Chus Pato is one of Europe’s most significant contemporary poets. She lives in Galicia, in Northwest Spain, and writes in Galician, a language that over time has weathered censorship, dictatorship, colonialist policies, and administrative neglect, all aimed at impeding its survival. Here, she converses with Erín Moure, Canadian poet and her translator into English for twenty years, on the occasion of the 2021 Poesiefestival Berlin. They discuss the current situation of Galician, the ways that poetry allows us to think out or rethink our relation to politics, the language of the poem and its difference from the language of consensus, and her current explorations into articulated language and human action in her work-in-progress, Sonora, from which she read in Berlin.
The original Galician conversation and German translation by Burghard Baltrusch are available; the interview has been translated into English by Moure with permission from Poesiefestival Berlin. Chus Pato’s most recent book in English, The Face of the Quartzes, appeared in Erín Moure’s translation from Veliz Books in fall 2021.
Erín Moure (EM): We’ve often discussed your choice to write poetry in Galician and how it is a political decision, a demand for justice for the language of your people—a language prohibited under Francoism—as well as a resistance to the political undermining of Galician and subtle promotion of a single and compulsory language, that of the unitary state of Spain, which we in English call “Spanish.” What I’d like to point out is that on the other side of the Atlantic, for your audience that is not Galician and that reads you in English translation, Galician is not a minor or defective tongue but simply a European language, and you a European poet. How do you see your role as poet, in Galicia, in Spain, in Europe, and now in the city of Berlin, a European capital of poetry as well as meeting point of the west and the east of Europe?
Chus Pato (CP): I think that in Galicia and in general I am well known enough as a poet and am read by the community of those interested in poetry. I know many loyal readers read my books when they are published. This is what I most value. Even so, I still perceive resistance on the part of canonizing institutions that I think has to do with what these institutions see as the difficulties in reading what I write (hermeticism, experimentalism, etc.) and with issues related to my political stance, a position that coincides neither with the right that governs us nor with majority nationalism.
That my work is known at all in the Spanish state is due in great measure to the efforts of my publishers and translators, and my feeling is that they have been remarkably successful. I can’t really gauge how I am perceived elsewhere in Europe. I feel I’m read more on the American continents. In Europe, my gratitude goes to Frank Kaizer, my Dutch editor at De Vrije Uitgevers, for his efforts and courage, and also to the Rotterdam festival and its former director Bas Kwakman.
EM: How would you describe the current situation of the Galician language, both in cultural milieus—where Galician figures prominently—and in daily life?
CP: The situation of Galician is dramatic, really. The Council of Europe, in its recent report on the fifth evaluation of Spain’s implementation of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, warns that only 23.9% of children in Galicia under the age of fifteen can express themselves in Galician.
Galician continues to suffer from a covert criminalization that has prevented generational transmission. The linguistic policies of the political party that systematically wins Galician elections are largely responsible for putting us in this extreme situation. Today, we can no longer say that Galician is strong in the private sphere, at least not in the case of younger generations.
We have to distinguish diverse political positions on linguistic diversity of the State: the Spanish right is always intolerant, and within the left there are degrees of tolerance. In the forty years that separate us from the end of the Franco dictatorship, we have not advanced much toward what is desirable, at least in my opinion.
What matters to me is what happens in Galicia, what the majority of Galicians think of their native language, and the reasons that lead them to turn away from it and not transmit it to their children as their mother tongue. These reasons have to do with the economic policies of the State, which has always viewed Galicia as a land from which to extract raw materials and labour. Two centuries of emigration and of the continual destruction of the values that constituted and still constitute us as distinct as Galicians largely explain the situation that faces us now.
EM: What for you is the relation between politics and poetry? In particular: can poetry give us a way or ways to think, and rethink, our political situation and thus rethink our bodies, our relations with that which lies beyond us?
CP: To me, the poem is a linguistic living entity, a being that comes to life in words and in the structures that are at work behind words. There is nothing more political than language. Poetry operates from and in language; from this we can easily deduce that writing poetry not only has a relationship with politics but, even more so, is a fully political act.
