Seven gestures
Chus Pato
from Hordes of Writing (trans Erin Moure)
Shearsman Books (Exeter, Eng.)/Buschek Books (Ottawa, Can.), 2011
The author you quote speaks of seven gestures that produce nation: birth, emergency, initiative, post-position, sense of theatrical practice, linguistic transmission and absolution . . .thus you realize that you write in the language of your forebears so as to absolve yourself of the suffocating bonds of our particular identity project, and in this language you can reach - you claim - a road to non-knowledge that surpasses the violence tied to the linguistic conflict of origin
absolution in the face of the historical catastrophes of nation and of the language proper to it, this sense of moral failure, etc.
we waste so much time in self-loathing that we end up not knowing what brings favourable winds and what doesn't
and you can ponder it endlessly, ask yourself yet again if you should welcome the next words or not, these words that confess themselves; the poem dotes on tiny portions of ecstasy or existence and every affect
or continue shaping a "lyric" that abstracts itself, indifferent to what happens, to what happens to us
and return to the inarticulate sounds of pleasure, to that instant of silence, when you're born but air has yet to burst into the lungs, to the exclamatory voice that precedes pain and death (64)
from Hordes of Writing (trans Erin Moure)
Shearsman Books (Exeter, Eng.)/Buschek Books (Ottawa, Can.), 2011
The author you quote speaks of seven gestures that produce nation: birth, emergency, initiative, post-position, sense of theatrical practice, linguistic transmission and absolution . . .thus you realize that you write in the language of your forebears so as to absolve yourself of the suffocating bonds of our particular identity project, and in this language you can reach - you claim - a road to non-knowledge that surpasses the violence tied to the linguistic conflict of origin
absolution in the face of the historical catastrophes of nation and of the language proper to it, this sense of moral failure, etc.
we waste so much time in self-loathing that we end up not knowing what brings favourable winds and what doesn't
and you can ponder it endlessly, ask yourself yet again if you should welcome the next words or not, these words that confess themselves; the poem dotes on tiny portions of ecstasy or existence and every affect
or continue shaping a "lyric" that abstracts itself, indifferent to what happens, to what happens to us
and return to the inarticulate sounds of pleasure, to that instant of silence, when you're born but air has yet to burst into the lungs, to the exclamatory voice that precedes pain and death (64)
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