Moure has been interacting with Pato’s work for years, and her contribution has been much more than just enabling success abroad; in fact, it’s time to acknowledge a Pato–Mourean poetics. Moure’s translations have always undertaken a deliberate exploration of postmodernist satire of form, using footnotes, unconventional formatting and an idiosyncratic translatorial take on the unreliable narrator trope. The overarching themes of her translations of Pato have been identity, subjectivity, liminality and, through plurilingualism, plurality.
The Face of the Quartzes marks a growth in confidence, expanding on the playful, erratic nature of previous translations (such as m-Talá, BuschekBooks, 2009). Not only do the footnotes feel more direct, but the discretion of word choices and interpretation end up feeling more deliberate than ever before. At one point in the manuscript, Moure translates “todo desaparece” dramatically as “everything goes poof,” for example. Elsewhere, “máis estraña” is not rendered by the run-of-the-Romance-language-translation-mill “stranger,” but the rather unequivocal “weirder.”
More important than lexical resonances, and arguably more faithful to Pato’s text, is Moure’s focus on the symbolic narrative of imagery during her translation. For example, early on she expands on the central figure of stone(s) by allusion using a footnote:
Seriously
here
there’s just us
we who can’t be seen or heard
the ojives uphold us
we’re loaded onto trains saying
goodbye goodbye!!!
we keep cleaving into boulders
or woodlands and on the peaks
into ridges that cut the skin
and defy winds
we who speak here are stones
as such
the flight of the cranes1
we were there for it
There’s a lot going on in the poem, intertextually, and the footnote is welcome as always. Although the point of view is liable to shift, for now, the stones are the speaker of the poem, and Moure is kind enough to draw the connection through Hölderlin down to Homer, making light work of something academics of every other poetic tradition have spent decades on: tracing the origins of Western poetry. But, footnote aside, the line “Galicia is stones” specifies that this is the origins of Galician poetry we’re talking about, and Homer and the 19th-century Romantics are part of it, too.
The word “ojives” (conventional anglicization, ogives) refers, I believe, to those famous Gothic arches of Ourense, Patos' birthplace and the location of one of Galicia’s five cathedrals. Thus, architecture contributes just as much as geology and geography to this work. Moure elaborates: “In Neolithic times, the Celtic peoples of Galicia would insert white quartz cobbles at intervals among the stones that marked the east face of their megalithic tombs. The eastern wall, facing dawn, marks the portal between the world of the living and that of the dead.” And hence the liberal renaming of the collection, whose original title in Galician is Un libre favor (lit. “A free favour”), which, Moure explains, taps into Kantian aesthetics (cf. die freie Gunst), but the English word “free” has too many unintended meanings. It’s by grace of nature that the poet is afforded their aesthetic freedom, an aesthetics without bias and partiality. According to Moure, for Pato, the philosophy is more refined: poetry is quite literally freedom. And so, Moure invents her own title for the work, playing the role of translator and poet to forge a combined Pato–Mourean poetics.
In Pato–Mourean poetics, symbols readily usurp the poetic “I” embodying the impermanence of subjectivity. For instance, the very next poem deconstructs the speaker of the previous poem:
They
the crows
have bodies of athletes
to a voice unlike anything else
they are similar
from here we can untangle this encephalon
look at me
look at the garden
stony psyche
go tell the stone to speak
go tell it
to smile
Here, the speaker says, “look at me / look at the garden,” then refers to “the stone,” declaring an immediate departure from the previous poem: previously the first-person plural subject, “stone” is now the third-person singular object. This serves as an indication of the narrative deconstructionism present throughout the body of the work.
Each poem stands alone, but translates subjectivity from one to the next, each time broadening the scope of linguistic possibility while at the same time making room for interpretation in the spaces in between. This is the breadth of meaning, the ineffability of signifieds over signifiers. The Kingdom of Galicia represents a former Roman province first settled by the Germanic Suebi people, then taken over by Visigoths, switching hands for another one thousand years before the territorial division of Spain of 1833 saw the end of the region as a kingdom; but Galician language is nearly as old as the kingdom itself, existing today in a state of diglossia. While it may be too complex to delve into here, Galicia’s autonomy and perseverance continue to be considered a threat to modern-day Spanish national identity and the religified history it insists upon. This is how inconceivably long Galicia has been here, beyond Homer, beyond story, beyond words, beyond time. The memory of what has been lost is what we cannot lose—that’s what we lose when we lose a language.
