s some of that. In relation to the fiction of Oswaldo Trejo, to whom I allude in that novel, I tried to read a few essays, but they didn’t help me too much and what I did was take the idea from what I wanted to put into my piece of writing; above all, whatever had to do with my character. The narrator is more cultured, though I try not to make the references too exaggerated; because I think that, in general, no one from our university-educated middle class is extremely cultured, they manage information from newspapers and magazines, television, they have some literary reference that comes from high school, things like that, with exceptions in a few circles of society in Caracas, but they don’t have books as an immediate reference. La expulsión del paraíso is my most literary text and it’s one of the most extravagant ones, because the character’s life is completely changed; the characters in my stories don’t end up doing well; all of them undergo many trials.

Regarding Viste de verde nuestra sombra (Fundarte, 1993), I wrote it more or less during the same time as Juana la roja... and it’s inspired by an issue of the Spanish magazine El Viejo Topo, which included a dossier on the “metropolitan indians,” a radical Italian group that would occupy abandoned buildings. I suppose it was also influenced by the fact that at the time I was living in La Gran Sabana and I was dazzled by what I was learning about the Pemon people. Although I don’t think any of that is reflected in the story. I might have been more influenced by an illustration in the dossier that showed a police officer in riot gear with an arrow piercing his shield, with that we’re already in the story. On the other hand, Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado (1) was written in Caracas during a time when the country seemed to have no future (that no man’s time between the fall of Carlos Andrés Pérez and the second presidency of Rafael Caldera), and I think some of that is reflected in the story and above all in the character. This text appeared in Tenerife, Canary Islands, thanks to the mediation of Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez and Ernesto Suárez, accompanying other short stories, although it also functions as a short novel.


The Art of Rewriting and the Legion Nearby

On another note, writing is actually something compulsive for me, since I can go for months and years without writing; then an idea begins to move around me and I start writing until I achieve something that might be a starting point. I don’t make outlines. And in fact I start stories whose ending I don’t yet know, I really try to be consistent with the anecdote, once it takes off I don’t try to force it. That’s a piece of advice from Cortázar: to be consistent, that the story be credible even if it’s fantastic. That’s why I try to maintain a rhythm. In any case, if I don’t finish a story in one night or in one week, it’s likely that I’ll never finish it and if I do finish it after a long time has passed it will definitely be a bad one. Actually, a few years ago I sent a story to a magazine, I wasn’t convinced it could be published, because I never managed to finish it and I sincerely think I should have never sent it.

That’s where one is left more exposed to criticism. Though I’ve really had a lot of luck with critics considering that if you add up the copies of all the books I’ve published they don’t reach three thousand. And despite this there has been a certain response, I say it because I know of writers who can publish eight or nine books, with readers even, and they don’t have the same resonance. In that regard, the truth is I can’t complain. And I’ve learned a few things from that. Above all because, in some cases, I’ve made myself revise more profusely, to be more responsible with readers, since one can sometimes become a bit arrogant when one has published. Regarding critiques that have pointed out errors in the writing, I’ve given myself the task of rewriting some texts, polishing them a bit more; this is the case with Juana la roja..., which had errors relating to grammar, although I have to say the editors created true disasters. Now that it’s been republished I have revised it and I hope it turned out much better. (2)

People always ask me if I feel I’m part of a generation of writers or novelists; what I think is that there was a group, we didn’t always share the same opinions about literature or about the matter that everyone in this country talks about, which is politics, but that group that wasn’t quite cohesive was interesting. In the 90s we were all working in cultural institutions: the Dirección de Literatura, Monte Ávila Editores, Fundalibro or the Consejo Nacional de la Cultura. And I think chance made it possible for us to know each other because we were all close to the world of books. Even those who weren’t had attended conferences through Fundarte or events that were organized in the book festivals; it was simply impossible not to meet each other. There were ideas about fiction of interest in the group like, for example, those of Slavko Zupcic y Armando Luigi Castañeda. I don’t know if they continue to write bu they, who were the youngest of that cohort, had a writing that was forward-looking. Writers, in many instances, are immersed in the country and express what’s happening, but only on extraordinary occasions do they give clues about what will happen. We’ll have to see if that group or generation, or whatever we might call it, from the 90s, which was very heterogeneous, with very different tendencies, will continue to say things to the country, and if it truly did so at one point.

