Vicente
Gerbasi
Selections from a major poet reflect the vitality of
Venezuelan letters.
Vicente Gerbasi is considered by many to be one of the, foremost Venezuelan poets of the twenties century. When he began to write, his poetry, as well as that of other members of the Grupo Viernes (Friday Group) to which he belonged, reflected the influence of surrealism. Characteristics of the German romantics, and perhaps most especially of Rainer Maria Rilke for whom Gerbasi has a special admiration, also entered his work. Such tendencies can be seen in his early poems: Vigilia del Náufrago ( 1937), Bosque Doliente (1940), and Liras (1943). However, it was only after publication of his Poemas de la Noche y de la Tierra (1943) that his own voice began to come to the fore, although even this work is somewhat permeated by the fuller rhetoric and slightly artificial touch of his first poems.
With the appearance in 1945 of Mi padre, el inmigrante, a landmark of undeniable importance both for Gerbasi's poetry and for the entire poetic movement in Venezuela is established. In this long poem, the author effects a transformation of his father, an Italian immigrant settled in Venezuela, elevating his spirit to mythical levels. The opening and closing verse: "We came in the night and toward the night we are going," skillfully synthesizes the pervasive, principal motif of the art of Gerbasi, the cycle of birth and death, the endless change of nature in which human life is but one manifestation more. Death, which at times becomes converted into the individual death of Rilke, ceaselessly roams throughout all of Gerbasi's poetry. With this poem, the poet seems to have relieved himself of certain memories that tormented him and enters into a new stage of expression.
In Espacios Cálidos (1952), he pours himself into nostalgic reminiscences tenderly evoking the innocence of his childhood; or perhaps. it should be said of his two childhoods. It is characteristic of Gerbasi to superimpose two settings. that of the Venezuelan town of Canoabo where he was born. and that of the town of Vibonati in southern Italy. the birthplace of his father. As a child, his father sent him to Italy to complete his education and while there, he lived for a while in
Vibonati. The sun, the tropical magic. and the cultural echoes of the Mediterranean formed this poetry about his childhood.
Gerbasi has served in the diplomatic corps and the trips occasioned by this career have enriched his poetic motifs. From these came Poesía de Viajes ( 1968) and Olivos de Eternidad ( 1961) .The latter, an emotional evocation of biblical themes, draws upon a pilgrimage he made, a climb to the top of a hill in Jerusalem. with the aim of infusing his poetry with the spirit of the ancient world. In another work. Gerbasi explored the period of conquest in Venezuela's history to write Tirano de Sangre y Fuego (1955). about the Spanish conquistador. Lope de Aguirre.
Young poets in Venezuela admire and respect Gerbasi greatly. looking
to and receiving from him and his poetry the best of Venezuela's artistic traditions.
Ignacio Iribarren Borges
A well known literary critic, author of
The Poetry of Vicente Gerbasi (1972).
Former Venezuelan Ambassador to the Unites Sates,
Poetry translated by John Lyons
Lausanne: Winter 1966
I speak of sadness
as of the fruit that in winter
has remained alone in a damp and mossy
tree of the mountains.
I speak of sadness
as of the girl
who passes crestfallen
through the city of the bright lit river
beneath the wind that carries off the whistle
of the trains.
My sadness is beneath the lamp
when, looking at my shoes,
I remember my torn shoes,
while I hear the wind of the snow
among the trees.
Sweethearts
The faces of the sweethearts, on the grass,
glance, dispassionately, towards the thunder,
until they glisten in the rain
which makes the flowers tremble.
Between peach and almond trees
which in the gyre of the seasons
are robed in bees,
the sweethearts
are an endless instant,
the slumber of time
shaken in its own storm.
The lightning makes its getaway
between the rocks and the roosters.
Time sinks with branches and clouds
in the puddles which the rain abandons
close to the sweethearts
who timelessly forget
their own history,
discarded in the lightning
and to a taste of wild honeys.
Mist
The trees awaken enveloped
in a blanched nostalgia,
with a weariness of ragged paupers
beneath the snow.
Equally blanched, the gulls
gliding in a vast silence,
and if the breeze stirs the trees
or stirs a single flower,
it spurs them towards the sadness
with which the day is born.
There is mist in our senses
and on the sea,
and out of the sea mist
shady ships surge
as from the depths of a dream
and scarcely are seen the crosses
of the Nordic flags
which in times remote
went down in the waves
with the stern cargo of the heroes.
