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Saturday, May 19th, 2012

🦋 Una Paloma

Speaking as I was the other day of epigraphs, here is a nice one (from one of my birthday books) --

De otros diluvios una paloma escucho

-- Ungaretti, 1925
(epigraph to Antonio Dal Masetto's La culpa, 2010)

I am taking this to be a reference (or more vaguely an allusion) to the dove that returns to Noah, a message of hope.

posted morning of May 19th, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about La culpa

Sunday, June third, 2012

🦋 The Lives of Things

Here is the utterly beguiling epigraph Saramago chose for his short stories:

If man is shaped by his environment, his environment must be made human.
It is from Chapter 6 of Marx and Engels' The Holy Family, a critique of the Young Hegelians which was their first collaborative effort. Saramago's method of carrying out this transformation of the environment, while I cannot imagine it to be just what Marx and Engels had in mind, is somehow exactly the right thing.

posted evening of June third, 2012: Respond
➳ More posts about Readings

Saturday, January 19th, 2013

🦋 epígrafe

Possibly premature (heh) but I have a title page totally thought out for This Silent House... I had been thinking a snippet from "Lullaby for Laura" would be the epigraph, but I just found a Joaquín Pasos poem that makes me think of Ávala: it is the one.

Canción para morir

¡Qué oscuro mar
sin velas
sin sol
sin agua!

¡Qué lejano recuerdo
sin alas
sin luz
sin sangre!

posted afternoon of January 19th, 2013: Respond
➳ More posts about This Silent House

Monday, January 21st, 2013

🦋 Two Bolaño tidbits

1. Infrarealismo

The world gives you of itself in chips, in fragments: At bifucaria bifurcata, Rise reports that Wave Press will be publishing Mario Santiago's Advice from 1 Disciple of Marx to 1 Heidegger Fanatic in translation. You can read the original (which is dedicated to Bolaño and to Kyra Galván) at infrarrealismo.com -- it is 2000 words which seems a bit short for the description "book-length poem" but I imagine the book will have some supplementary material in it as well, and/or the material online is not the complete poem.

The poem has a nicely Tractatus-y quote from Auden as its epigraph: "We must remember here, too, that nothing is beautiful, not even in Poetry, which is not the case." (Back-translated -- I don't know the source of the quotation.)

2. Adaptation

The first of Bolaño's novels to reach the silver screen will be (the as-yet unpublished in translation) Una novela lumpen; Chilean director Alicia Scherson has filmed it as Il Futuro, currently screening at Sundance. The trailer:
Thanks for the link, Jorge!

posted morning of January 21st, 2013: 4 responses
➳ More posts about Roberto Bolaño

Friday, August second, 2013

🦋 Epigraph

What I'm looking for is that the spectator, too, that he take the time to reflect. I bid him place himself before some images that demand he look at them from within. ... that he make the effort to wonder what's coming; or better, how to perceive what has come. Look, you see nothing. It's completely abstract: an image composing itself.

Juan Carlos Bracho



Sólo cerrando puertas detrás de uno se abren ventanas hacia el porvenir por JCB

posted morning of August second, 2013: 2 responses
➳ More posts about Mirar al agua

Sunday, October 19th, 2014

🦋 Two epigraphs

"Be quiet the doctor's wife said gently, let's all keep quiet, there are times when words serve no purpose, if only I, too, could weep, say everything with tears, not have to speak in order to be understood."
-- Blindness, Jose Saramago

"Doc tried calling her name but of course words out here were only words."
-- Inherent Vice, Thomas Pynchon

posted evening of October 19th, 2014: 1 response
➳ More posts about Inherent Vice

Thursday, March 15th, 2018

🦋 Epigraph

Aunque habían escuchado los mismos cuentos, los otros no habían vivido nada semejante

Pamuk takes his epigraph to The New Life from the first chapter of Novalis's Heinrich von Ofterdingen -- the passage in full,

Wo eigentlich nur der Fremde herkam? Keiner von uns hat je einen ähnlichen Menschen gesehn; doch weiß ich nicht, warum nur ich von seinen Reden so ergriffen worden bin; die andern haben ja das nämliche gehört, und keinem ist so etwas begegnet.

posted evening of March 15th, 2018: Respond
➳ More posts about The New Life

Sunday, July 14th, 2019

🦋 Motto

Every beginner ought to be given, as you have surely received, the tools of the craft. Or else one must beg, borrow or steal them. (Better still to fashion one's own...)

--Breyten Breytenbach

posted afternoon of July 14th, 2019: Respond
➳ More posts about Intimate Stranger

Saturday, November 28th, 2020

🦋 Un rudo manuscrito

Carmen Boullosa's Libro de Eva has some introductory materials at the front. It is presented as the transcription of a "rough manuscript", but there is no enclosing story to tell us where it was found or how we come to be reading it. There is however an introduction listing the contents; a brief letter with no attribution, bidding the reader to pass these papers along after reading them -- "Do not retain them, at the risk of your destruction" -- an unattributed note found among Eve's papers exhorting us not to allow Eve's voice to be lost to oblivion; and a prologue attributed to St. Teresa of Ávila. St. Teresa finds the document to be meaningless, putrid blasphemy; her advice is to ignore it.

The book has three epigraphs -- a few lines from Joy Harjo's Perhaps the World Ends Here; from Byron's Cain; and from Eduardo Lizalde's Each Poem is its own Rough Draft (which I am in love with, and meaning to read more of his work).

posted afternoon of November 28th, 2020: Respond
➳ More posts about El libro de Eva

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