The language of a poem is different from the language that we use to speak an I, to speak the world, or to advance using logical concepts. It’s a language that demarcates a border and thus is in osmosis with all other uses of language, but it is none of them, and does not wish to occupy the place occupied by other uses of language.
Poetry shines light on both authoritarianism and the servitude to which instrumental languages, commodified speech, and the fetishisms of commodity subject us: those languages that try to extract market profit from our bodies and leave us with sickness and debt.
And yes, I do think that the poem, in reaching us, intensifies something that expands the mind, brings joy, moves the heart, and nourishes the memory of what we are. Yes, I believe that a poem can alter the relationship we have with the body and the relationships we establish with the “other.” I believe that a poem provides evidence that life is not property, is surely that which cannot be captured and is improper. I believe that to write poetry today is to reach for a language far removed from property and possession, a language like life itself.
EM: As a translator, I think here of a recent English-language translation manifesto titled Deformation Zone (Ugly Duckling Press, 2012) by Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson. The manifesto articulates translation as mode, map, work of art, and as a radical regime of language that transforms and conforms. In the deformation zone, Göransson says, “the wound of translation makes impossible connections between languages, unsettling stable ideas of language, productive ideas of literature.” Reading this definition of translation permits me to posit your authorial figure as that of a translator, because the poetry you write already—even before translation into another language—upturns “stable ideas of language” and the very idea of literature as system of production. While language destabilizes, you also see it as productive; it “produces, produces us as human beings” (to paraphrase you) because humans are beings with articulated language.
CP: To me, a poet is someone who introduces into the language of common use what I’ll call the language of the Muse. This is always a formulation foreign to the city or centre, a speaking/writing that never settles down there, can never be mistaken for the language/writing of the city. It’s a logos that lives at the threshold, now inside and now out in the fields in what can’t be tamed, in what is unruly, wild.
The language of the poem is a logos that destabilizes the language of consensus. Clearly, it’s always a translation in that it introduces, into languages of common use, a language that cannot be used, a gift. From this we can say that writing a poem and translating a poem have much in common. Both carry, from one place to another, notions that don’t fit in, that don’t correspond without remainder. They are, in that sense—like metaphor—a transit, a navigation that is evidence that world and language do not entirely coincide.
The remainder is what holds interest for the poem. That remainder—which does not fit and is the Muse or Memory—is that which we will never be able to remember yet we experience, and it returns to us again and again.
Languages are in perpetual movement and at the same time go on being themselves, a little like the waters of Heraclitus’ river. Each night we utterly forget we are linguistic beings, that we possess an articulated language. There’s nothing stable in what leaves our mouth, in what follows the rhythm of respiration, the rhythm of the air. Among life’s multiple structures is one called Poetry. A poem draws close to, draws us closer to, that poetic structure of life.
EM: Remember a few years ago, in Wales, someone admitted surprise at your poetry. They’d thought Galician was a backwoods language, cut off somehow from modernity, and thus expected your writing to be just of regional interest. How do you respond to someone who perceives that Galician—or any language with fewer speakers—is backward?
CP: That did happen, and I do remember. The widespread idea that a minoritized language, one spoken historically by illiterate peasants, can only be poetized as if this were the case, is a form of colonial thinking. So we end up finding people who on reading poetry in Galician think that it’s not Galician because, in their minds, we must only write about farm tools, the greenery of the grass, rural charm, and resignation.
The best response is to ask that they try to realize that “high culture” is possible in any language and that history, including the entire twentieth century, was also experienced in those backward and ignorant languages by thousands of land labourers, men and women, who were exported, cast out, and proletarianized outside their countries. Also by those who stayed behind, where they lived and experienced the violence of being unable to prosper without abandoning their native languages, in what should clearly be called linguicide.
EM: I remember verses in m-Talá such as “IT’S NOT ONLY LANGUAGE THAT’S UNDER THREAT / BUT OUR VERY LINGUISTIC CAPACITY, regardless of the idiom we speak”—that warn, I think, of dangers to the voice—or “The voice was panic” in Hordes of Writing. The word “panic” appears often in Charenton as well. In the three poems you performed at the opening night Weltklang at Poesiefestival Berlin in June 2021, there is more a presence of water, poplars, of the relation between person and land or animals, and with writing/voice/articulated language. In the first of the poems you read, we hear the poem ask itself if it is Hades, hell. In one of the videos, you said: “I like to think about a world without sounds, mute.” How do you see the evolution of your poetry since m-Talá, the book that in 2000 provoked a tremendous commotion in Galician and Spanish poetry, and up to The Face of the Quartzes (Un libre favor in Galician) and now your work in progress, Sonora?
