Planetary Noise. Erín Moure
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human individual, in a single person’s articulated voice. The book is Moure’s reply to those who would deride lyric, in particular some self-styled conceptualists who, unable to see the lyric as constructed, naturalize it in order to dismiss it, thus missing its transgressive power.
Just as Pillage Laud is a text in excess of the “Citizen Trilogy,” there is now an interlude between Moure’s Galician and Ukrainian cycles in the form of a clamorous collaboration of “resonant impostors” that unseats translation and any standard notion of its reliance on an original: Expeditions of a Chimæra (2009). This time a human collaborator, poet Oana Avasilichioaei, provides the occasion to deviate from the course. A book of pranks and reckless transits, of maps and the endless deferral of “arrival,” it entangles subjectivity and performance in a fast-moving demonstration of translational modes of “passing.” In so doing, it provides passage for Moure’s work between Galicia and Ukraine.
In O Resplandor (2010), the first book in the Ukrainian cycle, translation, reading, friendship, death, and grieving are staged in different tempos. This book derives its title from a Galician word for light emanating from an object, like a halo; for Moure, it is a trope for reading, and for poetry. The optical phenomenon Moure evokes is that of blue light and its effect on our diurnal and nocturnal cycles and our perception of the passing of time. Moure uses this passage of time in the body to queer reading practice itself, as if reading can stop time, and translation reverse it. Elisa Sampedrín, by now considered not just a heteronym (though Moure considers her a polynym, i.e. not only heterogeneous to Moure but polyphonic in her own regard) but a Galician in her own right, reappears in O Resplandor in the mœbius strip of a contradiction: she is bent on translating the poems of Nichita Stănescu from Romanian—a language she does not speak—into English, because she wants to read them. In so doing, Sampedrín jostles at every turn with the unwanted presence in the book of Moure, who is seeking to locate Sampedrín in a time and place that already do not exist. In the second part of O Resplandor, Moure overtly borrows lines directly from an early version of Oana Avasilichioaei’s translations of the Romanian poems of Paul Celan (published in 2015 in Avasilichioaei’s Limbinal) and rearranges them, as she worries the noise of grief into a text(ile) within which to wrap the maternal body.
The Unmemntioable (2012), for its part, articulates a linguistic noise beyond any “unspeakable”; it is the noise, rather, of an interdiction, of what would perhaps be speakable, but is not mentionable. As Moure, in fulfillment of a promise made to her mother to return her ashes to her birthplace, appears in her mother’s natal village in Ukraine, she comes face to face with two registers that trouble all process of memorialization: the legacy of the Holocaust, firstly, and then the legacies of the border changes and ethnic cleansings that by 1945 had brought to an end the multicultural communities in what had once been the east of the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In The Unmemntioable, E.M. the dreamer, on leaving Ukraine, again seeks the pragmatic E.S., Elisa Sampedrín, who desires only to be left alone in Bucharest to conduct her research into experience. E.S., in a fit of annoyance at E.M.’s stalking of her, steals E.M.’s jottings—which turn out to dwell on the infinite, to the disgust of E.S.—and then decides, as a kind of revenge, to use E.M. as her experimental subject. Whereas in O Cidadán, Moure employed the threshold of noise to question Augustine of Hippo’s metaphysics of reading and the ideological limitations of his interpretations of “tolle lege” in the Confessions, in The Unmemntioable, Elisa Sampedrín worries the fabric of Ovid’s poetry in trying to write poetry for Erín Moure. At the end of the book, the two subjectivities merge at an abandoned Art Nouveau or Secessionist style casino (what better way to meld experience and the infinite) at the edge of the Black Sea in Constanța, Romania, and the book ends by offering a wish for courage, in Galician, coraxe. Experience, it turns out, lies outside the book.
In Kapusta (2015), a bilingual poem in the form of a play, the staging of memory of the Holocaust via the grandmother and mother—who spent the war not in Ukraine but in rural Alberta—allows the indescribable noisiness of the “unmemntioable” to be spoken by staging it literally and figuratively, involving the reader or spectator in the responsibility to resist genocides, and thus ending the interdiction.
POLYRESONANCES (Transborder Noise), POSTFACE, & Further Reading
Moure’s work and its complexities and echoes can be read in conversation with the work of other major figures in North American poetry, poetics, and translation theory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Incorporating philosophical quotations in the poem itself, and drawing from the major theoretical debates regarding language and subjectivity, Moure’s work refuses easy distinctions between poetry and poetics, philosophical writing and poetic writing. I often read Moure’s work as queer theory; her explicit engagement with the likes of Monique Wittig, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and other queer theorists leads to Moure’s prescient work on queer affect theory, and the “queer art of failure.” O Cidadán (2002) was published before Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology (2006) or Judith Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure (2011), yet engages with these topics in a rigorous and wide-ranging way. Moure’s work can also be read in conversation with the work of poets such as Phyllis Webb, Daphne Marlatt, Nicole Brossard, Lisa Robertson, Fred Wah, Roy Miki, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caroline Bergvall, Harryette Mullen, Bhanu Khapil, Rachel Blau Duplessis, Claudia Rankine, C.D. Wright, Andrés Ajens, Chus Pato, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Myung Mi Kim all of whom grapple with language and languages, and their relation to political and economic structures and to identity formation.
The final section of Planetary Noise is curated by Moure and offers the reader a window into her translations of other poets’ work. These poems are not inserted in the other sections with her own work, as is often done in North American practice, as for Moure, translation is an opening of poetic culture in English to the work of others, not an absorption of it. Moure discusses her approach to translation in her Postface. A reader may also wish to consult the series of essays on translation that Moure published in Jacket2 between 2012 and 2014—details are in the “Further Reading” list at the back of this volume, which includes a selected list of her own essays as well as essays on her work by others.
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