Notwithstanding, it seems to me that this group belonged to a certain literary tradition. Because I think that in Venezuela we have a strong literary tradition, but one that’s not necessarily tied to the academy. There critics who affirm, many times correctly, that Venezuelan writers don’t know their literary tradition. There is one; but for a writer it can be another one that’s not the national one. A writer, like any Latin American, is formed by reading a Japanese writer or the North Americans, to give an example. There’s a web of dissimilar influences and readings. Many of us who began in the 80s and 90s were influenced by Renato Rodríguez, and we continued to discover him in conversations. Even Rómulo Gallegos has been a reference point for everyone; in this sense I can say there were people who wrote against him. Guillermo Meneses, who was less frequented but had a certain importance, has also been present; there is Julio Garmendia and Salvador Garmendia, the early novels of Carlos Noguera, that are extraordinary, those of José Balza that despite generating so much rejection opened up spaces and influenced other writers; such as Humberto Mata, among others from the house.

That whole tradition of writers I’ve mentioned, regrettably, with specific exceptions, has not been projected outside the country. And maybe that’s one of our writers’ biggest frustrations. Though I think that transcending borders is more of a commercial problem than a literary one. The country’s market can’t sustain a writer because you have to publish abroad and have wider distribution. The truth is I’m convinced the best writers have had to work in other fields since their work has distanced them from the market. There you have William Faulkner, among many others, who didn’t make a living from literature until his final years. Or like the character in La expulsión del paraíso, who when he starts to make a living from what he writes has already betrayed his writing. That’s been the temptation for many writers.

Notes

1. Novel published alongside the short stories “De las mutaciones,” “Carro rojo,” “Puertorrico,” and “Buscando su muerte natural” in the book with the same title: Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado (Canary Islands, Spain: El Lobey Ediciones, 2003; republished by Monte Ávila Editores, 2010).

2. Juana la roja y Octavio el sabrio, Viste de verde nuestra sombra and “Ella está próxima y viene con pie callado” were published in a single volume titled Tres novelas cortas (Universidad de Oriente, 2007).




{ Eduardo Cobos, Letralia, 22 April 2013 }

La poesía de Vicente Gerbasi / Carlos J. Soucre

The Poetry of Vicente Gerbasi

[Canoabo, Carabobo state, birthplace of Gerbasi]

The poets of the Viernes Group burst onto the scene with a solution of continuity in the face of Venezuelan poetry that while already exhausted intended to continue. The poets of that group that left the biggest impression, in my view, were Vicente Gerbasi,Luis Fernando Álvarez, Pablo Rojas Guardia and Otto de Sola; and from outside Viernes, the also excellent Juan Sánchez Peláez, as I see it, the only truly surrealist poet that Venezuela has produced. In the Viernes Group, only a few passing traces of the movement created in France by André Breton were noted, while Sánchez Peláez had ties to the Chilean surrealist group Mandrágora. He displays a poetic writing where one notices a flow of oneiric character, although not strictly emanating from automatic writing. He reveals a beautifully arbitrary writing, surprising and magical images, distant and dissimilar realities that approximate each other by means of associations, like Pierre Reverdy wanted, and which reason or logic would refuse to relate together. It is well known that logic is for rational thought. After Viernes, other very valuable poetry groups emerged with Tabla Redonda, the Sardio Group and later on El Techo de la Ballena, who continued to offer us a poetry with which Venezuela could, and can, exhibit itself with dignity before the intellectual world of this America. We don’t present these notes as a critic, since we are by no means one, but rather as a mere being who is sensible or... sensitive. (“The critic is a subject that enters into a matter that does not concern him,” Mallarmé said.) The poets of the Viernes Group were opposed by poets and men of letters from the so-called Generation of 42, slaves to precepts, versifiers, minstrel singers, ludics, makers of sonnets, compositions that had already been exhausted as well in the Spanish language by the great poets of Modernismo. Jokes were also made at the expense of Viernes; we recall that a good poet from the Generation of 18, a very dignified person, said with the grace that distinguished him, and noting the dreamful nature of his friend Vicente Gerbasi, that the latter should be named “Registrar of a cloud,” and someone else, also a poet, wrote a few jovial verses with the following title: “Responsary to the Viernes Group.” This made me think of the following impertinence: This one’s going to face the same thing as Mozart, who also composed a Responsary that later turned out to be for himself.

