Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

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What politics where breath fractures?:

(in)translation and the poetics of difference

Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza

To cite this article: Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza (2018): What politics where breath fractures?:
(in)translation and the poetics of difference, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, DOI:
10.1080/14636204.2018.1456149

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2018.1456149

Published online: 03 Apr 2018.

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JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2018.1456149

What politics where breath fractures?: (in)translation and the

poetics of difference
Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, Boston, MA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The book Secession/Insecession, published in 2014, consists of two Translation; poetry; literary
texts that face each other in the style of conventional bilingual studies; cultural politics
editions of poetry: a translation by Canadian poet Erín Moure of
Secesión – originally written in Galician by Spanish poet Chus Pato
– and Moure’s intranslation, her response to her own rendition of
the original text. Secession/Insecession therefore diverges from the
standard bilingual edition that it resembles; rather than a
translation that faces an original text, it is a translation that faces a
response, both written in the same language. In line with Paul
Celan’s notion of Atemwende or breathturn, the book deploys
various forms of interruption and difference: ruptured testimonies,
fragmented quotations, broken dialogues, unanswered
apostrophes, divided names, and intranslations. This article
explores the sense of the political that can be traced in Secession/
Insecession in view of the poetics of difference that shapes
Moure’s (in)translation of Pato’s Secesión.

A poetics of difference
The book Secession/Insecession, published in 2014, consists of two texts that face each
other in the style of conventional bilingual editions of poetry (1).1 On the right side is Seces-
sion, a translation by Canadian poet Erín Moure of Secesión, originally written in Galician by
Spanish poet Chus Pato.2 On the left side is Insecession, which Moure calls an “echolation,”
that is, the “echo” of her translation, or her response to her own rendition of the original
text. That original, however, is absent from the book. As Moure explains in the preface,
“Each text in Canadian English responds to a Pato text” (6). Moure has elsewhere described
the role that Canadian cultural politics played in shaping this translation project:
In Canada it is difficult to publish foreign literature in translation … as all literary presses are subsidized by
the Canada Council … and their rules preclude using grant money for publication of work not Canadian.
… I realized that, being the same age as Chus and having a similar position as poet in my own culture, I
could write my own biography and poetics, as an echo and homage to Chus’. So I responded to each of
Chus’ texts in Secession, adding one extra text so that “my book” is longer than “her book” and the result, in
one volume, thus qualifies as Canadian. (Davis 2015)

Secession/Insecession therefore diverges from the standard bilingual edition that it

resembles; rather than a translation that faces an original text, it is a translation that

CONTACT Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza daguirre@fas.harvard.edu

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 D. AGUIRRE-OTEIZA

faces a response that is written in the same language. The table of contents shows how
closely Moure’s echolation corresponds to her translation, a coincidence that makes the
semantic, syntactic, deictic, sonic and graphic differences between the translation and
echolation stand out.3 For this reason, as Emerson (2015) has observed, Moure’s response
“makes visible the traditionally invisible role of the translator.”
It can be argued that this response also makes visible and audible the traditionally invis-
ible difference of the translator’s seemingly original poetic voice. One conspicuous
example of visible and audible difference in translation occurs shortly before the end of
Insecession, when Moure quotes Pato, “With love all this is bearable,” and then adds,
“Con amor … for it was me who wrote ‘with love all this … ’” (154). This is a key
moment of difference in Secession/Insecession, as Moure makes Pato’s absent original Gali-
cian text suddenly interrupt both the Canadian English translation and its Canadian
English echolation. Pato’s Galician text visibly but also – if read out loud – audibly
differs from its translation, and defers its reception. Consequently, Moure, a “Montreal
poet,” “born the same year as Chus Pato,” who is also writing a “biopoetics” (6–7), casts
her voice into sharp relief as a differentiated poetic voice, albeit one mediated by
another poet’s voice.
Such moments of textual fracture are thematized in the last paragraphs of Secession,
which identify poetry with “fissures” and “love”: “The poem is an intelligent fissure, it’s
love that persuades time to exist, time that implants itself into what is to come, primogen-
ital” (169). The back cover blurb picks up on this idea, first phrasing the temporality of
reception in explicitly political language and then reproducing the identification
between “fissure” and “love”: “Faced with the politics of domination and compliance
that corral our thinking, Galician poet Chus Pato is unyielding: to her the poet is a seces-
sion, and the poem an independence and sovereignty.” This declaration of independence
notwithstanding, what sense of politics does the poem itself offer? This question seems
particularly apposite in light of a compellingly self-reflexive apostrophe in Secession:
“What politics, the one that germinates from the poem … ? What politics, outside the
fold, outside the flag, where breath fractures?” (99). This essay explores the sense of the
political that can be traced in Secession/Insecession in view of the poetics of difference
that shapes Moure’s (in)translation of Pato’s Secesión.
The question of politics seems pertinent not just because Secesión rhetorically reflects
on its own potential effects, but because it posits itself as a poem of identity, and specifi-
cally of linguistic identity. As Pato proclaims in Galician,
O poema di identidade, cando a estrela nos leva ata una potencia da lingua que é identidade, contra os
soños e os sepulcros. … Se cadra poeta é aquel, aquela que fai concordar a súa disposición coa identidade
dun idioma. (2009, 86)

