Erín Moure
Biography
Erín Moure is a Montreal poet and relentless translator (from French, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish to English) whose practice both bridges and explodes the bridges between lyric and “experimental,” creation and translation.
Her most recent book, O Cadoiro (2007), was provoked by the medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric songbooks. Other recent books: Little Theatres (2005, translated into Galician as Teatriños, 2007); O Cidadán (2002), a troubled yet hopeful consideration of citizenship, and Sheep’s Vigil by a Fervent Person (2001), a transelation from the Portuguese of Fernando Pessoa. Her translations also include Nicole Brossard’s Installations, Museum of Bone and Water, and Notebook of Roses and Civilization from French (with Robert Majzels…Notebook was a finalist for a GG in translation and for the Griffin Prize); Chus Pato’s Charenton (Shearsman, 2007) from Galician; Andrés Ajens’s Quase Flanders, Quase Extramadura from Chilean Spanish (Left Hand Books, 2008). Moure has also translated poems into English from France’s Sébastien Smirou and Christophe Tarkos; Manoel Antonio, Manuel Rivas, María do Cebreiro and Daniel Salgado from Galician; Wilson Bueno from Portunhol. She has given readings in English, French and Galician in Canada, USA, England, Wales, France, Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Germany and Japan, as well as seminars in translation, language and construction of identity, and poetics. Her next book of poetry, O Resplandor, will appear in 2010 from Anansi. A book of essays, My Beloved Wager, will appear from NeWest Press in 2009, and a book of poetry written in collaboration with Oana Avasilichioaei, Expeditions of a Chimaera, will also appear in 2009 from Bookthug, as will her translation of Chus Pato’s m-Talá from Shearsman in the UK. Moure is currently translating Chus Pato’s Hordas de Escritura and working on a new book of poetry, The Unmemntioable. She is a contributing editor to The Capilano Review (Vancouver) and serves on the editorial board of the Galician Review (Birmingham, UK).
Poet's Note
That a poetics is an active thing, resides between reading talking making words. That a word “means” only in conjunction with another word and with a reader.
That the poetics of any subjectivity are always comp/flected, complex and inflected. For a subject is a subject across many parameters, many smudges, hesitations, crossings. I am an allergic poet? At times I must be. A postmodernist? Yes for I recognize in my work a resistance working within the modern (so I am a Lyotardian too). And further, a resistance to other resistant practices when these simplify in order to aggrandize the self. A political poet? In the sense that poetry is of the civis, and can move it, if only by pushing or wearing at the edge of limits that constrain a future. A theorist? No, a theatralist. I don’t have a theory. I just combine and see.
That acts in language are civic acts. Why is it that the civic role of so many such acts in poetry are, it seems, to protect and uphold the established order of civic being? Writing is, rather, for me, about risk and not about comfort.
That poetics moves across the borders of a language, into language/s. That thought processes and emphases are different in a different language. I exit from you, “I” am another.
That languages, multiple, and my learning of them, multiply, are a way of listening to the other. So as to speak. (In one language, thought is flattened, a veneer only.)
Translation is part of my practice. It is not solely a transfer of an “original object” from language A to language B but clamour and contamination. For translation is also involved in any writing at all, in so-called “original” work. A translation is a reading. In writing, we are all reading.
Mine is a poetics of encounter with the other. A poetics of the other, community, hospitality: in this, my readings of Agamben, Derrida, Nancy, Lyotard’s “différend,” and “Différence et répétition” of Deleuze. My English is necessarily interpenetrated by the other, as all English is (but some see the seams, some see seams sealed over: their own reflection, and some see a fracture or abrasion where I see leakage and openings.) Whoever just sees me as English sees an “Erin Mouré” they have invented. I, Erín Moure, am other to that, and my closest kin are those who live and write in language’s borderings, which are also borderings that take into account the fluid edges of the self, all selves.
Sample Work
Excerpts from O Cadoiro at Ditch, the Poetry That Matters
Excerpts from O Cadoiro at Jacket