Well, then. Gerbasi’s poetics is signed by a lyricism toward the landscape and everything from there that surrounds him, surprising, luxurious images, a language not so much constructed as made by the effects of resonances, with an occasionally metaphysical treatment. For example: surrounding death, that mystery that obsesses him along with life in his masterful poem “My Father, the Immigrant” and from the famous verse: “We come from the night and toward the night we go,” enigmas that have been addressed, as we know, by more than one philosopher. Poetry for him was never an entertainment, a spectacle. Or any of those declamatory and pompous things that versifiers offer. He perceived through the senses those correspondences that Baudelaire spoke of, and which could later be glimpsed in Arthur Rimbaud’s sonnet “Vowels,” and this is how in the poetry of Gerbasi we read verses where he shows us the color of sounds or makes us smell the perfume of the stars. But I don’t claim this was an influence on Gerbasi, but rather that it was already in his sensibility, that’s what he extracted from his senses. Gerbasi is the poet that situates himself in front of things or the landscape as a mystic; the tree, the water, the sun, the animal, the stone, the star, good and evil, being and not being, speak constantly to him of the mystery. He makes from the real a quintessence in which a double dimension of things is accomplished, the real sense and another one that is developed within the spirit. Both states are integrated in a synthesis in which one doesn’t know what is real and what is marvelous. Or everything is marvelous. Those who study that double resonance then notice a being who, without being delirious or in a oneiric trance, is easily transported from one world to another, from a normal state to a privileged one and makes of both worlds, as I said, a symbiosis. Finally, Gerbasi’s poetry is a magical object, it’s not there to be explained because poetry is served exclusively to the senses and to one’s sensibility, and it is only through that faculty that it can be assimilated. There the word doesn’t work like it does in the dictionary or in the essayist’s mind, I mean that the poet doesn’t adhere to or doesn’t remain within the realm of what the word means there, he transcends to the inexplicable. This is all I can say regarding the poetry of Vicente Gerbasi.




{ Carlos J. Soucre, Tal Cual, 20 April 2013 }

La campaña / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Campaign

     I was invited to the exequies of a hunting dog. The nomadic family broke out in agonized laments and described themselves as threatened by penury after the death of that provident server. The women imposed on the men the mission of putting together a brigade and going out in demand of the accused wolves.

     We went into the campaign at the break of the next day. We lacked gunpowder and carried measured canes. The sun appeared very quickly over the ground of snow and turned it into a glassy surface. The snow was thin and the horses would break through it easily to devour the hidden grass. Hunger was devastating the country.

     We ran into the squadron of wild beasts when we rounded the curve of a steep mountain. Some of our riders were dangerously bitten in the tough fight and said they had been infected with rabies. Eight or ten wolves were knocked down and with their spines broken. I was satisfied by capturing a baby cub with red hair.

     We returned to the village after attaining victory and proceeded to curing the wounded by means of cautery. All of them showed signs of melancholia, which is the beginning of the crisis of rabies.

     The women didn’t expect to save the infected ones any other way than by sacrificing my captive as a symbol of their faith, maintained for innumerable generations, since the days of Attila. They adored a sword nailed into the ground, image of strength. They discreetly envied my fortune and once again demonstrated toward me the uncertainty of their dealings. They were capable of advising my loss in the case of ending up better off in a second excursion.

     The wounded recuperated thanks to the sacrifice of my baby cub. They grew content when they saw the signs of my sadness and they let me see the necessity and opportunity to continue my journey. They had pretended, according to my conjecture, to have the symptoms of rabies.

     I abandoned the company of those disloyal hunters and I stepped out with my horse into the uniform country, with the help of a compass.

     A woman wounded me with a stone when I was separating my horse from looking at itself in the mirror of a puddle.




Las formas del fuego (1929)




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

El chavismo y la memoria subversiva de Jesús / Armando Rojas Guardia

Chavismo and the Subversive Memory of Jesus



In light of the efforts to transform Chavismo into a new type of religion, utilizing and instrumentalizing Christian elements and content, it is a moral imperative for me to distinguish this type of unusual religious expression from genuine Christianity, at least in the manner that many men and women in our country and our time understand it and attempt to live it.

1.

The first thing I need to say is that, as a radio listener and TV-watcher, as a reader of newspapers and an Internet user, for weeks I’ve been feeling a deep nostalgia for modernity and for the critical spirit of Enlightenment thought. The excess of religion, of ritual manifestations, of sacred ceremonies and devotedly homiletic speeches that has abounded in Venezuelan public life for months now turns out to be incompatible with one of the most indispensable conquests of the modern world: the secular State, the total laicism of public affairs. That laicism, which has been an essential characteristic of our life as a republic since 1830 and which therefore has decisively permeated our entire historical character as a nation, is being violently assaulted to a degree none of us could have expected by an avalanche of religious symbology mixed in an indisoluble manner with excrescences of magical thinking. I think that, with the exception of a few Islamic theocracies, this isn’t happening in any other country in the world. The symbolic sobriety and austerity that the modern secularization of public affairs imposes when it comes to approaching the religious fact, has come to be exactly that in Venezuela: a nostalgia.