Moure translates: “The poem speaks identity, when the star lifts us to a power of language
that is identity, against dreams and tombs. … It could be that poet is one whose disposi-
tion coincides with the identity of a given language” (119). And yet the apostrophe in
Secession/Insecession interpellates readers regarding a text which presents itself as both
a translation and an “intranslation,” that is, as sheer linguistic difference (8). Any potential
identity between poet, poem and language that Pato’s text claims is thus rhetorically dis-
avowed by the poetics of difference that shapes Secession/Insecession.4 Indeed, readers
may wonder about the original text throughout the entire book. Inserted in Moure’s
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 3

echolation, Pato’s Galician amor – that is, in a way, her original poetic voice, the “poem
speak[ing] identity” – also “fissures,” “fractures” or splits from the Canadian English book
to make visible and audible the difference between original and translation and the differ-
ence within Moure’s response to it.
The differential logic at work in Secession/Insecession can thus be read as a poetics of
difference designed to interrupt a conventional politics of origin and identity. Pato has
elsewhere argued that linguistic interventions have enormous power in the realm of insti-
tutional politics:
Someone rules a group and tells them their origin (an identity) and from this, forms are configured that
exclude all who don’t listen to or submit to the story. At the same time, something else goes on; another
word commences, when this other word is proffered and written down, it makes the State tremble.
(2014a)

Prefiguring Moure’s notion of “an original that never was” in Secession/Insecession (110),
Pato also poses in Secesión a long, almost breathless question that seems to explore the
possibility of a different and deferred non-identitarian sense of the political. This sense
of the political is located in a ghostly, liminal space of linguistic disruption resulting
das pulsións do idioma, dun suxeito que non pode atarse e impronunciábel se estende (psique, vida) ata
os bordos da Terra, que se concibe espectro entre outros moitos e se ensambla nos múltiples órganos do
territorio, ata as fisterras onde se fracturan os soños, as ideoloxías, os pneumas, os defuntos? (2009, 71)

from the drives of language, from a subject that can’t be restrained and unpronounceably extends
(psyche, life) to the ends of Earth, conceives itself as one ghost among many and assembles itself in
the multiple organs of the territory, up to the finisterrae where dreams fracture, ideologies, pneuma,
the dead? (99)

This rhetorical question indicates that the differential logic shaping the poetics of Seces-
sion/Insecession is inscribed in a constellation of tropes such as the slash, cut, caesura, dis-
tance, fissure and fracture: “Que política, fóra de bando, fóra de bandeira, onde se fractura
o alento?” (Pato 2009, 71) (“What politics, outside the fold, outside the flag, where breath
fractures?”) (99).

Evoking and revoking origins

In line with this differential logic, Moure’s aptly named echolation both evokes and revokes
given names, starting with that of the poet. The “enigmatic disorganization” announced at
the beginning of Secession reaches so far into Insecession that it catches up to and med-
iates “Erín,” the seemingly original and immediate proper name that identifies the trans-
lator: “But I can intranslate it, like a conflagration, a drug, an insecession, an e-
(ri)nigmatic disorganization” (8). Erín’s insecession thus cuts into her own name, evoking
and revoking it in an “e(ri)nigmatic” echo that makes it somehow improper (8). Moure
also begins Insecession with a loving evocation of her mother’s pronunciation of the
name Erín: “I remember … one word, my name, becoming two words in the mouth of
my mother” (18). As Moure’s mother breathes Erín’s first name into spoken language,
she fractures it into two words. Erín’s personal secession becomes yet another “e(ri)nig-
matic” echo; her name doubles as itself and something else.
Thus, Moure responds to Pato’s idea that a poet must assume a violent split in identity:
“cesura, constituírse en secesión, nesta imposibilidade que teñen as linguas para que
4 D. AGUIRRE-OTEIZA

