CHAIN 10

SHORT | STOR
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
GEOGRAPHY III,E.Bis-.
once, sundered, one sentence, syl
labial to syllable dis
join ted, sev e
red—just one type of guy, his
funicular character of prototypical founding, still
mimicking it (the type:“it doesn’t mean anything”).
once again, one vine to vine, another vine-shoot, same vineyard
“to los an e (an y alread lost) in the grafting
—tries losing faster, losing
more closely still.”
once and again, such a time: taken away
—the type, time-encrypted—(to myth),
opens the field to the field of the disengaged, d is
per sa l over name s salt fl
ats, atopical hummocks uncrypted
—and—as clearing temporarily razes clear
before the before of the after and the now,
sunclarities’ clearing’s unlost lost, unit—ed to one art.
“THUS ‘FABRICATION’ IS HERE UN LITTLE BIT HECHIZO-
LESS”: SOME NOTES BY ERIN MOURÉ ON TRANSLATING
ANDRÉS AJENS: South-Chilean poet Andrés Ajens’ work is of
a density that is nearly untranslatable, or that is translatable, if
English will bend to its will and pleasures, its amplitude, its extravagations.And
if there is a way to make present the “culture” of
which Ajens is part, and not simply the strangeness of my reading
of that culture.
Which is a risk I bear. For my work on Ajens is a translation not of
“his text”—for there is no “his text” I have access to, and this is so
for any translation—but of a reading practice, a translation of my
reading practice, focussed on a text that is his but is also one that by
my very reading of it is already wrenched from its dizzyingly open
context and culture, and is read, through my eyes, into mine.
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