Join the
campus community on Tuesday, April 11, 2013 at 4 pm in
Curtin Memorial Library. Poet Guillermo Parra will
read from his translations of the works of Latin American writer
José Antonio Ramos Sucre, and lead a discussion.
Translations of the works of José Antonio Ramos Sucre
José Antonio Ramos Sucre was born in Cumaná, Venezuela in 1890.
He moved to Caracas in 1911 to study at the Universidad Central de
Venezuela. In the capital, he worked as a secondary school teacher
and as an interpreter for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His
poems, essays, aphorisms and translations appeared in various
Venezuelan newspapers and magazines. He published Trizas de
papel (1921),Sobre las huellas
de Humboldt (1923), La torre de
Timón (1925), Las formas del
fuego (1929), and El cielo de
esmalte (1929).
In December of 1929, Ramos Sucre traveled to Europe to take up a
position at the Venezuelan Consulate in Geneva. Afflicted by years
of insomnia and anxiety, he took his own life in June of 1930. His
work was rescued by younger generations of writers and critics
during the 1960s and he is now considered a foundational figure of
modern Venezuelan literature. The critic Francisco Pérez Perdomo
describes his writing as "...one of the most innovative produced by
Latin American poetry."
Poet Guillermo Parra
Poet and translator Guillermo Parra was born in Cambridge, MA in
1970. He has published the translations José Antonio Ramos
Sucre, Selected Works (New Orleans; University of New Orleans
Press, 2012) and José Antonio Ramos Sucre, From the Livid
Country (San Francisco: Auguste Press, 2012). Selected
Works was included in the list "75 Notable Translations 2012"
by World Literature Today.
His works of poetry include Phantasmal Repeats
(Cambridge: Petrichord Books, 2009) and Caracas Notebook
(Queens: Cy Gist Press, 2006). His poems, essays and translations
have appeared in 6x6 (Ugly Duckling Presse), The CLR
James Journal, Effing, InTranslation (The Brooklyn Rail) and
Papel Literario (El Nacional newspaper, Venezuela).
Since 2003 he has written the blog Venepoetics,
dedicated to the translation of Venezuelan and Latin American
poetry into English. He lives in Pittsburgh, where he is working on
a bilingual edition of the Collected Works of José Antonio
Ramos Sucre.
This event is sponsored by the Division of Arts and Letters and
Curtin Memorial Library, and is open to the public.