PORTABLE COUNTRY: VENEZUELAN POETRY: 1921 - 2001
The first Venezuelan-American
artist I ever noticed was Devendra Banhart. His acoustic albums,
Rejoicing in the Hands and
Niño Rojo, were
a minor revelation for me when I first heard them in December of 2004.
It was during a visit to my family’s house in Florida, and I sat in
my old room playing these records repeatedly for days, feeling a sense
of immediate recognition. Those infinite riches I looped in a little
room for two weeks would eventually have a big influence on my own work.
In the fall of 2003, I had started the blog Venepoetics
with the idea of translating and writing about a handful of Venezuelan
poets. Venepoetics would
turn out to be the beginnings of an anthology called Venezuelan Poetry: 1921-2001. These English translations of twenty
Venezuelan poets are my version of Venezuelan-American folk culture,
hybrid and lo-fi.
Venezuelan
Poetry: 1921-2001 includes a handful of texts each by poets whose
work is emblematic of 20th century Venezuelan literature. It goes without
saying that my selection is incomplete and highly personal. I intend
for it to serve as an introductory sample of poetry from a country that
remains unknown on literature’s global stage. My choices are dependent
on personal taste, as well as what I’ve been able to find during visits
to Caracas between 2001 and 2010. Books from Venezuela rarely circulate
abroad so this makes the task of researching Venezuelan poetry a matter
of ingenuity, PDF files, photocopies, university libraries and contacts
with Venezuelan writers via e-mail, blogs, Facebook and Twitter.
I have chosen
two particular years as reference points for the anthology as a convenient
frame for the 20th century. In 1921, the poet whose work inaugurates
modern Venezuelan literature, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, published his
first book, Trizas de papel [Paper Shreds], a collection of prose poems, essays
and miniature short stories that was later incorporated into a subsequent
book. During his lifetime, Ramos Sucre was acknowledged as a brilliant
and admired poet whose work appeared regularly in Caracas newspapers
and literary magazines. However, his radical reinterpretation of what
poetry might accomplish was not fully understood in Venezuela until
decades after his death. It was only in the sixties, when his work was
championed by younger poets and critics aligned with the counterculture
and the avant-garde, that his reputation as a foundational figure for
Venezuelan literature was established.
In the spring
of 2001, Juan Sánchez Peláez published a handful
of new poems in Verbigracia, the now-defunct literary supplement of the newspaper
El Universal. These would
turn out to be his last published work during his lifetime. Sánchez
Peláez’s first book, Elena
y los elementos [Helen and the Elements],
was a turning point in Venezuelan poetry when it appeared in 1951, serving
as a guide for several generations of avant-garde writers with its ecstatic,
surrealist poems imbued with an oneiric sensuality. Over several decades,
Sánchez Peláez would go on to pare down his work, adopting a more
austere and minimalist style that is exemplified by his elegant final
poems. I interpret his death as representing the end of Venezuela’s
20th century in poetry. I first read Sánchez Peláez
in Providence, RI in 1997 and everything after that encounter was utterly
changed for me as a poet and reader. His work almost immediately pulled
me into its dark orbit. It was Sánchez Peláez
who led me to Ramos Sucre a decade later when I was researching Venezuelan
literature in Caracas.
I’d like to briefly
address the topic of Venezuelan invisibility for the reader to consider.
While Latin American countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and
Peru have produced writers whose work has been translated into English,
with many of them becoming global classics, Venezuelan literature is
terra incognita. When one mentions Venezuelan literature in the English-speaking
world the immediate reaction is silence, as there are no reference points
to guide readers. Even the ongoing political conflict in Venezuela that
has made international headlines in recent years has not been enough
to break that silence around Venezuelan literature. This is partly a
problem of translation and research, as well as a result of the unequal
circulation of culture in an age of empire. But the invisibility of
Venezuelan literature has yet to be theorized and it remains an enigma.
I’m fascinated and disturbed by this invisibility, so I translate.
In 1968, the
poet and novelist Adriano González León (1931-2008), a member of the
avant-garde writers and artists collective El Techo de la Ballena, published the
novel País portatil
[Portable Country]. González León’s book evokes the contrast between
19th century rural Venezuela and the sprawling Caracas of the late 20th
century. Its protagonist is a Marxist guerrilla who carries a suitcase
across Caracas on a dangerous secret mission. The book’s title is based
on the notion of Venezuela as a compact, transferable entity, a country
that after the arrival of petroleum in the 20th century shifted the
national discourse away from its agrarian foundations toward a postmodern,
fractured identity. Although País portátil
was awarded the prestigious Seix Barral
Biblioteca Breve
Prize in Spain, González León’s work never circulated much beyond Latin
America. The invisibility of Venezuelan literature is a problem that
will have to be deciphered by those of us who care about the country’s
contributions to that amorphous entity known as World Literature. With
that in mind, I present Venezuelan Poetry: 1921-2001 as a portable
country, a prelude to a much longer, more inclusive book. I think of
these translations as a form of Venezuelan-American field recordings,
DIY and outside the academy.
For readers interested
in other translations of Venezuelan poetry, I recommend several titles:
Juan Calzadilla, Journal with No Subject, translated by
Katherine M. Hedeen & Víctor
Rodríguez Núñez (Salt Publishing, 2009); Eugenio
Montejo, The Trees:
Selected Poems 1967-2004, translated by Peter Boyle (Salt Publishing,
2004); 5 Poems by Jose Ramos Sucre,
translated by Cedar Sigo & Sara Bilandzija (Blue Press Books, 2008); my own translations of
José Antonio Ramos Sucre, From
the Livid Country (Auguste Press, 2012)
and Selected Works (University of New Orleans
Press, 2012); Ana Enriqueta Terán, The Poetess Counts
to 100 and Bows Out: Selected Poems, translated by Marcel Smith
(Princeton University Press, 2002).
I include three
wonderful translations by my friends Anne Boyer and Cedar Sigo
& Sara Bilandzija. Sigo
and Bilandzija deserve credit for being the
first translators of Ramos Sucre into English, with their 2008 chapbook
listed above. Most of my own translations emerged from my experiences
among the community of poets I was blessed to be a part of in Durham,
North Carolina between 2006 and 2012. Among these comrades, Joseph Donahue
and Dianne Timblin have been particularly
helpful with their commentary on my translations. My wife, the Venezuelan
fiction writer and scholar Dayana Fraile,
has offered invaluable editorial suggestions. Finally, I’m grateful
to Adam Clay, Matthew Henriksen and Tony Tost
for their interest in this project and their support at Typo and Fascicle.
Pittsburgh
Spring 2013 |