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The Truth

José Antonio Ramos Sucre

tr Guillermo Parra

The swallow knows the calendar, divides the year by the guidance of an innate wisdom. It can dispense with the variable moon’s warning.

      According to natural science, the beauty of the swallow is its body’s constitution for flight, a proportion between the means and the end, between the method and the result, a Socratic idea.

      The swallow covers continents in a single day of travel and has known the measure of the terrestrial orb since long ago, anticipating the infallible dragons of myth.

      A delirious astronomer was pondering on his isle of pines and rocks, a present from a king, about the rings of Saturn and other wonders of space and about the elemental spirit of fire, the restless phosphor. A teleological prejudice had inspired in him the thought of situating the exile of condemned souls within the wheel of the sun.

      He recovered the human feeling of reality in a warm spring. The swallows habituated to circling the monuments of a deceased kingdom, erected according to a primordial arithmetic, rose to the rigorous clime and spoke into the sage’s ear the solution to the enigma of the universe, the secret of the impudent sphinx.

La verdad

José Antonio Ramos Sucre

La golondrina conoce el calendario, divide el año por el consejo de una sabiduría innata. Puede prescindir del aviso de la luna variable.

     Según la ciencia natural, la belleza de la golondrina es el ordenamiento de su organismo para el vuelo, una proporción entre el medio y el fin, entre el método y el resultado, una idea socrática.

     La golondrina salva continentes en un día de viaje y ha conocido desde antaño la medida del orbe terrestre, anticipándose a los dragones infalibles del mito.

     Un astrónomo desvariado cavilaba en su isla de pinos y roquedos, presente de un rey, sobre los anillos de Saturno y otras maravillas del espacio y sobre el espíritu elemental del fuego, el fósforo inquieto. Un prejuicio teológico le había inspirado el pensamiento de situar en el ruedo del sol el destierro de las almas condenadas.

     Recuperó el sentimiento humano de la realidad en medio de una primavera tibia. Las golondrinas habituadas a rodear los monumentos de un reino difunto, erigidos conforme una aritmética primordial, subieron hasta el clima riguroso y dijeron al oído del sabio la solución del enigma del universo, el secreto de la esfinge impúdica.

José Antonio Ramos Sucre was born in Cumaná, Venezuela in 1890 and died in Geneva, Switzerland in 1930. He published three books during his lifetime, all of them collections of poems, stories, and essays in small privately printed editions in Caracas: La torre de Timón [Timon’s Tower] (1925), Las formas del fuego [The Forms of Fire] (1929), and El cielo de esmalte [The Enamel Sky] (1929). Ramos Sucre’s work was acknowledged during his time, and he published many poems in Caracas newspapers during the 1920s, but didn’t reach a wider public until the 1960s, when younger generations of writers and scholars rediscovered his poetry. The Spanish originals of these poems are taken from José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Obra completa, edited by Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio (Caracas: Bid & Co. Editor, 2019).

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx