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by Erín Moure (Author), Chus Pato (Author)
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 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 intranslatable."
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 2009 Book of the Year by the Revista das Letras, literary supplement of Galicia Hoxe (Galicia Today).Author Biography
ERÍN MOURE is a Montréal poet and translator curious about what's active in the poetry of others. Moure's most recent books are Kapusta and Insecession, a biotranspoetics published in one volume with her translation from Galician of Chus Pato's biopoetics, Secession. Other recent translations include White Piano by Nicole Brossard, translated with Robert Majzels from the French, and Galician Songs by Rosalía de Castro, translated from the Galician.
CHUS PATO is a central figure in contemporary poetry and one of the most iconoclastic figures in Galician and European literature. Her sixth book, m-Talá, broke the poetic mould in 2000. Hordes of Writing, the third text in her projected pentology, Method, received the 2008 Spanish Critics' Prize for Galician Poetry, and the Losada Diéguez Literary Prize in 2009. Pato continues to refashion the way we think of the possibilities of poetic text, of words, bodies, political and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world. Secession is Pato's ninth book and her fourth to be translated into English.
