Editor’s Note: The translations that make up this dossier were completed by students of the University of Exeter under the direction of professor Katie Brown, and are dedicated to the memory of Libby Jones, a former student of the University of Exeter, a talented translator, and a contributor to LALT. She is greatly missed by all who knew her.
De muerte lenta is a small treatise on moral politics, which tries to salvage the moral memories that are almost non-existent in the country.
Elisa Lerner is one of those Venezuelan writers who, with a vast literary knowledge, has been creating a style. And when we talk about style, we are referring to the qualities of a prose that is always personal, elegant, and cosmopolitan. Her published work and her private writing, often epistolary (the prose that she has left in emails), show a vocation that does not overlook any stylistic context. In this way, all her readers can easily identify her: they recognize her vision of the external and textual world through her syntax, which is so close to the resources of poetry.
A writer of fiction, plays, essays, and crónicas, Elisa Lerner had a diplomatic career lasting twenty years. She was the only woman in the Sardio literary group, which was composed of notable Venezuelan writers, poets, and visual artists (Adriano González León, Ramón Palomares, Rodolfo Izaguirre, and others). In 1999, in recognition of her literary career, she received the National Literature Prize in Venezuela. Some of her standout works are the plays En el vasto silencio de Manhattan (published in 1961 and winner of the Anna Julia Rojas Prize at the Ateneo de Caracas, in 1964) and Vida con mama (1975), as well as various short pieces like La bella de inteligencia and La Mujer del periódico de la tarde. In 2003, she published a volume called Teatro de Elisa Lerner. In essays, she published Una sonrisa detrás de la metáfora (1969) and Yo amo a Columbo (1979). Within the crónica genre, the style most explored by the author, Carriel número cinco (1983), Crónicas ginecológicas (1984), Carriel para la fiesta (1997), and En el entretanto (2000), later collected under the title of Así que pasen cien años (2016), stand out. In fiction, she has published the book of short stories Homenaje a la estrella (2002), prefaced by Eugenio Monetjo, and two novels: De muerte lenta (2006) and La señorita que amaba por teléfono (2016). Her most recent work, published in 2022, is titled Sin orden ni concierto: Homenaje pospuesto a Virginia Woolf. Although less known outside of Venezuela, Elisa Lerner’s contributions to the Latin American crónica deserve greater visibility. For both her literary work and for her dedication and position as a writer, Lerner represents one of the most original vocations in the Hispano-American world.
As the Venezuelan critic Rafael Arráiz Lucca has pointed out, “Elisa Lerner belongs to the brilliant tradition of Venezuelan writers raised in the bicultural environment of Judaism and Venezolanidad.” From this cultural, historical, and religious context, it is possible to find some resemblances between Elisa Lerner and other Latin American voices. Saña and Las genealogías, two works by the Mexican writer Margo Glantz, make me think of two books by Elisa Lerner: De muerte lenta and Homenaje a la estrella. Glantz and Lerner are contemporary female authors (one born in 1930 and the other in 1932). They share a Jewish heritage (Glantz, from Ukrainian Jewish parents; and Lerner, from Romanian Jewish parents); in this way, they share an emphasis on the subtleties of prose. Both salvage and represent a Jewish culture that is expressed from memory; the inherited story deserves to be written with the high attributes of literary style. This is something that we, as readers, notice in each of them.
When I think of Elisa Lerner, I do so from the strange proximity that books provide. I imagine a patient woman: a demanding reader, who scribbles on books with firm, fine ink, and highlights an apparently revealing sentence to check its validity, hesitantly leaving it in the margin of the page. I also imagine a selective woman who wastes no time with poorly written titles. A small certainty appears in the middle of everything: her participation in the Sardio group, together with Ramón Palomares, the poet from Escuque, a town in the Venezuelan Andes. Does Elisa Lerner share my passion for the great collections of poems, El reino and Paisano?
Those who have known her for decades describe her with noble and gentle devotion. This devotion is demonstrated, for example, by the Venezuelan writer Antonio López Ortega, who comments: “Elisa never strays from her path: she only hopes to have around her harmony, the red wine of friendship, and perhaps beautiful prose (like her own) that could distract her on an ordinary afternoon.” Adding to this list is the poet and critic Rafael Castillo Zapata, who highlights her “mocking disposition and heart of a stealthy joker.”
The Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930) breathes, with original breath, in De muerte lenta. There is in a syntactic twist, a combination of themes, a glimpse that suggests a “poetic” exchange between Ramos Sucre and Lerner.
De muerte lenta (2006), the first of two novels published by Lerner, possesses the Carpentian “severity of a courthouse.” A lot of silence is necessary to write this type of novel, and to read it. Those who rush will not be able to savor it, they will miss the station, and will get off in a place where apathy and indifference prevail. Rushing ahead would wreck the plot. De muerte lenta requires a patient reader, and as the author has said, “Our past has been a ruinous and bloody impatience.” Though it does not have the extreme formal complexity of leading proponents of the Baroque, Elisa Lerner’s style demands a reader who knows how to identify certain textual markers. These “markers” are the expressive signs that, once identified, make the reading open and enjoyable.
