Rafael Cadenas, Cervantes Prize 2022. Selected poems

Raphael Chains, Venezuelan poet, is the new winner of the Cervantes Prize 2022. Also a translator, professor and essayist, he was born in Barquisimeto in 1930. From a young age he was inclined towards literature and also got into politics. He went into exile due to his membership in the communist party, although he returned to Caracas in 1957. He worked as professor of English and Spanish literature. His work has made him one of the great references of the Hispano-American modernist poetry.

Titles such as The notebooks of exile, false maneuvers, Outdoor,  Annotations, Lover o Notes on Saint John of the Cross and mysticism. He has received awards including the National Essay Award, National Literature Prize,  and Saint John of the Cross Award in 1991. This Cervantes put the finishing touch to his career. Then there goes one selection of poems selected briefs.

Rafael Cadenas — Selected Poems

Look

I see another route, the route of the moment, the route of attention, awake, incisive, Sagittarius! Viscera Peak, Extreme Diamond, Hawk, Lightning Route, Thousand Eyes Route, Magnificence Route, Line Route to the Sun, Surveillance Beam Reflection, Beam Now, Beam This, Royal Route with its Legion of Living Fruits whose climax is that place everywhere and nowhere.

Fear

Someone closes a door on a man who falls silent, looks at himself in his cell with a single vent and doubts that he himself exists.
Sometimes, for moments, he is taken out to see the sun, but he returns to his place by his own steps.
There at least he knows he suffers.

Inquisitors

They go from one place to another measuring, scoring, biting here, there, full of drool from the past, grimaces, labels. They indicate, point out, dictate, correct, harass. There, they say, is the culprit. Our master codes will chase you barking day and night. There it is, our mastiffs sniff the dirty trail. He is the stain on our tiles. He insults our purity. Around the world, always, with their account books, their perverse pencils, their this yes this no, their autos de fe, their vengeful potions, extending a red ruler over the body that the pack is going to chase.
There is the one who betrayed us, he says. Let's spit, here it comes.
Let's spy it as one eye.

History

I open the window and see an army collecting its victims. Ghosts that carry ghosts in their arms, and wherever I walk I discover their mouths. The penury of their suits is nothing compared to that of their eyes, and to the pus of heroism, what to say about all that? Transparent bodies in the sun, with fabric of ghosts. If I forget, I still know that they continue to collect victims—they are just beginning—and there is no end, it will last until night and every night and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow and after and always. Inside, five, nine, fifty, two hundred years I will open the window again and the scene will not have changed. The spectra will be the same as the others, but she will not be altered, there will be no modification, a last minute correction.

Sources: Audiolit, A half voice