The Site of Paradise

Adriano González León

At the dawn of this festive mud—coasts of bitten-off land, rosy women dangling their fruits at the seaside, the thunderous flight of macaws lighting up the eyes of caravel men, this land of Eden soon to be pierced by malarias—the legend began, with clerks and buccaneers, with filthy folios telling of wonders, with travelers driven mad by a sun more effective than death. Now, the chronicles of the times are recorded, colonial reports bloated with cocoa and coffee, glory and risk of a flotilla of ships quivering through waters infected with pirate blood. Ports gathering spices, large barrels of olives and wine, the obscure traffic of rentier companies, the reckless twists of Charles V’s overturned coffers. For centuries to come, waves of foul-smelling men kept on arriving. In distinguished gestures, or frog leaps, or fanfares, or one-legged hops, the finials and houppelandes of regents, the vain Captaincy General expands its magnificence through its black cargo piling up on the bays like rotting wood. Curve of the earth, land of grace, region of birds never before seen, gold in ears, gold in treetops, gold in the water of its rivers—all the world is for them, and we, we are still in this poor little school, its roof half-torn by the gale, while the consumptive teacher tells her pupils, also consumptive, that this might have been the site of paradise. Because of this, perhaps, we drag the fruits of the unfit tree, lurking like snakes and meandering through charmless rocks, coagulations of hunger stretching our arms out to the sea, peeled-off painting in petroleum’s great flare, we are exiled right here, despite the lights, the papers, the loud movie screens, the food, well-sterilized, pasteurized, preshrunk, the protection acts, sprayed all over with DDT, useless but warranty-sealed, crippled, on the ground, up above, in the shadow or beneficent reflection of our very first industry, under their benevolent guidance, regents, buccaneers who know how to drill, reach down to the ultimate bone to find miraculous macaws once again. And so, with walking canes, and so, with sticks, grasping the ground, well-equipped with Gallegos’s formula “our land is all paths like our hope, all horizons like our will,” the jingle, the councils, the great ball, the scintillating game, and them, regents, buccaneers, generals, mister All, mister Smith, mister whoever, humanists, teachers, they play ring-around-the-rosie and trade little mirrors, they trade plastic matter in paradise, the land of grace that still smiles.

translated from the Spanish by Maria Anna Zazzarino

Read the original in Spanish

Asfalto-Infierno (Asphalt-Hell, Ediciones del Techo de la Ballena, 1963) is one of González León’s most radical literary experiments. Written during Venezuela’s transition to democracy after the fall of Marcos Pérez Jiménez’s long military dictatorship, Asfalto-Infierno makes visible the disjointed speeds of Venezuela’s petroleum-fueled modernity. Co-authored with photographer Daniel González, Asfalto-Infierno is a collection of dialogues between image and text where visual details serve as points of departure for González León’s experimental prose poems, flash fictions, and mock-zarzuelas. Conveying the text’s dark playfulness constitutes one of the main challenges of translating this text.

“El sitio del paraíso,” (The Site of Paradise) illustrates González León’s unusual use of syntax, surprising imagery, and immersive prose. In less than a page, the prose poem narrates Venezuela’s history from Columbus’s caravels to the 1950s oil boom. Moving between these temporalities, the text is articulated around a whole cultural, historical, and literary tradition that is not readily apparent to a foreign reader. While the cultural allusions to modern writers such as Rómulo Gallegos can be easily solved within the text itself, the references to multiple episodes of Venezuela’s colonial history are harder to locate. To solve this intertextual problem, I consulted the original Spanish and Jeannette Varner’s English translation of José de Oviedo y Baños’s Historia de la conquista y población de la provincia de Venezuela (The Conquest and Settlement of Venezuela), a fragment of which is included as an epigraph to González León’s novel País portátil (Portable Country; Editorial Seix Barral, 1968). González León’s work demonstrates that measuring distances through translation often entails unexpected paths: from reckoning with a defamiliarized version of your own language to an excursion into a literary and cultural realm that each text invokes.

Adriano González León (1931–2008) was a Venezuelan poet, essayist, and novelist. A recipient of the Venezuelan Premio Nacional de Literatura (National Prize for Literature), González León is best known for his experimental use of narrative form and for his activities with the literary and artistic collective “El Techo de la Ballena.” His first novel País portátil (Portable Country, Editorial Seix Barral, 1968) received the Biblioteca Breve Prize awarded by the publisher Editorial Seix Barral. In 1980, González León was awarded the National Award for Literature for lifetime achievement. Despite his prominence in Venezuelan letters and media, most of his work remains untranslated.

Maria Anna Zazzarino is from Caracas and lives in Santa Barbara, Californa. She is currently a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she studies literatures of extraction in the Americas. She has been a Fulbright scholar, and her writing has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies and Mondes Francophones. An article on El Techo de la Ballena’s film Pozo Muerto is forthcoming in Media+Environment.