But the fact is the ethical proposal of Jesus of Nazareth is itself incompatible with religion. An historically indisputable phrase by Christ is: “But go and learn what this means: I desire compassion, and not sacrifice” (Mt 9,13-12,7). There, in that phrase, a devastating critique of religion (sacrifice, worship) is suggested in order to privilege, as an anthropological alternative, solidarity, compassion and human fraternity. The religious project finds its reason for being in “the sacred” (a space, a time, a few utensils, a few rites, a few norms), and in “the sacred” as a counterpoint to “the profane,” to the lay and secular. On the other hand, Jesus’s project operates a radical displacement: the way to access God is not through the sacred, but rather through the profane aspect of our relation with fellow man, the ethical relation of service for others to the point of devotion and forgetting oneself. Christ not only showed us, but he incarnated a way —another one—, unprecedented, of living human religiosity. We know of his critical distancing from the two religious instances that mediated, for the men and women of his time and country, the relation to God: the Temple and the Law. Regarding the first, the gospels never mention that Jesus went to the Temple to pray or to participate in any liturgical ceremony. His conduct was never ritualistic: he didn’t find the Father in the sacred space of the Temple nor in the sacred time of religious worship. He went to the Temple because that’s where people gathered and it was to them he directed his message. Jesus Christ spoke with the Father and of the Father in profane, secular time and spaces of life itself, the daily life of the city and countryside. The only violent action Jesus realized was the one he performed in the Temple (Mk 11,15-19; Mt 21,12-17; Lc 19,45-48; Jn 2,13-22) and his contemporaries judged that action as an “attack” against the Temple itself and everything it represented in the Israelite life of his time. In the Gospel of John (4,20-24) we’re told, as a teaching emanated from Christ himself, that neither sacred space, nor the religious ceremonies that are celebrated within it, constitute the adequate place to find God. He is found when one invokes Him “in spirit and in truth” throughout the concrete secularity of existence. And, with regards to Jesus’s conflict with the Law, he gave no importance to the norms of ritual purity (Mk 7,1-17), to prohibitions about food (Mk 7,18-23), to what is stipulated about fasting (Mk 2,18-22), to the social rejection, also legislated, that fell upon public sinners, who were his friends and shared the table with him (Mk 2,15-17), and upon prostitutes (Mt 21,4-31s); he also dispensed with norms regarding the treatment of and cohabitation with women, a group of whom accompanied him permanently (Lc. 8,1-3), some of them having a bad reputation (Lc 8,2). Finally, Christ’s axiom regarding the Law is the following: man is not made for the law but rather the law is made for man (Mk 2,27).

So, this national waterfall of rituals and political speeches that intend to employ Christian symbolism understood in a “religious” manner, not only attempts against the sane laicism of our life as a republic, that we should do everything possible for it to be the most modern (or postmodern) possible, it’s one of the pivots of what Christianity projects for us as anthropology.

2.

I think nothing and no one is less Christian than the rule of a caudillo and a caudillo. Both probably function in Venezuela and in countries neighboring ours as a funest Hispano-Arab inheritance, although other latitudes have known and also know the political dominance of a supposedly providencial man who presents himself as the galvanizer of a collective mobilization. There are very serious exegetes and theologians who affirm that this was the core of one of the great temptations of Jesus; this seems to be the meaning of one of the tests —the third and decisive one— that he faced in the desert during the preamble of his public activity (Mk 1,12s; Mt 4,8-10; Lc 4,1-13): these texts regarding the temptations constitute a tale, not a historical one, but rather a redactional and symbolic one, that wants to illustrate for us what stalked as the possibility of Jesus’s own consciousness going astray throughout his life. I’m speaking of the temptation of power. But with this crucial characteristic: the temptation of power in order to accomplish good deeds. It’s well-known that Israel awaited a political messiah, a warrior who was going to completely do away with the opprobrium and secular oppression of the country and its culture. The four canonical gospels explicitly indicate to us that all of Jesus’s close disciples thought, and they continued to believe it until the very moment of the passion, that Christ incarnated that political messianism, based on power and on the human triumph. After the miracle of the multiplication of bread (Mt 14,13-23; Mk 6,30-46; Jn 6,1-15), the enthusiastic multitude thought that Jesus was the awaited political messiah (Jn 6,4) and, in consequence, they wanted to proclaim him king. Jesus then retires “once again to the mountain, alone” (Jn 6,15). The disciples who identified with the popular enthusiasm didn’t want to lose the occasion for Christ to be proclaimed a political king. This is why both Matthew and Mark point out that Jesus had to “force them” (anagkáso) to get on the boat to leave that place (Mt 14,22; Mk 6,45).