In my eyes, it’s an existential crisis Moure humbly empathizes with as a Ukrainian-Canadian poet. Two poets, two Galicias: that of the Iberian Peninsula and that of Eastern Europe, subject to as convoluted a political history as one another.
With a plurality of subject pronouns follows a plurality of symbolic nouns, as in this poem:
We were talking
and the conversation seemed an igloo
a white thread
a vegetal weaving
a dome
You
hunter
spoke of the chromatic placement of the quartzes
felling the deer so its body could freeze in the air
dawn chirps outside the window
an infinite
bursts and breathes
if a druid were to show up in my language today
it would be a pillar of greenery
go with the dogs
pace out the chestnut woods where the waters weave
their enormous passages
the verse turns and returns at the end of the furrow
everything’s dug up
the tomb the well
*
We redden the rose
using blood
Not quite couched in traditional symbolism nor surrealism, Pato’s symbols are readymades, throwaways, furtive allegorical objects that later reappear as easily as they are discarded. The conversation seems like an igloo, the dawn chirps outside, an infinite breathes. Each of these represents syntactic affronts, on the same level as “colorless green ideas sleep furiously,” and through the poetry of the Galician language, Pato and Moure are able to bring these linguistic challenges front and centre. These are not merely language games, but defiances, that the poem not only makes sense but is free to not make sense, at the same time. The text engages with expanding the realm of grammatical possibility, as a direct embodiment of this praxis, this poiesis, this poetics, the “language of poetry,” the “possibility of poetry,” as freedom. That is the libre favor Moure recognizes in Pato, a rebellious aesthetic that refuses to back down from celebrating the history and language surrounding her, the beauty that Moure masterfully uplifts through her translation.
The choice is not only a structural one, but a philosophical one. What does it mean “if a druid were to show up in my language today”? Language is a place, open to the mythological, the historical, the magical, the heretical, the symbolical; “it would be a pillar of greenery,” that’s right, the language would change, into an architectural column of verdure. It’s not just symbolic, it’s ecological. Languages, like bodies, like nature, like places, grow. The history of Galicia is a cornucopia of figures nearly erased by Castilian revisionism.
Suddenly
life just got even weirder
I don’t know if I docked at the island in a kayak
or was it an azure canoe
maybe my murderer was a boy
maybe the archangel shot me
I had the urge to kiss the embalmed corpse of
Lejana2 [ . . . ]
the barn swallows will settle
in the lap of the swan
in the serpentines of the lyre
of the bard3
I adore this portrait of Lejana4
imbibing the waters of the Don
tranquillity must have seemed so remote
to an imperial poet
under the serene sky
the snow is icy
that’s how desire is expended
like a wheel that runs back and rope that snaps5
my back
writes the poet5
will not be able to endure forever
the rain
We find in this poem a multiplicity of archetypal figures: Lejana from a popular novel, who doubles as Lyce from myth, followed by the appearance of archangel Gabriel; then the allusion to Eduardo Pondal. And in the last footnote for this poem, Moure denotes a plurality of translations: the first from Lytton, the second from Wickham. More interestingly, she confirms the earlier suspicion that, although playfulness and satire have their place in their shared poetics, “Pato is literal here, not sarcastic,” and as a consequence, Moure leaves the adverb “forever” where it appears in the original (as eternamente) on the penultimate line, to emphasize it in the English.
It is challenging to interpret even one poem without calling into comparison at least one more from the collection, before addressing any allusions and intertextuality occurring between the lines, beyond the lines, beyond the poetry. As such, Pato and Moure establish their place through their poetics, an inclusive poetry for women, by women, as well as for writers, by writers (even specifically “unha poeta" / "a woman poet”). The words exemplify this, with resounding affirmations such as “we are contemporaries” and “in us Aphrodite lives.”
Moure affirms that Pato is “one of the great poets of our time,” and in the same breath adds that Pato’s poems “are an ecology,” and not just for the abundance of flora and fauna, but the praxis of subjectivity explored through this symbology, cosmology, ontology.
Graciously, Moure concludes the work, among other things, with indexes of symbols, including the “Index of Winds,” with a full excerpt from The Nautical Magazine (1870) to explain the choice behind translating galerna as “nor’wester.” Elsewhere, Moure has described her translation of Pato (in m-Talá) by stating: “Each text in Canadian English responds to a Pato text, with one added Chinook wind.” This lexical choice reaffirms it all for me, sure as the wind blows, for Chus Pato: poetry is praxis.
