Camuflaxe

by Lupe Gómez

Poetry. Women's Studies. Translation. Translated by Erín Moure. CAMOUFLAGE is a new collection of poems by the Galician poet and journalist Lupe Gómez. The poems in CAMOUFLAGE are sharp, tender elegies for a mother and for a rural village, its changing walks and ways and words. In CAMOUFLAGE, we see how one person can be "two sisters," with "two pasts." We learn about making cheeses, but also that "Death is a political project." Gómez's bold voice erases the line between the political and the domestic, the experimental and the sequential, and allows for celebratory insight. CAMOUFLAGE was published in Spain in 2017 and is Gómez's eleventh book of poetry but her first published in the United States. The poems were originally written in Galician, a language spoken by about 3 million people, primarily in Galicia, an "autonomous community" in the northwest of Spain. Translator and poet Erín Moure has translated the book into an intimate English with a vivid and tight "linguistic embrace." CAMOUFLAGE is a bilingual edition with a translator's introduction, and presents a new approach to designing work in translation.

Genres: Poetry

107 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

About the author

Lupe Gómez was born in Fisteus, Galicia in 1972 and currently lives in Santiago de Compostela. Her first book of poems, Pornography, published in the mid 1990s, sent a ripple of surprise and protest through Galician literature for its bold exploration of women’s bodies and sexuality. It was translated into English by Rebeca Lema and Erín Moure, and published in Germany in 2013 in an extensive volume on her work entitled Libre e estranxeira — Estudos e traducións. Camouflage (Chan da Pólvora, 2017) is her 15th book, and is in its third printing in Galicia. It received the prestigious Spanish Critics’ Prize for 2018 for poetry in Galician and the 2018 Gala do Libro Galego Prize for poetry. Camouflage and Pornography will both appear in Spanish (Castilian) translation in 2019. Besides devoting herself to poetry, Gómez is a journalist and theater critic, and a liturgical reader in the cathedral of Santiago. Her work will soon be put to music by acclaimed musician and singer Amancio Prada.

Reviews

[Carmen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Qué ternura

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

On Galicia, Lupe Gómez writes: "Your world was not visible on maps". Camouflage is a bilingual book that celebrates Galician language and land through a political and feminist historicising of the romantic pastoral. These light and uncluttered poems - of agrarian meadows, cows and cheeses - are ripened by Gómez’s serene nostalgia and yearning for community. Camouflage traces the mother-daughter relationship from birth, past the "political silence of the hearth", towards the death of the Mother-as-muse: the book is a commemoration for the spirit of the rural, female body. Nevertheless, Gómez and Moure reminds us that Galicia’s way of life and radical language, including its refusal to be absorbed by the neoliberal economics of Spain, is bitterly under threat. If "language resists in the stomach of a dead farmer" then Camouflage can be read as a book that, like Galicia, refuses to blend into the background, to be viewed as invisible.

[natàlia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emocionoume moito. Ten toda a forza e a tenrura de Lupe Gómez.

[Tensy Gesteira estevez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Camuflaxe, un poemario abertamente reivindicativo, no que se ve reflectido o campo e as mulleres que tanto o traballaron e traballan, as nais que o deixaron todo por coidar os seus fillos e fillas e por darlles un futuro máis alentador que o seu, a pobreza como escenario desde o que berrar polo que corresponde e o rural como punto de inicio e final para entender o que somos. Ateigados de moito erotismo tamén, os versos de Lupe Gómez destacan por ser un berro, por falar sen fisuras do que somos, e sen límites á vergonza. Por iso, quizais, vexo valentía e sinceridade en cada verba escollida.

Recensión completa aquí: https://lecturafilia.com/2019/05/16/c...

[Moisés · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unha preciosa declaración de amor.

[Breogán Xague · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutamente precioso <3

[Xiana Otero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ti non tiñas soños
porque as mulleres na aldea non soñan.

[Jimena · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

[Elena Barrio · Rating 5 out of 5]

El libro del año.