The Venezuelan poet José Antonio Ramos Sucre (1890-1930) breathes, with original breath, in De muerte lenta. There is in a syntactic twist, a combination of themes, a glimpse that suggests a “poetic” exchange between Ramos Sucre and Lerner. Lerner describes the character Madame Dubsky, “that somewhat blunt Israeli matron”: “Indifferent to the violent nature of the tropical sun, on the back of her slender little bones exposed to the elements, she wore the wrinkles on her face with energetic arrogance, like guests at a summer party, in the middle of a benevolent garden.”
The most meta-literary encounter in De muerte lenta is between the poet Ida Gramcko (who by then, in 1948, was a cultural attaché in the Soviet Union) and the writer and President of the Republic, Rómulo Gallegos: “Her appearance before the President of the Republic was a quick and too silent greeting if we take into account the tragic silence that followed. But we already know that there are writers and poets who tend to be abruptly miserly with their words in everyday speech.” It is worth noting that, in the novel, the poet Gramcko is not directly named. This is another quality of Elisa Lerner: the ellipses that appear to make her speech more complex and suggestive. This periphrastic style is another subtle sign that we see in Chapter 4, titled, “In Gallegos’ Palace, 1948.” This thus results in a detailed and moving description of a poet, “a young woman, very beautiful, a Greta Garbo of the Tropics but shorter.” Elisa Lerner does not rush nor sell what she describes, she circles around what she is trying to say. Then, after various paragraphs, tying up loose ends and some historical traces, we realize that this “diplomatic novice” and “woodland maiden” is the poet Ida Gramcko: “The willful chin, almost a proud writer’s signature. Eyes of unforgettable golden light. In her brown hair, the flowing silkiness of the mane of a horse belonging to the heir of some ruling dynasty. Dark circles under her eyes that foretold a precocious insomnia: a precocious pain.”
If we were to join all of Ramos Sucre’s prose poems, one after another, following the structure of a novel, the unity of language beyond the motif and the short story that the texts tell would be surprising. That is why it is not too abrupt to go, for example, from La torre de Timón to El cielo de esmalte, two of his fundamental works. The same method can be found in parts of the work of Elisa Lerner, who never loses sight of the discursive qualities that give her prose consistency. And, if we go a little further, it is possible to consider her prose like an autonomous, identifiable character.
De muerte lenta is a cathedral of images; without rushing and with an attentive eye, we select some fragments that burn like delicate candles: “The old party is illuminated by the difficulties of lighting matches in the darkness of memories. It will not be long before the little blue flame appears, cheerful, like Arabian harem pants. The flame of memory, its insecure halo, a tiny dome, flickering and golden.”
Elisa Lerner’s writing has a language free of syntactic fractures and uses an abundance of epithets, like that of Ramos Sucre: “ancient customs,” “upward brushstrokes,” “disguised threats,” “blatant disturbance,” “further collapse,” “primitive huts.” This rigor is even found in burlesque passages: “At dawn, under the pretext of not putting on weight in order to keep their husbands, they did not have to rush off to expensive female gyms, and on their way, rid themselves earlier than others of the chronic semen that forms part of their nightly makeup.”
In other parts of the novel, in addition to the scenic description, we can also recognize the close affiliation to objectivist poetry. Through a clear, simple, and distanced gaze, the everyday environment shows itself and does not wallow in emotional outpouring. A call from an onlooker’s voice appears, and urges: “Friends, I recognize you. Where from? Where from? Shrapnel sounds, a dust cloud from a military coup d’état. A bullet hits the window. Bloody bell.”
Rafael Castillo Zapata has also said that De muerte lenta is a small treatise on moral politics, which tries to rescue “the moral memories that no longer exist in the country.” That is why the characters outline the silhouette of a tragic and lucid Rómulo Gallegos, reconstructed by the nostalgic eye of those narrating. To this day, it is hard to believe in Gallegos’ short stint as president, a cultured and constitutional man, uncomfortable for men with rifles and uniforms. One has the impression of reading a testimony of an inherited reaction or an account of the mistake, dated 1948. A momentary government that casts doubt on one of the central characters in De muerte lenta, the sullen Dr. Carlos Pedraza, who tries to convince himself that these events were not “a dream of a reflection of youth, or a short-lived clarity invented by himself.”
Elisa Lerner, at 91 years old, still lives in the city of Caracas. Her work is still recognized in academic and cultural spaces: in 2023, the Universidad Metropolitana, based in Caracas, awarded her an honorary doctorate, while the Masters in Latin American and Caribbean Literature at the Universidad de Los Andes (Mérida, Venezuela) paid tribute to her at the Venezuelan Writers Club, a club in which I had the honor of participating as a speaker. Lerner is currently preparing a fourth book of fiction. All those who know her know of her willingness and kindness, always attentive to new emerging voices.
Translated by Madeleine Owen-Ellis and Stella Taylor
Photo: David Tomaseti, Unsplash.
