Born in Barquisimeto, Venezuela in 1930, Rafael Cadenas is Venezuela’s most renowned and celebrated poet. He has been awarded the Venezuelan National Prize for Literature, the prize of the Feria Internacional de Literature de Guadalajara, the Federico Garcia Lorca international poetry prize, and the Premio Reina Sofia. Cadenas is also the author of eight collections of essays on a range of topics, and he has translated into Spanish the work of Walt Whitman and D. H. Lawrence.
In her introduction to The Land of Mild Light: Selected Poems of Rafael Cadenas, Rowena Hill writes, “Rafael Cadenas is in every sense Venezuela’s senior poet, a very human voice that for 60 years has accompanied thinking people, bringing pleasure, understanding, the recognition of affinity, and (especially in later years) consolation and encouragement for his insistence on truth — the unsparing acceptance of things as they are.”
In a 1999 interview, Cadenas said, “The soul is always in danger. But I don’t want to elaborate on that claim. I prefer to leave it like that, simple. I want to tell you a feeling that I always carry: living and doing what human beings do, knowing ourselves to be fleeting, moves me to believe that there is a sustaining force outside of me … The idea is to be present, open, attentive, up with reality, with what is happening. Amante, at the end, expresses what I am trying to tell you, which is central for me. Worrying about happiness is just for adults. ‘As a child,’ says Alister Reid in my translation of phrases attuned to Zen, ‘I did not know what happiness was and whether I was happy or not. I was too busy being.'” He added, “I am tied — strapped — to reality, which is always fantastic but rarely presented as such. In this sense, certainly, I always accompany Borges.”
Rowena Hill concludes, “What unifies all of Cadenas’ poetry, in spite of variations in style and emotions from one period to another (and although he may say he is not the same person who wrote his early poems), is an intention, a constant will to reveal being in its nakedness, at the frontier where the poetic word is born. And it is the effort to be awake, to recognize things as they are in the light of that contact with being, a fundamental sincerity, that is the only hope of the human race in this age of lies.”
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Beloved Country
So much of you remains unopened, like music lost inside me.
Country to which I return every time I go broke.
Seal, celebration, vault of trunks.
You’ve never denied me your virgin milk.
My ebb, my secret source, my real counterpart.
I can’t determine the reach of your scent, but know you’ve been
there at all my starting points, wrapping me up,
thoughtful East, as in a ceremony.
Country where the lines of my hand lead, site where I’m someone else,
my wedding ring, you’re close to the core.
— translated by Forrest Gander
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Failure
What I took for victory is only smoke.
Failure, rock bottom language, trail from a different more demanding place, your handwriting is difficult to make out.
When you put your mark on my forehead, I never thought about the message you were bringing, more valuable than any triumph.
Your blazing face pursued me and I didn’t know it was to save me,
For my own good you’ve pushed me into corners, denied me easy successes, deprived me of ways out.
It was me you meant to defend by not granting me brilliance.
Purely out of love for me you’ve manipulated the emptiness that on so many nights has made me speak feverishly to an absent woman.
To protect me you made way for others, led a woman to prefer someone more resolute, removed me from suicidal trades.
You’ve always helped me out.
Yes, your ulcerous, spat on, hateful body has received me in my purest form to hand me over to the clarity of the desert.
Out of madness I’ve cursed you, ill-used you, blasphemed against you.
You don’t exist.
You were invented by delirious pride.
How much I owe you!
You elevated me to a new rank washing me with a rough sponge, throwing me on to my true battlefield, assigning me the weapons left behind by victory.
You led me by the hand to the only water that mirrors me.
Because of you I don’t know the anxiety of playing a role, using force to stay on a rung, climbing by me own effort, quarreling over status, inflating myself till I burst.
You’ve made me humble, silent and rebellious.
I don’t sing you for what you are, but for what you haven’t let me be. For not giving me a different life. For hemming me in.
You’ve offered me only nakedness.
It’s true that you taught me roughly –and you cauterized me yourself!– but you also gave me the happiness of not fearing you.
Thanks for taking thickness from me in exchange for large handwriting.
Thanks to you who deprived me of swellings.
Thanks for the riches to which you compelled me.
Thanks for building my home with clay.
Thanks for pushing me aside.
Thanks.
— translated by Rowena Hill
* * * * *
Ars Poetica
Let each word carry what it says.
Let it be the tremor holding.
Let it keep like a heartbeat.
I will not falsely ornate
nor ink in doubt
nor add glitter to what is.
This makes me hear me.
Here we tell the truth.
Let us be real.
I want terrifying exactitude.
I tremble when I think I am false.
I must bear the weight of my words.
They own me as much as I own them.
If I don’t see well, tell me, you who know me,
my lie, show my fraud,
scour out my scam.
I will thank you, truly.
I am mad to correspond.
Be my eye, wait for me at night to spy me, study me, shake me.
— translated by Sophie Cabot Black.
* * * * *
The Exile
The exile deplores homelands
Despises boundaries
En route to a moment
Begins to see
How much energy is restored by what surrounds it
Things revived day by day
Clings to the body seeking an ancient form
Recognizes mystery
Despises unreality
Sees his face reflected in a pond and forgets it.
— translated by Robert Pinsky
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The Land of Mild Light: Selected Poems of Rafael Cadenas, edited by Nidia Hernández, was published by Arrowsmith Press in June, 2021. You may acquire the book directly from the press by clicking here.