Selected Works: Expanded Edition

José Antonio Ramos Sucre ha devenido un poeta de culto, asediado por lectores y críticos seducidos por el mundo visionario que convoca, por el lenguaje ancestral que reconquista, por su vida, vuelta mito y persona de sus poemas en prosa. Atendió el llamado de la muerte —preludio y fin de su poesía— con su suicidio cuando, derrumbado por el insomnio, creyó irrevocables el sueño y la poesía.

In this expanded Selected Works, José Antonio Ramos Sucre tells his brother, “What is written should have a single adornment: that of exactitude.” Ever erudite and incisive in piercing, we find Ramos Sucre’s frequencies tuned to a heightened awareness of the in-between where evil is experienced through the beauty it invents. His ability to inhabit multiple worlds and receive all the voices and emotive counterparts within confirms again that he is an empath of the highest order. Here’s to Guillermo Parra for rescuing these ethereal voyages and transmutations of punishment and delight.

Con la traducción de José Antonio Ramos Sucre al inglés, el lector anglosajón seducido por elexquisito estético de la narrativa neoclásica trasmutada en una poética del exilio del ser, revisitará los paisajes de la psique, comunes a los trágicos griegos, a los poetas latinos, a Shakespeare, al Dante y a Wordsworth. José Antonio Ramos Sucre brinda a quien lo sabe leer, una óptica mediterránea inédita, fraguada enEl Caribe; la nostalgia de un atalaya paradójico, gótico y tropical.

José Antonio Ramos Sucre out-Baudelaires Baudelaire, is more Poe than Poe, stands eternal guard at the crystalline picture window of the house of oblivion and dreams through kaleidoscopic opera glasses of the profane ruins of centuries. Once you read Guillermo Parra’s translations of Ramos Sucre, you will never forget this poet whose shadows eclipse all fiction. No genius—not even Borges—could ever have been genius enough to make Ramos Sucre up.