conflúan as cousas e as palabras. Un poeta asevera eu eu é un lugar despoboado, un silen-

cio, un corte, unha distancia” (Pato 2009, 87) (“caesura, constituting oneself in secession, in
the very impossibility that languages might link words and things. A poet asserts I I is a
deserted site, a silence, a cut, a distance”) (119). Echoing the poetics of Secesión, Seces-
sion/Insecession can be read as being constructed by a series of textual doublings and
redoublings: fragments of discursive forms paratactically juxtaposed as different versions
of Pato’s caesura, a notion shaped, as shall be seen, by the poet’s Atemwende, or breath-
turn, as developed by Paul Celan.
In this game of evocations and revocations, translation traces a difference generated by
the ghostly absence or split of an identifiable original: “Even walking, I can’t stop translat-
ing. Haunted by an original that never was,” writes Moure (110). This idea of translation
evokes the spectral language described in Secession: “Any language is ghostly because
language is the nothingness of the living world extended in a body” (131). Both Moure
and Pato refer to this liminal connection between language and body when they call
their respective texts a “biopoetics” (6–7). If a text is haunted by a ghostly absence, its pres-
ence takes on a supplementary form; as Pato writes in Secession, “In a Literature, words are
the irremediable absence of objects that, on the other hand, are not entirely different from
this absence and vice-versa” (125). Even the “original” act of writing is a kind of fracture
understood within Pato’s notion of secession as a “distance” or “cut,” “the consciousness
of the empty space between one exhalation of the voice and the next that makes writing
possible” (Davis 2015). The “present” text, haunted by the absent original breath of an
uttering voice, is productively supplemented by more voice and more text, and made
different from itself.
This connection between secession and poetic writing owes much to Hölderlin’s notion
of caesura in Greek tragedy as “a counter-rhythmic interruption” (2009, 318). According to
T. W. Adorno, caesura in Hölderlin’s late poetry is a form of poetic interruption that “dis-
pensing with predicative assertion causes rhythm to approach musical development,
just as it softens the identity claims of speculative thought, which undertakes to dissolve
history into its identity with spirit” (1992, 132). Pato (2014a) similarly understands caesura
according to a differential logic that disrupts identity; she believes that writing poetry
means avoiding the violent “instrumental uses of language” associated with “identitarian
narrative(s).” Yet a poem can be both a political weapon and a violent speech act:
The language of consensus, even when the political is sabotage, is split, pierced by the poem.

It is the poem that originates an unforgettable politics, a nation of prophecies, of the dead, of letters, of
apparitions, not subject to existence (birth or death), rigorously phantasmal.

The nothingness, the mouth’s contortion, every day, every hour, every second, that clothes itself as poem,
as politics of the future; this nothingness sustains bodies, extension, world.

The poem is unpronounceable; to this unpronounceable, we belong. (131)

Pato assembles this spectral poetic community in paratactic fashion, arranging a string of
statements, clauses and phrases in what Adorno calls “a serial order whose elements are
linked differently than in the judgment … not asserted in fixed propositional form but
rather suggested like a possibility” (1992, 131–132). A violent poetic speech act thus trans-
forms instrumental political language into Pato’s “politics of the future.” Drawing on
Nichols’s (2009) description of Hölderlin’s caesura, Pato’s secession can be seen as a
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 5

“self-differentiating scission within language itself, which opens into the difference of
word, metrical rhythm, even the poet’s confrontation with the surrounding world.”
Moure echoes this differential logic that disrupts any sense of identity between word
and world, word and word, and voice and voice, when she describes translation as a
violent act of writing. She says that translating Pato’s Galician poetry into Canadian
English is “a way of bringing – into the secession or cut – another voice, her human
voice” (144).