CP: I’ve been pondering the voice for years; it’s a question that has been crucial for me to better understand the processes at work in writing. In great measure, what we write ends up being read by people in their own rooms, in solitude, and without voice. As well, given the importance of the gaze in our time, we write for the gaze. Writing is first directed at the gaze.
The fact that I read my poems aloud in public, however, has drawn me to reflect on the voice and to consider with increasing awareness the role it plays and what it means in my own compositional process. With Aristotle we know that we “humans” do not simply have voices; we have articulated language. Animals are the ones with voices; we, in sacrificing the voice, break with animality to enter into speech, which gives us the distinction between good and evil. It so happens that I can’t accept this duality, and others so basic to our civilization, which distinguish between culture and nature, humanity and animality, slave and free, man and woman. All this has led me to consider the voice as fundamental to the poem.
The voice is something I can’t even think of sacrificing because I conceive of myself as nature and as a mammal sapiens. My linguistic articulation hinges on the voice. I have no desire to set myself at the pinnacle of a hierarchy that names all other animals. Hence my vindication of the voice as muteness as well as speech. The muteness of the voice is fundamental because the writing of a poem begins when we are left wordless.
EM: I want to talk about the imagery in your work (swallows, buffalo, trout, salmon, poplar, etc.) that comes from a world we call “natural.” In Flesh of Leviathan, final book in your pentalogy Delve, there are also many animals and plants; they appear to inhabit a world that is post-apocalyptic, or post-post-apocalyptic. Now in The Face of the Quartzes, and in the poems I’ve read from your work-in-progress, Sonora, I perceive a different relation with the non-human world. Animals and plants can be read almost as omens, as if these images desired or invented or made possible a future. They are in no way bucolic images of a past.
CP: I agree with the idea in Indigenous ontologies that we are nature, as I’ve already expressed. In Sonora, my meditation on the voice and on our species hits a point of no return, where nothing coincides any longer with the earlier conception that situated human beings as central on the Earth. It could be that in Sonora other species, whether animal, mineral, or plant, are already saturated in this new reflection. That said, I don’t think I’ve ever written anything bucolic. I’ve had the fortune of experiencing the last death throes of the rural labouring culture of Atlantic-facing communities, while at the same time living in urban settings. Perhaps this explains why these issues are urgent to me.
EM: I’m thinking now of your nod to Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky in the poem “Stalker” which you read in Berlin, an interface between what we call the West and the East of Europe, which at its furthest reaches touches Asia. There are many references to Western Asia in the five books of Delve. Now in The Face of the Quartzes and Sonora, the poems are situated more frequently in your birthplace, Ourense, in the interior of Galicia. Can you comment on this geographical movement in your work over time?
CP: I see Europe as an Asiatic peninsula and not as the continent which geography has taught us. I’ve always been attracted to “the great European plain” and to its contacts with Middle-Eastern civilizations. They are part of my cultural biology. I can’t envision myself without the hydraulic civilizations of India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, and I cannot perceive of Europe without the lands that once comprised the USSR and its extraordinary cultures, its marvellous poets.
Tarkovsky is one of the major artists of these cultures and I adore his films. In my poem “Stalker,” I wanted to unite what in the film is called the Zone with my mother’s home territory—the Limia, in Galicia. I chose to read this poem in Berlin because so many Limians emigrated to Germany and made their lives there. Several of my father’s cousins went to Germany to work, and one still lives there. Since childhood, Germany has been very present in my life because of that family emigration. Berlin is what it is, a city traversed by History in a brutal way, and I recognize the enormity of this situation.
EM: I’ve always loved the explicit multiplicity in your work. Can you comment on this multiplicity of voices and subjects, those of women especially, and the variety of forms as well, including theatre, conversations, and interviews? For me this wealth is a tremendous strength in your work and transmits an urgency that I too feel.
