Secession/Insecession (Literature in Translation Series)

Poetics. Memoir. SECESSION/INSECESSION is an 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 untranslatable." 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 a 2009 Book of the Year by the Revista das Letras, literary supplement of Galicia Hoxe (Galicia Today).