A rhetoric of violent reason and myth

The slash in the title Secession/Insecession already indicates that the book differs violently
from itself. A slash can have several meanings. First, it is a line break. For example, on the
third page, the words secession and insecession appear on different lines, with the slash
(somewhat redundantly) occupying the line between them:
Secession
/
Insecession

Second, a slash can replace the conjunction or, indicating a choice that is often mutually
exclusive and marking a binary opposition. Third, a slash also allows for the paratactic jux-
taposition of two names without necessarily stating a preference. The slash in Secession/
Insecession could therefore be read as punctuating the ambivalence between exclusion
and inclusion that the title implies. The order of terms in the paratext may imply that Seces-
sion – and, by extension, the absent “original” Galician text – takes precedence over Inse-
cession, but this interpretation is complicated by the fact that the book inverts the order of
the texts. Finally, the slash may also solidly join the names of the two poets on the spine of
the book: Chus Pato/Erín Moure. On the book cover, however, the slash is replaced by the
preposition with, in the rather feebly conjoined “Secession by Chus Pato with Insecession by
Erín Moure.”
Both semantically and graphically, then, the slash at least sometimes signals a differen-
tial logic of exclusion. To Moure, any poetics premised on the violent rhetoric signaled by
this punctuation mark is deeply political:
THE “EXCLUS” or excluded is a conflicted actor, in Rancière’s notion of the political; she is a figure who does
not try to smooth over that cut or blow of the scinding or secession; the scimitar slash between law/fact,
right/death. In Chus Pato’s work, this figure would be the poet, who excludes herself or admits to being
excluded, and who therefore speaks. (160)

Between Moure’s loving apostrophe to Pato – “Dear Chus, I can neither read nor write what
you produce, but I can intranslate it” (8) – and Pato’s idea that poetry is “love that per-
suades time to exist,” Secession/Insecession repeatedly hints that only a countervailing
poetics of passion and love can bear such slashes: “passions don’t stem from the gut,
they’re from words” (145), “the literary word amasses the passions that differences
emit” (167) and “with love all this is bearable” (151).
Disturbingly, however, this poetics of love cannot be separated from a rhetoric of vio-
lence. Secession/Insecession interweaves personal family histories, instances of collective
violence around issues of national identity and reflections on the Final Solution and eco-
logical devastation. Moure’s denunciation of the causes of violence reproduces her
6 D. AGUIRRE-OTEIZA

translation of Pato’s words almost exactly: “Instrumental reason is a promise that will never
be fulfilled because its greatest satisfaction is the destruction of the species and surely of
the planet” (46–47). This declaration that enlightened thought contains the potential for
self-destruction recalls T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s 1944 Dialectic of
Enlightenment.
These and other ideas of the Frankfurt School generally inflect Pato and Moure’s cri-
tique of instrumental reason. Insecession echoes Secession: Moure narrates her visit to
the Birkenau extermination camp in response to Pato’s reflections on her visit to Ausch-
witz. Adorno famously declared that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (1967,
34). Pato dialectically inverts this injunction: “Auschwitz is dark lightning, a perfect oxy-
moron, because life is impossible, hope impossible, writing impossible after Auschwitz.
All in all, the prescription is nothing but its opposite, we must live, we must have hope,
we must write after Auschwitz” (65; emphasis in original). Pato’s injunction – to write –
follows her declaration that discourses about the Final Solution are oxymoronic.
It is in this context that Paul Celan’s influence is felt. Moure quotes Celan’s famous
“Death Fugue” in Insecession: “Your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Sulamith” (50).
Pato (2014b) has said elsewhere that Celan’s work has deeply informed her poetic think-
ing,5 and her notion of caesura is clearly shaped by a key notion from Celan’s late poetics,
Atemwende, or breathturn. As Adam Kirsch has described it, Atemwende is
a kind of productive silence, a loss of rhetorical momentum, a swerving away from accustomed paths. Less
articulate than speech, but necessary if speech is to take place, the breathturn is the privation, the abjec-
tion, language must undergo if it is to be trusted to speak once again. (2016, 62)

This extreme form of poetic caesura can be understood as a response to Adorno, an

attempt to find a way to write in a post-Auschwitz world, given that the “juxtaposition
of poetic pleasure with human obscenity raises the very danger Theodor Adorno
warned about … and that Celan forswore in his late work” (Kirsch 2016, 63). When Pato
calls poetry the place “where breath fractures,” she appears to be reacting in a similar
way to a history of radical violence.

