Poetry
La torre de Timón
Not translated into English
José Antonio Ramos Sucre · 1925
Synopsis
Eighty-eight texts, prose poems and historical essays, which take up in revised form Trizas de papel and Sobre las huellas de Humboldt and add fifty-two unpublished pieces. The book opens with "Preludio", in which the poet speaks of his wish to escape pain and sees death as a deliverance. The heroes of independence, Bolívar, Mariño, Bermúdez, and figures of culture, from Homer to Michelangelo, meet suffering, solitude and death.
Context
The collection was published in Caracas in 1925 by the Litografía y Tipografía Vargas. Its dense language, which readily drops the word "que", makes it difficult, and Fernando Paz Castillo saw it as a book written to isolate himself further. Long forgotten, the author has since been rediscovered, and his Obra completa appeared in 1980 in the Biblioteca Ayacucho. Anthologies have presented him in French and English, but the collection has not been translated on its own.
Who it is for
To read, before the avant-gardes, a learned and sombre poetic prose that sets history and death in dialogue.
Prizes and reception
The book was praised on publication by the generation of 1918; Enrique Bernardo Núñez saw in it learned digressions.