Thus the soul heroically
goes down in the Universe,
mid a vast mist of galaxies,
until gradually it hearkens to
the presence of God
who radiates in the boundlessness of his suns.
Return to the Village
The lightning reveals to me a display of palms,
an illumination of peasant festivity,
a milky light amid the scattered maize.
What day is this of fleeting deer in the gleaming
vegetation?
I am in the thirty seventh year of my skull,
read in the lines of my hand,
heard int he gloomy acoustic of my heart.
I see old wooden doors eaten away,
faces of maidens buried in handkerchiefs,
glossy dogs in the shade of the square.
I am in the middle of my age,
beyond the trees of the day,
where the birds gather to take shade.
where the rocks and ravines flare up,
in the warm lair of the snakes,
in an area of old faces,
huddled beneath the loneliness of the thunder.
Do I know even the course of my steps?
I know that I come from an avenue of tamarinds,
in whose shade the bones sleep.
Around my being the distances raise up cities,
temples of ancient stone,
bridges of silent architecture,
museums where the profiles are in tears.
deep bakeries where man kneads the paste of the night.
I am in the thirty seventh year of my skull,
in a solitary light of domestic animals,
by the door of my abandoned house.
Within the furniture shines like coffins.
In the yard, the orange trees gather their human shadows.
My skull. It's true. My skull.
Lit up by the lightning.
In the Forest Depths of the Day
The simple act of the spider who spins a star in the Shade,
the elastic step of the cat towards the butterfly,
the hand that slips along the warm back of the horse,
the sideral smell of the coffee flower,
the blue taste of the vanilla,
hold me back in the depths of the day.
There is a concave brilliance of ferns,
a resonance of insects,
a fluctuating presence of water in the stony nooks.
Here I recognize my age built from rustic sounds,
from orchid light,
from hot forest space,
where the woodpecker sounds the hour.
Here the dusk invents a crimson jewellery,
a constellation of glow worms,
a tumbling of bright leaves upon the senses,
upon the depths of the day,
where my wild bones are spellbound.
Translations by Guillermo Parra:
My Father, the Immigrant
1945, first four songs.
I
We come from night and toward night we go.
The earth stays behind wrapped in her vapors,
where the almond tree, the child and the leopard live.
The days stay behind with lakes, reindeer, snow,
with austere volcanoes, with charmed jungles
where fear’s blue shadows hover.
The tombs stay behind at the foot of the cypress,
alone in the sadness of distant stars.
The glories stay behind like pyres that muffle
secular gusts of wind.
The doors stay behind complaining in the wind.
Anguish stays behind with its celestial mirrors.
Time stays behind like tragedy in man:
life-creator, death-creator.
Time who lifts and wastes the columns
and murmurs in oceans’ millenary waves.
The light stays behind washing mountains,
the children’s parks and the white altars.
But also night with its pained cities,
the daily night, what is not yet night,
but instead, brief pause trembling in fireflies
or passing through spirits with agonized fists.
The night that descends again toward light,
waking flowers in taciturn valleys,
refreshing the water coils in the mountains,
launching horses toward blue cliffs,
while eternity, within gold lights,
moves quietly through astral plains.
II
We come from night and toward night we go.
The steps in dust, the blood’s flame,
the forehead’s sweat, the hand on shoulder,
the wail within memory,
everything is shut down by rings of shadow.
Time lifts us with ancient cymbals.
With cymbals, with wine, with laurel branches.
Besides, twilight agreements drop into spirit.
Grief digs with its wolf claws.
Listen inwardly to the infinite echoes,
the enigma’s horns in your distances.
Within rusted iron, there are glimmers into which the spirit
desperately falls,
and stones that have passed through man’s hand,
and lonely sands,
and watery lamentations in river beds at dusk.
Yelling into the abyss, reclaim
that inner gaze moving toward death!
Heliotrope reflections, passionate hands
and dream lightning all repose among the hours.
Come to the deserts and listen to your voice!
Come to the deserts and scream to the skies!
The heart is a calm solitude.
Only love rests between two hands
and descends with a dark murmur in the seed,
like a black torrent, like a blue pollen,
with the tremor of fireflies hovering in a mirror,
or the scream of beasts that break their veins
in avid nights of insomniac solitude.
While the seed brings visible and invisible death.
Summon, summon, summon your lost face
on the shores of that great spectre!
III
Ecstatic lightning between two evenings,
fish swimming through nighttime clouds,
glitter’s pulse, jailed memory,
trembling coin over dark nothingness,
vision facing the shadow: that is us.
The day passes taciturn through the stagnant water
doubling through rushes toward the oblivion vessels.
The spirit trembles quietly in the violets.
Are we not a secret hidden by the hours?
Look how vision is a glimmer of azahares,
in the evening’s architecture,
as the self hides
in the subtle sigh of fronds.
Something ever closes around our forehead.
The stones’ cold courses in our blood.
A murmur of dice descends through valleys.
And always man alone, under the sun and thunders,
chased by voices and whips and teeth.
Always man alone, with his vision, his,
with his memories, his, and his hands, his.
Man questioning his quiet shadows.
Listen: I’m calling you from my solitudes,
from the palm tree districts
opened to the luminous sky signals.
The wind tangles with you in sidereal fogs,
and stops you at the foot of the black birch trees.
Ancient deer from the moon
go running through memory arcades,
and heart flames fall into your silence.
IV
What I feel in my blood like a sand clock,
next to some portrait, from the string and the salt;
what I listen to in my blood like a day’s rumor,
when a night butterfly
arrives to kiss our shadowed heart;
what I listen to in my blood like harp chords,
when everything turns off and everything is a yesterday,
with faces, with ashes and hands in the shadows;
what I listen to like a grain falling,
in the twilight of rooms,
where the autochthonous mirror of confidence
vainly destroys the masks of man:
what I listen to in my blood like sun flutes,
when my children dance around my existence
like a far hill of vintage;
when thought transforms my secrets
into ivied chasms,
and I recline my forehead on nocturnal wine;
when I feel my steps on earth,
and when I say: earth,
and I know that I am here illuminating myself,
loving her and listening to her mandate, which is to exist,
within what secretly descends toward my death;
rumor that sustains and draws me
in my ancient portrait,
with the falcon on the shoulder,
in the penumbra of olive leaves:
mark of conscience,
enigma of old walls,
fallen from light in sadness,
hay in the afternoon, solitude clouds,
night fires in the form of skeletons,
vision toward the jaguar’s shadow.
We are not inhabitants of light.
There are fog tongues and burning signs
dancing around us.
Our vision falls on mourning rings,
in rushes of fear, in stars made from silver.
The lost forehead moves, like a cold flow
through the nightly scarecrow humidity.
When does my dark walking come out of you?
Abyss into which my eyes fall, stays behind.
Man belongs to the night who follows him,
dream that the sun defends,
a parenthetical uncertain wonder,
image that crumbles the fog.
My mother still contemplates your portrait
and a far glimmer begins in her white hair.
I am here on the earth, here on earth,
and in your death, dispersed within my senses.
And eyes persist, flashes of danger.
And the habit of moving by the sound,
by humidity, laughter, fog,
where light rays dance
like reminiscing about familiar deaths.
Everything advances in me and all drops, and all is rumors,
a nearing and love, and a suffering for what’s loved,
and to carry it all toward dream
and making the earth a dream.
And it is what approaches burning, sounding like thunder
above a child,
from your hard life, your lonely death,
your death like wide fields
where night curves her slowness of stars,
with a rumor of helmets, of stones, of skeletons,
with guitars fallen next to the heart,
with a devil’s verse,
with the sulphur of the tyrant Aguirre
dancing in the hills
and distant ancient lightning
in a thicker horizon with flood shadows,
and the winds that sound over the deaf drum
of burning earth,
of the alligator’s water and the poison tooth.
My father, father of this hurricane. And of my poetry.
Juan Sánchez Peláez
Iniciación en la intemperie (1990)
The eyes of the owl
closed on the plain
of death
in the solitude
of horses
that die
looking at a star’s path.
The eyes of the owl
closed watching the window
with one eye
on a squirrel
and another on the lightning.
The eyes of the owl
saw a horse
come into my house
forced to abandon
the plains,
the horse of an alley
in Paris
with its cart
full of cabbage.
The owl hid
in a chamber
of sadness,
in the poverty of the world
he saw his final shirt.
He put it on his father
who still loves him.
The owl
Juan Sánchez Peláez
deteriorated by skeletons.
Guillermo Parra es un poeta y traductor venezolano-americano nacido en Cambridge, Massachusetts. En 2012 publica sus traducciones de José Antonio Ramos Sucre bajo el título Selected Works (University of New Orleans Press). Desde 2003 mantiene el blog de traducciones venepoetics.
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