Intranslating love as differential politics

These and other acts of textual violence, reinscribed as cuttings, slashes, exclusions and
divisions, alternate with the language of love in Secession/Insecession. Secession closes
with an identification of poetry with love: “the poem is an intelligent fissure, it’s love
that persuades time to exist” (169). Here “poem” and “love” are linked by a copula
(“it’s”) at the same time as the correlation between them is mediated from within by
another identifying copula (“is an intelligent fissure”) that emphasizes the difference
inherent in poetic identification. The double copula is echoed in the paratactic construc-
tion: “the poem is … it’s love.” “Love,” reinscribed as a spectral form of difference, becomes
the sign of a narrow opening to a “politics of the future,” a deferred but textually present
sense of the political in a history that was always already violent. Secession/Insecession thus
inscribes in written language a horizon of political expectation always already interrupted
by its own differential poetic language – its caesura.
Caesura opens the poetic space to “love,” understood as a series of figures of speech.
Through a seemingly endless set of apostrophes, Moure posits a dialogical form of
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 7

difference which interpellates past and future readers and writers. If for Pato poetry is “love
that persuades time to exist” (169), Insecession draws to a close with a list of twenty-four
different loving apostrophes, as though Moure were desperately trying to prolong time:
“Dear Hannah Arendt, I write. Dear Lisa, dear Kim, dear Carla, dear Karis, dear Chus, dear
Gail, dear Oana, dear Judith … ” (168). These apostrophes are haunted by two final ones
– “dear spook, dear ghost” – that are themselves haunted by the uncertain responses of
future specters. This apostrophe and its reverberations, a seemingly unfulfilled speech
act, both facilitate and impede the free exchange of words: “This is a dialogue with
Chus Pato. This is not a dialogue with Chus Pato” (166).6 In this sense, Moure and Pato
propose a biopoetics of writing as a ghostly remainder of what has been lived and life
as a ghostly reminder of what will be written (6–7). This biopoetics configures a protracted
apostrophe that breaks off and turns away while speaking to absent interlocutors in a
series of fractured exhalations. In Jacques Derrida’s terms, Secession/Insecession is an
address “without the least assurance,” a “hazardous” plea to a future utopian community
that differs from itself, and is deferred, in every present difference of the poem (2005, vii).7
Marjorie Perloff has encouraged critical practice to focus on difference: “Given the
endless discourse of isms and izations (as in globalization) that confronts us today,
perhaps the most fruitful task is to discriminate difference, both within a given work and
within the larger categories of artworks” (2004, xxvi, emphasis in the original). Pato and
Moure’s poetics signals the need to discriminate the difference of translation within those
larger categories of artworks. As mentioned above, the linguistic difference in Secession/Inse-
cession is radically registered in Moure’s intranslation when it is “perforated by a linguistic
image” (27) self-reflexively taken from the Galician original: “‘With love all this is bearable’,
writes Chus Pato. Or, more accurately, Con amor … for it was me who wrote ‘with love all
this … ’” (154, emphasis in the original). But the difference of (in)translation is even stronger
yet, given that the Galician original reads “por amor” instead of “con amor” (Pato 2009, 112).8
In Lawrence Venuti’s words, such self-critical discrimination attempts to “register the linguis-
tic and cultural difference of the foreign text” (2008, 15). Given that Moure had already suc-
cessfully conveyed the declarative meaning of “con amor” (or “por amor”) in Secession, what
her intranslation actually registers is the linguistic and poetic difference of the foreign text, a
poetic difference that produces more text (Damrosch 2003, 288).
Building on Venuti’s ideas about linguistic and cultural difference in translation, Moure’s
insecession registers an even more radical difference. Playing as it does on an aural meta-
phor, her echolation hints at the uncanny presence of the translator’s seemingly original
poetic voice. Moure’s different poetic voice is self-referentially highlighted in “Con amor …
for it was me who wrote ‘with love all this … ’” (154). Echo is performed here as both
present and absent in manifold ways. Moure not only makes the absent original Galician
text interrupt both her Canadian English translation and its Canadian English echolation,
she also inscribes her own poetic voice metaphorically, as an echo and therefore as dis-
placed, in the written text of Insecession.
But beyond reading echolation as linguistic and cultural difference, and as a metaphor
for the translator’s displaced poetic voice, Moure’s self-inscription “Con amor … for it was
me who wrote ‘with love all this … ’” invites yet another reading. David Nowell Smith has
persuasively argued that voice in poetry is not just figured “as speechsound, as persona, as
subjectivity…or as an authentic self, or as an individual or collective identity,” but figured
through “the energies and syncopations” generated by prosodic and rhetorical repertoires,
8 D. AGUIRRE-OTEIZA

