Guillermo Sucre Figarella (born 1933), is a Venezuela

Venezuela

Venezuela , officially called the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela , is a tropical country on the northern coast of South America. It borders Colombia to the west, Guyana to the east, and Brazil to the south...

n poet

Poet

A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...

 and literary critic

Literary criticism

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...

 born in Tumeremo in the state of Bolivar. He is also a member of the notable Sucre family

Sucre family

The Sucre Family is a prominent political family of Venezuela.-Origin:The family was founded in Venezuela, by Carlos Francisco de Sucre Garrido y Pardo, a Flanders-born noble, son of Charles Adrien de Sucre y d'Yves, Marquess of Preux, of Flemish origin, and of María Buenaventura Carolina Isabel...

 like his uncle Jose Antonio Ramos Sucre

José Antonio Ramos Sucre

José Antonio Ramos Sucre was a Venezuelan poet, professor, consul and erudite. He is a member of the Sucre family of Venezuela and the great-great-nephew of Antonio José de Sucre...

 and his older brothers General Juan Manuel Sucre Figarella

Juan Manuel Sucre Figarella

Juan Manuel Sucre Figarella , was a Venezuelan Army Brigadier General who served as Chief of Staff of the Venezuelan army in the 1970s during the administration of President Rafael Caldera...

 and Senator Leopoldo Sucre Figarella

Leopoldo Sucre Figarella

Leopoldo Sucre Figarella , was a Venezuelan politician and engineer. A member of the Sucre family Sucre Figarella served as Governor, Minister and Senator during his long and eventful political career. He was nicknamed "The Builder" and "The Czar of Guayana".-Early career:He was born in Tumeremo in...

.

Literary critic and academic

His most important critical work is made up the volumes "Borges, el poeta" (1967), a wise incursion into the writings of the Argentine master, Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

 and "La máscara, la transparencia" (1975), an acute analysis of the paths of contemporary Latin America

Latin America

Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages  – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...

n poetry. There are new corrected and augmented editions of both. He has also translated into Spanish the works of André Breton

André Breton

André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....

, Saint-John Perse

Saint-John Perse

Saint-John Perse was a French poet, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1960 "for the soaring flight and evocative imagery of his poetry." He was also a major French diplomat from 1914 to 1940, after which he lived primarily in the USA until 1967.-Biography:Alexis Leger was...

, William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...

 and Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

.

In 1957 he founded the literary journal Sardío and an associated literary group. He began teaching at the Universidad Central de Venezuela in that same year. From 1968 till 1975 he lived in the United States, where he lectured at the University of Pittsburgh

University of Pittsburgh

The University of Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as Pitt, is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787 on what was then the American frontier, Pitt is one of the oldest continuously chartered institutions of...

 and became a member Pitt's Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Upon his return to Venezuela he taught at the Universidad Simón Bolívar

Universidad Simón Bolívar

Simón Bolívar University or USB, is a public institution located in Miranda State, Venezuela with scientific and technological orientation....

 and became literary director of the publishing house Monte Ávila Editores

Monte Ávila Editores

Monte Ávila Editores is the largest and most important publishing house in Venezuela. Between 1980 and 2000 it published over 300 titles, largely by Venezuelan authors, producing over 1.2m copies....

.

He won the National Prize for Literature

National Prize for Literature (Venezuela)

The National Prize for Literature is a literary award made annually to Venezuelan writers.* 1948 Mario Briceño Iragorry...

 in 1976 for his essay La máscara, la transparencia.

Poetry

His poetic work has a singular place within Venezuelan literature. He is a poet of light, like the Bolivian Eduardo Mitre or the Mexican Homero Aridjis

Homero Aridjis

Homero Aridjis is a Mexican poet, novelist, environmental activist, journalist and diplomat known for his independence.-Family and Early Life:...

, and like them he makes of the splendour and magnificence of the tropics the first motivation behind his poetry. His work is also heavily inspired by sensuality. Thus, writes Sucre in his collection of poems entitled, "En el verano cada palabra respira en el verano" (1976) to note "the hard / the fleeting transparency". It was him who invited, from the pages of his first book, "Mientras suceden los días" (1961), to walk towards "the invisible kingdom", which refers to that which he has imagined. He is a poet trying not to get lost in "that lighting that lit up my childhood... where I see and recognize myself / my face", as his "La mirada" (1970) reads. In his verses we find Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz

Octavio Paz Lozano was a Mexican writer, poet, and diplomat, and the winner of the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature.-Early life and writings:...

's influence, as evidenced in his poem "Sino gestos", also included in "La mirada", which reads: "condemned to the same decay / the poem / the hand that writes it / and that erases it / the gaze that follows it / and rejects it / he that dreams it / and who also invents it"

Notable works

• Borges, el poeta (1967)
• La máscara, la transparencia (1975)
• Mientras suceden los días (1961)
• La mirada (1970)
• En el verano cada palabra respira en el verano (1976)
• Serpiente breve (1977)
• La vastedad (1990)