That was the temptation I was referring to: the temptation of power. And it’s a temptation that, as I’ve said, can be clothed in a false consciousness: it is power, yes, but in order to transform it into a factor that multiplies good. And Jesus rejects that specific temptation from an impregnable conviction that he never ceased to explain to his closes followers, those he thought were particularly apt to understand it: the path to power and privilege leads one to keep a “reasonable” coexistence with the agents and factors that organize in this world the suffering and oppression of mankind. Society is not transformed from above (from power and fame) but rather from below (from the unarmed solidarity with those crucified throughout history) (Cf. Mt 16,22; Mk 8,33). From this conviction emerges an implacable denunciation of political power: “You know (...) that those who hold sway as rulers dominate nations as though they were their owners and the powerful impose their authority. This will not be the case amongst you, but rather if any of you want to grow you should become a servant to others” (Mk 10,42-43). And what also emerges is an enormous freedom facing him, facing power: when Jesus is told that Herod —who was the king of Galilee and thus the political chief of the region of Israel to which Jesus belonged— wanted to kill him (Lc 13,31) he tells them: “Go and tell that fox (...) that there is no room for a prophet to die outside Jerusalem” (Lc 13,32). In the Jewish culture of that time the “fox” was considered the animal that didn’t represent anything. Thus, it was as though he were saying: “Go and tell nobody...” And this was the king!

I’m not going to waste my possible reader’s time abounding the obvious: just as Jesus was a layman, not a priest or a professional theologian (as the so-called “lettered men” and scribes were) he didn’t want to be a caudillo. Despite his ascendance among the most impoverished masses of Israel he didn’t want to instrumentalize them with a political objective because for him God was not mediated by power, not any type of power, only by love (that prostituted but essential word). We all know what finally happened: he was assassinated as a “blasphemer” and “political criminal” by the civilian, military and religious authorities of his time. The masses he didn’t want to instrumentalize left him on his own. Completely alone, this man of unpronounceable innocence, tortured and executed as though he were a criminal and a dangerous revolutionary by institutional power, by the intellectual orthodoxy and their henchmen, had already warned his followers one day —those back then and those today—: “See how I’m sending you out as sheep among wolves: therefore be as cautious as snakes and as innocent as doves. But be careful with people, because they will take you to court, they will whip you in the synagogue and they will lead you in front of governors and kings for my cause; thus they will give testimony...” (Mt 10,16-18). Jesus did not live for the cross; when the dynamics of reality imposed it on him, he accepted it and assumed it, transforming it into an option of love, that is, an affirmation of life. This execution, this assassination carried out for religious and political reasons, that infamously crowned a life consumed by disinterested service to others, was left forever transformed into a forceful requisition, in the deepest and most intimate denunciation of any type of power, no matter how much it might try to be canonized.

From the Gospel we Christians inherit a radical suspicion regarding the pretensions of leadership, of important positions, of the supposedly majestic, dazzling aura that seems to surround political and social triumph. If anyone had any doubts whether president Chávez was a caudillo of the most rancid and sad Latin American lineage, observe what they want to do with his passage through history: Chávez ascending into the sky, Chávez enthroned in the altar of a chapel in the 23 de Enero zone of Caracas (called the “Chapel of San Hugo Chávez”), Chávez multiplied in stamps sold at the entrance of churches and plaster busts that, it’s been said, people seek out so they can pray to him in the intimacy of their home, Chávez the second Simón Bolívar, Chávez the new liberator, Chávez the Redeemer, Chávez the “Christ of the poor.” All this would be amusing if it weren’t tragic. Because it’s a matter of an inextricable mixture of magical credulousness and naiveté for many with a deification, a mythologizing, a sacralization orchestrated by those in power. Biblically speaking, it is simply said, an idolatry. From the Christian point of view, it doesn’t make sense. We Christians believe that there has only been, only is and only will be a single messiah. And a crucified messiah. And crucified means that the “utopian” (in the sense Ernst Bloch uses) radical brotherhood of human relations, which is the central tenet of Christianity, can only be realized from the “utopia” of the cross: the total failure implied by the last scream of Jesus’s agony, abandoned by one and all, and which expresses God’s solidarity with history’s humiliated and offended, not from the majesty of power that uses the poor as instruments in order to dominate them —turning them into objects of political marketing— but rather from a solidarity that is defenseless, forsaken and left out in the open air alongside them. The failure of the cross is a counterweight to the heroic-promethean image that we create of the messiah. It doesn’t display any epic traits. The death of Jesus was not that of Socrates, parsimoniously drinking hemlock, accompanied by disciples and friends. His was wrapped in signs of a profound fright: an authentic sense of being horrified by suffering, torture, solitude and death itself which inevitably also seemed to him like the cause and mission of his life.