as well as the construction of deictic utterance; hence the need to also discriminate in our
reading “the fissures opened up by these conflicting configurations” (2015, 3). Hence the
need to also discriminate in our reading “the fissures opened up by these conflicting con-
figurations” (Nowell Smith 2015, 3). Fissures is the operative word in Nowell’s critical
approach to voice in poetry. In Moure’s self-referential response to “con amor,” voice is
not just figured as the voice of a “Montreal poet,” or as an echo of the theme or topos
of the displaced, invisible or inaudible translator of poetry, but figured through the
fissure or breathturn generated by the material fabric of Insecession – notably, the conflict-
ing configuration of its deictic construction – in the here and now of each successive
reading and voicing of the text.
“What politics,” then, “germinates from” the configurations of voice and voicing specific
to Insecession? The political force of Moure’s discrimination may be that it refuses to make
politics a mere theme or topos, that it goes deeper to “interrogate … the very idea of poli-
tics,” as Krzysztof Ziarek understands Adorno’s idea of radical art (2002, 349). The reference
to Adorno is particularly pertinent because, as noted above, Dialectic of Enlightenment
shapes the radical critique of instrumental reason that underlies Moure and Pato’s
poetics. Adorno denounced the close connection between instrumental reason and the
notion of universal exchange (Earley 2009, 3). If, as Jacques Lezra has argued, “translatabil-
ity in natural languages today supports, and can only be understood in the context of,
economic globalization, and the universalization of market logic” (2015, 174), then the
differential logic inscribed in Moure’s intranslation – “perforated” as it is by Pato’s untran-
slatable “amor” – amounts to a political critique of the logic of universal exchange: “This is
not a dialogue” (166).
And yet, Lezra goes on to argue that at the same time that cultural particularity chal-
lenges “the (political-economic) principle of translatability,” it has another – universal –
economic effect: “culture, to the extent that it becomes the location for untranslatability,
and untranslatability, to the extent that it becomes synonymous with cultural particularity,
add value universally” (2015, 178–179; emphasis in the original). Moure’s decision to add
one extra text to Insecession to make her own text longer than her translation, so that
Secession/Insecession would qualify as Canadian for subsidy purposes, is a strategic nego-
tiation of cultural universality and particularity in response to market logic (Davis 2015).9
The added value of particularity within universality of Secession/Insecession is implied in
the back cover blurb, which, also following market logic, depicts “Galician poet Chus Pato”
as “unyielding” in the face of “the politics of domination and compliance that corral our
thinking.” After declaring that, to Pato, “the poet is a secession, and the poem an indepen-
dence and sovereignty,” the brief advertisement momentously announces: “Together Pato
and Moure bridge the Atlantic to interrupt and invigorate our thinking on poetics, history,
translation, place and reading.” Phrased in strongly political language, the double gesture
of bridging and interrupting confirms the mobility of translation, as though the fluid con-
vergence between the cultural particularity of Galician and the cultural particularity of
Canadian English would be permitted by a universal exchange logic that sustains the
potential links between linguistic and nationalistic self-determination.10
And yet the slash punctuating the ambivalence between exclusion and inclusion visible
in the title Secession/Insecession can also be read as restricting such cultural fluidity, at least
momentarily. In keeping with Perloff’s proposal, perhaps the discourse of cultural differen-
tiation in Moure and Pato’s book should also be discriminated. A different sense of
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 9

