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Prototype Publishing Ltd. Virgula.
Paperback
Published February 13, 2024
8 people want to read
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April 14, 2024
I reviewed this for Asymptote. You can read the full review here: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog...
"Virgula by Sasja Janssen, first published in Dutch in 2021 and now out in an English translation by the Booker International Prize-winning Michele Hutchison, centres on the same punctuation mark. The text is titled after the Latin word for comma, which symbolises movement and a break away from stillness. It pushes phrases ahead, links one thought to the next, and bridges language. Indeed, if the full stop—or period, as the Americans like to call it—can denote death, cessation of thought, and even an end to language, then the comma is the complete opposite. It is perpetually in motion, gesturing towards a relentless zest for life, a desire to fill the emptiness with words, to delay the inevitable. Janssen invokes Virgula as a muse, an entity no less than any other Greek goddess, and she is at the beginning of each poem in the first and last of the book’s three sections—which also take the title of “Virgula”. The poems in the middle section each begin with “I call upon you”, again after the section’s title."
"Virgula by Sasja Janssen, first published in Dutch in 2021 and now out in an English translation by the Booker International Prize-winning Michele Hutchison, centres on the same punctuation mark. The text is titled after the Latin word for comma, which symbolises movement and a break away from stillness. It pushes phrases ahead, links one thought to the next, and bridges language. Indeed, if the full stop—or period, as the Americans like to call it—can denote death, cessation of thought, and even an end to language, then the comma is the complete opposite. It is perpetually in motion, gesturing towards a relentless zest for life, a desire to fill the emptiness with words, to delay the inevitable. Janssen invokes Virgula as a muse, an entity no less than any other Greek goddess, and she is at the beginning of each poem in the first and last of the book’s three sections—which also take the title of “Virgula”. The poems in the middle section each begin with “I call upon you”, again after the section’s title."
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