That identification of Chávez and Christ, being an idolatry and not making sense, was propitiated in more than one aspect by Chávez himself. He never tired of proclaiming that he obeyed the “first and greatest socialist in history.” In vain people responded that this affirmation contained an unforgivable anachronism: Jesus was not a socialist just like he wasn’t an aviator: socialism implies a theory of political, social and economic organization dating from the 19th century, that is, a considerable temporal distance from Christ’s life. It was useless. Until the end of his existence Chávez continued to believe and proclaim this nonsense. As it’s also nonsense, but this time it’s an absurdity that is dangerous because of its political consequences, to affirm —as is being done now by the supposed emulator of the deceased president— that “socialism is the kingdom of God on earth.” Regarding this statement, the following precisions turns out to be necessary: that “utopian” dream (in the worst sense, the etymological one, of the word: “there is no such place”) is found in its own way in Plato’s Republic, in the visionaries of the Fifth Monarchy, in the Medieval apocalyptics, in the anabaptists, in the Puritan theocrats, in the religious sectors of the anarchist movement: all those who have not believed and don’t believe —I’m citing George Steiner almost from memory— in the constitutive fallibility of man, in the permanent imperfection of the mechanisms of power, in the presence of inhumanity and evil within man’s existential condition and his historical achievements. They have believed and believe that the “civitas Dei” should be built now on earth and that a certain fanatical rigor at the service of the revolutionary ideal is indispensable: from there to sustaining that the ends justify the means and that some dose of political terror becomes necessary to obtain the edenic objective of the suppression of all oppression, there’s no more than a step or two.

The Kingdom of God, considered biblically, is a reality whose plenitude is meta and transhistorical, when God, as Paul of Tarsus says,“is in all things.” It is the responsibility of us human beings to progressively and always partially or in an unfinished manner draw closer to that plenitude, organizing the dynamics of history in such a manner that it reach closer to it. Someone might not like the appellative Kingdom of God. Many years ago a friend told me that we Christians should speak, not of the Kingdom but of the Republic of God. To make things clear, I invite the reader to remember that the first poetry collection by Ramón Palomares is titled El reino [The Kingdom]. And the Kingdom of God is a mythopoetic designation to allude to a goal —the sovereignty of God as a fraternal house of human abandonment, a definitive house that is he himself made presence among us— and that indeed we should make an effort to begin constructing here and now, always and at every moment under the threat of those powers that, according to the Gospel of Lucas (22,25), “take away liberty and make themselves be called benefactors” and which are money and the political and religious powers. From the future that goal acts as a constant critical instance that interpolates and questions our always limited and partial achievements, impeding the history and society we build from not remaining open, convening us for the ontological appointment to which we have been called at birth: “It will dry the tears from your eyes. There will no longer be death nor shame nor weeping nor pain. All the ancient things have passed” (Ap 21,4).

To pretend that this ontological convocation will be realized by socialism constitutes, to say the least, a senseless act: “The Kingdom of God should be understood as the Kingdom of Man: this is the theology of totalitarian utopias.” (George Steiner)




Armando Rojas Guardia Venezuelan poet, critic and essayist who played a fundamental role in the foundation of the literary group Tráfico, and who has published numerous collections of poetry and essays, among them Del mismo amor ardiendo (1979), Yo que supe de la vieja herida (1985), Poemas de Quebrada de la Virgen (1985), Hacia la noche viva (1989), "La nada vigilante" (1994) and El esplendor y la espera (2000).

Translator’s note: Armando Rojas Guardia lived at the poet and priest Ernesto Cardenal’s spiritual community Solentiname in Nicaragua during the 1970s.




{ Armando Rojas Guardia, Prodavinci, 2 April 2013 }