untranslatability would then be required to account for a political critique beyond the –
commercial – thematization of linguistic and cultural particularities and even Adornian
condemnations of identity.11 The political critique in Secession/Insecession would not
dwell solely on the presumably inaccessible location of cultural particularity. No matter
how particular the linguistic and cultural difference of “con amor” may seem, these two
words would arguably still be able to secede, if only fleetingly, from the identity politics
and nationalist hauntings attached to strong untranslatables such as fado, sprezzatura
or Dasein (Apter 2014, xiii–xiv).12 Rather, the difference in “con amor” could be understood
as a textual “fissure,” a narrow opening to the untranslatable specificity of its linguistic
materiality, or its graphic and sonic matter (169). From this angle, Venuti’s helpful claim
that “to focus on translation is to redefine the study of literature in the most material
ways” could be rephrased to express that to focus on intranslation is to redefine the
study of political poetry in the most material ways (2014, 191).
Although “con amor” may register as a Hölderlinean caesura or “counter-rhythmic inter-
ruption” in the seemingly unstoppable discursive fluidity fostered by current universal
market logic, the specific linguistic and cultural difference marked by the irruption of a
Galician shibboleth in a Canadian English translation does not preclude relationality and
translatability but rather makes them possible. As Lezra has described Wittgenstenian
untranslatability, “con amor” presents readers with “the experience of the impossible: the
ethical requirement that we dwell upon the name as such, in testimony to what it describes
and inscribes in itself, and that we pass beyond it to what it designates” (2008, 328).
This experience of the impossible in translation can elucidate the self-refuting logic of
two paratactically juxtaposed statements such as “This is a dialogue with Chus Pato. This
is not a dialogue with Chus Pato” (166). Even if the reasoning resulting from the translator’s
juxtaposition of these two sentences should be aporetic, its effect on readers may be to
affirm the possibility of dialogue. “Just as it softens the identity claims of speculative
thought,” the disruption – the rhythmic interruption, the caesura, the suspension of dialogue
– created by the self-referential parallelism between the two statements allows Moure to
relate to Pato’s particularity and translate her “original” poetry (Adorno 1992, 132). The dis-
ruption indicates that dialogue is possible: “Con amor … for it was me who wrote ‘with love
all this … ’” (154). The intranslation shows that such disruption prevents her from simply
universalizing particularity on a presumptive politico-economic principle of translatability.
Or does it? What kind of “love” does not acquire the universal added value of cultural
particularity, at least temporarily? If Pato and Moure both view poetry as an “intelligent
fissure” and “love that persuades time to exist,” their poetic discourse could also be – to
evoke Roland Barthes – a lover’s discourse. Such a discourse is marked by “an extreme soli-
tude” inasmuch as “amor” has been “completely forsaken by the surrounding languages” –
“spoken, perhaps, by thousands of subjects (who knows?), but warranted by no one”
(1978, 1). Pato and Moure’s lover’s discourse would be both particular and universal, a dis-
course of solitude and multitudes, exclusive and inclusive, restricted and comprehensive,
seceded and inseceded. Thus, their lover’s discourse would also be completely forsaken by
the language of translation, but only momentarily, as a fleeting caesura or a significantly
fractured breath. Thus, the original “amor” could only be written by poets and received by
readers as difference and deferral.
It is in this sense that Moure puts forth her Rancièrian definition of the poet as one “who
excludes herself or admits to being excluded, and who therefore speaks” (160). If Moure and
10 D. AGUIRRE-OTEIZA

Pato posit a language of love lived as the affirmation of poetic difference, then “what politics,
the one that germinates from the poem?” (99). Indeed, one form of politics in Secession/Inse-
cession is shaped by the cutting inclusion of untranslatable verbal matter or, in Jacques Ran-
cière’s terms (2004, 12–13), the abrupt redistribution of the linguistic sensible: a non-
identitarian, productive fracture between word – amor – and word – love – or a performative
contradiction of a lover’s diction in the present difference of the poem.
It is also in a non-identitarian sense – beyond the seemingly differentiated personal
voices shaping and shaped by Galician and Canadian English cultural particularities –
that it may be productive to shift the critical focus onto the different ways in which the
fissures opened up by the conflicting configurations of voice and voicing in Secession/Inse-
cession can be read. If, in Moure’s self-referential response to “con amor,” voice is figured
through a caesura generated by the material fabric of the text in the here and now of each
successive reading and voicing, configurations of personal and spatiotemporal shifters are
key to any critical approach to the potential political effects that the vocal differentiation in
Secession/Insecession may have.
After all, the conflicts of self-referentiality, thematized but also performed by the sharp,
almost cutting double copula inscribed in the paratactic construction “the poem is an
intelligent fissure, it’s love that persuades time to exist, time that implants itself into
what is to come” (169), extend to any future reading of Moure’s translation/intranslation,
pressing onto the here and now of each voicing of its material fabric, and thus historicizing
every new iteration of the semantic, syntactic, deictic, sonic and graphic strands interwo-
ven into the text. It is from a readerly perspective, then, that the horizon of political expec-
tation always already interrupted by the differential dialogic language of Secession/
Insecession may be productively enlarged, perhaps even disrupting the seemingly fluid
temporality and translatability encouraged by current universal market logic.

