Nicolás Suescún (Colombia)

Por: Nicolás Suescún
Traductor: Tranlated by the author

Economic report

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou work", God cursed Adam.
And it was thus that Adam Smith conceived work.
-Marx

Adam, not Eden's, but Smith,
and the old Karl with the great beard
meet each other crossing a London bridge.
The Teutonic Jew pounces upon
the phlegmatic Anglo-Saxon;
this last one, the pseudo-Teuton,
falls into the freezing waters of the Thames,
famous for the nymphs
that of yore sang on its banks.
A choir of praises sings out
at one shilling per voice.
Everything has a price, says Adam,
and Karl sinks down in the river of history,
murky and full of a pedestrian fauna.
Glug-glug-glug. God then received him
in his breast and said to him:
"Karl, Karl, this and no other
is your fate because you always
objected to all my decrees,
but I am generous and magnanimous,
give me everything you have in your pockets
and I will give you the best of my clouds,
very near Adam's cloud,
the one of the shilling per voice,
not Eden's one."
"But that would be hell without end," said Karl.
"As a matter of fact," said God
with great thunder and lightning,
"you must know
that everything has a price,
even in Heaven,
ask Adam if it is not so,
either one, the one from Eden
or the one of the song of the shilling."

Nicolás Suescún was born in Bogotá in 1937. Poet, translator, journalist and bookseller, advanced secondary studies in Virginia; then he took courses of humanities, history and literature in the University of Columbia and, later on, in the school of High studies of Paris; at his return to Bogotá he was appointed professor of English at the National University; He worked at the Buchholz bookstore whose magazine Echo he directed during several years; in 1976 he exposed a collection of his collages in the University of Berlin and in the Gallery Belarca; then he founded the Extemporánea Bookstore, he was diagramador of the Magazine Nueva Frontera, Chief of the editorial staff in Cromos Magazine, he prepared international reports for the TV news program Noticias Uno, and author of countless bibliographical notes in different national and international publications . Translator of Rimbaud, Flaubert, Somerset Maughan, Ambrose Pierce, W.B. Yeats, Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Crane. Works: El retorno a casa, 1971; El último escalón, 1974; El extraño y otros cuentos, 1980; La vida es...; Los Cuadernos de N, 1994; y Oniromanía, 1996.