This is a second, expanded edition of the English translation of poems by José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Venezuela, 1890-1930), which was originally published in 2012 by University of New Orleans Press. Although Ramos Sucre is a foundational figure of Venezuelan literature, it is only in recent decades that his work is being studied and disseminated, with editions of his work published in Venezuela, Spain, Mexico, France, Portugal and now the United States. This second edition includes 16 new translations.
José Antonio Ramos Sucre (Cumaná, 1890-Geneva, 1930) was a Venezuelan poet, professor, diplomat and scholar. He was a member of the Sucre family of Venezuela and the great-great-nephew of Antonio José de Sucre. He was educated at the Colegio Nacional, and then at the Universidad Central de Venezuela where he studied Law, Letters and Languages (ancient and modern Greek and Sanskrit).
Guillermo Parra was born in Cambridge, MA in 1970. He is a poet and translator whose translations include a novel by Israel Centeno, The Conspiracy (Phoneme Media, 2017) and the collections of poetry, José Antonio Ramos Sucre, Selected Works: Expanded Edition (Noemi Press, 2016) and Air on the Air: Selected Poems of Juan Sánchez Peláez (Black Square Editions, 2016). His translation of the poetry of Vicente Gerbasi is forthcoming in 2022 from Black Square Editions. He lives in Clearwater, Florida where he works as a teacher.
"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." - Anne Boyer
"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." - Micah Ballard
"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." - Alba Rosa Hernández Bossio
"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 en El Caribe; la nostalgia de un atalaya paradójico, gótico y tropical." - Israel Centeno