Notes
1. Hereafter, all unidentified page references are to Moure, Erín, and Chus Pato. 2014. Secession/
Insecession.
2. Biographical notes at the beginning and end of Secession/Insecession (6–7, 178–179) provide
detailed information about Moure and Pato, including their places of residence and birth.
Pato’s second biographical note in Secession/Insecession reflects twentieth-century Spain’s
history of violent conflicts about national identity:

Chus Pato (María Xesús Pato Díaz) was born in 1955, when Galicia was in the grip of the Franco
dictatorship in Spain. Today a central and iconoclastic figure in Galician and European literature,
Pato relentlessly continues to refashion the possibilities of poetic text of words, bodies, political
and literary space, and of the construction of ourselves as individual, community, nation, world.
She brings us face to face with the traumas and migrations of writing itself, and the possibility
(or not) of poetry accounting for our animal selves. (179)

Moure’s second biographical note is similarly focused on political history: “Montreal poet Erín
Moure was born in 1955 in a Canada governed by the liberals under Louis St. Laurent” (178).
3. For instance, Pato’s titles include: “This I is not a Murderer,” “The I That Writes is Not The I That
Remembers” and “This I is Not Death.” Moure responds to these with the titles “This I is Not a
Murderer,” “The I That Writes is … I Forget” and “This I is Hardly Death” (14–15).
4. The monolingual Spanish edition of Secesión describes Pato’s work as creating “espacios litera-
rios dedicados … a su condición identitaria de mujer gallega” (Gorría 2012, 14–15).
5. See Moure (2016), See also Casado (2003, 47).
 JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES 11

6. Miguel Casado has noted that in Pato’s poetry “la incertidumbre sobre un estar dentro o fuera,
la contradicción de la palabra en su doble cara opresiva y liberadora … actúan como motores
de búsqueda, como desencadenantes de una experiencia” (2003, 46, emphasis in the original).
7. The idea of community developed in Secession/Insecession recalls Roberto Esposito’s negative
conceptualization:

The community isn’t a mode of being, much less a “making” of the individual subject. It isn’t the
subject’s expansion or multiplication but its exposure to what interrupts the closing and turns it
inside out: dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in the continuity of the subject. (2006, 8, emphasis in
the original).

Along similarly disruptive lines, Gerald Bruns has drawn on Maurice Blanchot’s and Jean Luc
Nancy’s idea of désoeuvrement, or inoperativity, to argue for a poetic community premised on
“a sharing or division of voices,” where “only the singular ‘being-outside-oneself’” is received
and transmitted:

Poetry opens a hole in being through which every totality drains away. So it is not merely that the
poet is outside and uncontainable with any order of things; it is that poetry disrupts in advance …
the possibility of any such order. (2006, 81)

Turning to the trope of the fissure, Casado identifies Pato’s utopian register as desire in the
present of the poem:

una energía que actúa en el presente y discrepa en él de lo dado, una negación que lleva a
moverse, la exigencia en presente de una fisura. Utopía es el nombre que podría darse a … una
poética que se experimente como utopía. (2003, 49)

8. Ana Gorría’s Spanish translation also reads “por amor” (Pato 2012, 208).
9. Gorría explains that Secesión responds to “ese espacio de diálogo entre la diferencia represen-
tada en la particularidad del cuerpo y de la voz gallega y en la universalidad de la dicción
poética” (2012, 14).
10. In this context, the strong discursive currency that transatlantic studies possessed in the early
twenty-first century would have further facilitated such convergence.
11. In the back cover blurb to the monolingual Spanish edition of Secesión, Gorría also highlights
the bridge between particularity and universality when she says that Pato creates “un espacio
de pensamiento poético … capaz … de desarrollar puntos de enunciación capaces de conver-
tir la particularidad en un universal que atraviesa a todos los seres humanos prestando
especial atención a la caracterización de la diferencia (el ser gallego, el ser mujer).”
12. Pato encourages a specific political reading of the presumed identity between language and
nation when she writes about “the amazing naturalness with which those who call themselves
Spanish in language and nation can claim to be non-nationalist” and “the tiniest expression of
identity by we citizens of the Spanish state who are of other nations and languages” (2014, 43).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Daniel Aguirre-Oteiza is Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish) at
Harvard University. Among his translations are works by John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Wallace
Stevens and W. B. Yeats. He has published in journals such as Hispanic Review, 1611: A Journal of
Translation History and Revista Hispánica Moderna. His second book, El canto de la desaparición:
Memoria, historia y testimonio en la poesía de Antonio Gamoneda, appeared in 2015. His current
book project is titled This Ghostly Poetry: Spanish Republican Exiles between Literary History and
Poetic Memory
12 D. AGUIRRE-OTEIZA

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