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).
