Month: February 2019

From the Portuguese original of Llansol’s Geography of Rebels

In lieu of writing critically about Maria Gabriela Llansol’s first ever publication in English; The Geography of Rebels, from Houston’s Deep Vellum, I’m posting this sly reference (below, plus). However, as I said re Mallo, these and some of 2019’s forthcoming books (mostly in translation), call out for serious, passionate, engaged, authoritative responses from writers. I hear the call and am going to be responding again after a long interlude.

Spend a life attempting to capture the resistant poetics of your existence (what/why else?) and you do gain special access to other writing. You can see right through most of it -line by smooth paragraph by over-recognisable page- but also locate magic; know, observe or instinctively recognise how it is done. It’s all in the writing. If you make original sentences or pages, then you know about each word, each in between, and all their potentialities. The call is urgent. Books pages tend to agree on what is important, especially viz work in translation, exceptions are treasured like monsoon rain. I almost always felt differently (2019: Khaled Khalifa, Enrique Vila-Matas, Anne Boyer, Saidiya Hartman, Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Yasser Elsheshtawy, but also E J Burnett, Laura Beatty, etc.); a significant motivator in paying attention to awkwardness, the resistant or ‘difficult’, complex or subtle, and the ‘foreign’. No apologies. Continue reading “note_15 On M G Llansol’s The Geography of Rebels in Graz; any place for a nonviolent image?” →