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| Caracas. José Pulido. Viviana Marcela Iriart |
Going south
looking for the warmth
of your
past: your voice is the tip of a flight
lend me
your smile to write with it
Chekhov
would have told you
The voice
that always emerges cutting through the fog
the smile
that is like a premonition of places
where
Hamlet could survive without the need to be happy
You deserve
to enter the realms of magic
The magic
that is always moving its songs in yours
Magic nipping
at your heels, tasting your sadness
you deserve
solemnity and celebration,
and that
pain has its paradise
“I wish the
birds sang just for you
I wish the
basket of warm bread smelled just for you”
I don't
know what it's like to have a lost soul but yours is as visible
as the best
of lighthouses
if ever navigating
in the dark
and I
mention this today
because I
was remembering the city
that passed
before your eyes
and it was
a city to be repeated in imagination
on the
stage of a breeze that rehearses birds
and that together
with your voice flies over walls,
cuts
through the fog and makes me say on my own
as if I were
a bush waiting for that breeze:
the city we
lost is grateful to have met you
Translation by ©Luciana Valente
JOSÉ PULIDO: Venezuelan
poet, writer and journalist, born in Villa de Cura on November 1, 1945. He
currently lives in Genoa, Italy.
In 2024 he
won in Italy the International Award of Excellence “City of Galateo-Antonio De
Ferraris 2024″.
In 2023 he
was elected as member of the Venezuelan Academy of Language.
In 2000 he received
the Caracas Municipal
Literature Award, Poetry Mention, for his poem collection Los
Poseídos. He won the second Miguel Otero Silva Award for
novels, sponsored by the publishing house Planeta, for his
novel Una mazurkita en La mayor.
He was in
charge of the magazine BCV Cultural of the Central Bank of Venezuela until
2012, and of the magazine Circunvalación del Sur, edited by the Metropolitan
Poetry Circle, in 2008. He directed the art pages of El Nacional (1981-1988),
El Diario de Caracas (1991-1995) and El Universal (1996-1998). Founding member
of the supplements Bajo Palabra (Diario de Caracas, 1995) and El otro cuerpo
(Supplement of the Ateneo de Caracas, in El Nacional, 1997-1998).
Editor-in-chief, under the direction of Salvador Garmendia, of the magazine
Imagen (1994-1996). Correspondent for the Venezuelan News Agency, Venpres, in
Peru, 1990. Correspondent for the Organization of Ibero-American States for
Education, Science and Culture, 1992; and advisor for the Sofía Ímber Museum of
Contemporary Art, 1996.