Synopses & Reviews
Poetics. Memoir. SECESSION/INSECESSION is an homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato's Galician biopoetics of poet and nation, SECESSION—translated by Erín Moure—joins Moure's Canadian translational biopoetics, INSECESSION. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against normalized language; to Moure, translation itself disrupts and reforms poetics and the possibility of the poem. In solidarity with Pato, Moure echoes Barthes: "A readerly text is something I cannot re-produce (today I cannot write like Atwood); a writerly text is one I can read only if I utterly transform my reading regime. I now recognize a third text alongside the readerly and the writerly: let's call it the untranslatable." In SECESSION/INSECESSION, a major European poet and a known Canadian poet, born on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the mid twentieth century and with vastly different experiences of political life, forge a 21st century relationship of thinking and creation. The result is a major work of memoir, poetics, trans-ethics and history. Chus Pato's Secession was chosen as a 2009 Book of the Year by the Revista das Letras, literary supplement of Galicia Hoxe (Galicia Today).
Synopsis
Secession / Insecession is a homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato's Galician biopoetics of poet and nation,
Secession - translated by Er 1/2n Moure - joins Moure's Canadian translational biopoetics,
Insecession. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against normalized language; to Moure, translation itself disrupts and reforms poetics and the possibility of the poem. In solidarity with Pato, Moure echoes Barthes: A readerly text is something I cannot re-produce (today I cannot write like Atwood); a writerly text is one I can read only if I utterly transform my reading regime. I now recognize a third text alongside the readerly and the writerly: let's call it the untranslatable.
In Secession / Insecession, a major European poet and a known Canadian poet, born on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the mid twentieth century and with vastly different experiences of political life, forge a 21st century relationship of thinking and creation. The result is a major work of memoir, poetics, trans-ethics and history.
Chus Pato's Secession was chosen 2009 Book of the Year by the Revista das Letras, literary supplement of Galicia Hoxe (Galicia Today).
About the Author
Erín Moure has written a dozen books of poetry, most recently O Cadoiro (2007). Her 2005 Little Theatres was shortlisted for the Griffin Prize, Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the GGs; it won the AJM Klein Prize, made the Globe 100, and was translated into Galician as Teatrinos (Galaxia, 2007). Her translation of Galician poet Chus Pato's Charenton came out in 2007 from Shearsman (UK) and BuschekBooks (Ottawa) and her translation of Pato's m-Tala will soon appear from the same presses.