CP: Poetry dreams two impossible dreams: one is to mean nothing at all, to be Music, and the other is to think philosophically, to be Philosophy. And since there are two sides to every border, what’s on one side and what’s on the other desire and touch each other and are osmotic. At a given point, I realized that the language of the poem also delineated another border, that between poetry and other literary and artistic genres, and non-artistic ones as well. A poem, if it wants to, can encompass narrative, essay, and theatre without ever being narrative, essay, theatre. That’s how m-Talá came to be the book that it is. From theatre I learned how to create characters, although in the poems they are direct voices, not characters. All this is linked to the fact that in the poems I write, there’s no centred and exclusionary lyric subject.
The poem that I try to write opts for the kind of subject in which all personal pronouns are interchangeable and equally valuable. It opts for a subject who desires to include others without hierarchy, who loves metamorphoses and wants to flow like the waters or like the incessant upheavals of mountains, who values the voices of wind and grass as much as the voice of a human. And, of course, the subject in the poem I write gives women a relevance and accepts the mark of gender. Acceptance of this mark presupposes, for this type of lyric subject, understanding what it means to be a woman in the neoliberal patriarchy and in the various contemporary patriarchies.
This subject knows that we women can be returned to many forms of bondage, some as ancient as prostitution, and others as new as eating disorders. This subject realizes that violence against women is the model for the carrying out of all other violence against animals, other men, and other peoples.
EM: To end, one more rather large question: what future is there for poetry?
CP: Poetry has no future because the time of poetry is always the present. That moment at which someone reads aloud and someone else listens to the poem, or the moment when someone opens a book, and silently reads the poem. The time of poetry is that of Ero of Armenteira, protagonist of several medieval cantigas written in Galician by King Afonso X the Wise. Ero prayed to the Virgin Mary to know paradise and his request was granted—he fell into a 300-year trance upon hearing the song of a single bird. When he woke, the world had utterly changed from what he once knew.
A poem is never a current event, it is never timely but a commotion in time, a departure from the time measured by clocks. It’s an action that changes everything, even the notion of the temporality of the very words that are the impossible measure of its acts.
Chus Pato has authored eleven books of poetry in Galician, six of which are translated into English: m-Talá, Charenton, and Hordes of Writing (all Shearsman Books), Secession (Book*hug), Flesh of Leviathan (Omnidawn Books) and most recently, The Face of the Quartzes (Veliz Books, 2021). An essay, At the Limit (Zat-So Productions), has also appeared in English. Pato’s work is widely translated into Spanish, and into Catalan, Portuguese, Bulgarian, and Dutch, with selections in German, Polish, French, etc. Her work appears in dozens of anthologies. Retired from teaching history and geography in central Galicia in 2020, she continues her lifelong literary and social activism: she serves on the boards of the Fundación Euseino? and the Fundación Rosalía de Castro, and holds a chair in the Royal Galician Academy. Her Hordes of Writing received the 2008 Spanish Critics’ Prize and the 2009 Losada Diéguez Prize. In 2013, the Galician Booksellers’ Association proclaimed her Author of the Year. In 2015, her voice was recorded for the Woodberry Poetry Room archive at Harvard University. She performs frequently in Europe and South America and has also read in Canada, USA, Cuba, Mexico, and North Africa. She is at work on a new book, Sonora.
Erín Moure’s most recent poetry is The Elements (House of Anansi Press, 2019), “a book of Dad.” The Face of the Quartzes, from Veliz Books, is her sixth translation from the work of Galician poet Chus Pato. Other recent translations: a chapbook from Argentian poet Juan Gelman, Sleepless Nights Under Capitalism (Eulalia Books); from the Galician of Uxío Novoneyra, The Uplands: Book of the Courel and other poems (Veliz Books); from the French of Quebec poet Chantal Neveu, This Radiant Life (Book*hug, 2021 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation into English). In French translation by Colette St-Hilaire, Moure’s most recent work is Toots fait la Shiva, avenue Minto (Le Noroît, finalist, Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation into French), from her memoir Sitting Shiva on Minto Avenue, by Toots (New Star Books, 2017). A forty-year retrospective, Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure, appeared in 2017 from Wesleyan University.
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