So-Lair Storm by Andrés Ajens, trans. from the Spanish by Erín Moure

Poet, essayist, translator, cultural agitator, and literary activist Andrés Ajens (AA)—cult writer, hidden writer and writer of what the folds of history hide—is raised from the antipodes of literature, with a poetic project that stands out for both its forcefulness and its hybridity. A poetry of articulation and dis/articulation, of artifice, of disengagement and dismemberment, So-Lair Storm moves between broken narratives, different materialities (letters, emails, diary fragments), critical essay, and experience. In his diverse cultural scaffolding, Ajens combines indigenous writing and languages, the history of Western literature, post-structuralist philosophy and linguistics, manipulating geographical and scriptural boundaries, breaking down, chewing and digesting language like no other. His is a poetry that resists not only oblivion, atrocity, and colonialism, but also translation and interpretation.

Praise for So-Lair Storm

“If translating is the art of transferring what is written in one language to another, how to translate those writers who meander that border? And what about those rebels who do not recognize or respect any boundary and deliberately wander around a linguistic free zone? Erín Moure, with originality, inventiveness, and courage, assumes the invitation and the risk of getting involved in the delicate predicament of interpreting Andrés Ajens’s convoluted verses. And she rises to the challenge, giving birth to poems that not only ‘pick up the gauntlet’ of AA’s literary bet, but also have a life of their own and summon new questions.”

—Carlos Soto-Román

“Andrés Ajens explodes the stories layered into the Southern Cone’s deep cultural terrain, collecting their shards for poems he offers as guaca, the unrepayable gift. Strange the rivers, strange the silent distances, strange the notes left by Charles Horman of a spectral coup still refracting through Chilean air and time. Translator Erín Moure meets Ajens at every turn and gifts him with her own note-poems. Hers is a rare tour-de-force delivering on the greater promise of creative, multilingual translucination. Thus, by its own inconceivable weight, poetry.”

—Kristin Dykstra

“In the years since Jena Osman and Juliana Spahr borrowed Chilean poet Andrés Ajens’s neologism translucinación as the theme of the landmark tenth issue of their magazine Chain, the word has become nearly synonymous in American English with dialogic approaches to experimental translation. In So-Lair Storm, Erín Moure offers the first substantial selection of Ajens’s own poems in ‘English,’ hallucinatory polyglot poems that mirror aslant the catastrophe of the colonial project in the Americas. Translucinating Western history and its murderous ends, literature and its complicity, this ‘spindance’ of austral ‘counter-noises’ is a jubilee of language, a ‘womb of i-ambs’ in a ‘decolonial ApothecAry,’ opening the ear.”

—George Life & Christina Vega-Westhoff

Andrés Ajens is an Andean-Chilean writer and the author of fifteen books of poetry, hybrid criticism-poetry, and translation. Recent titles are La guaCa húmera (2022) and La golondrina húmera y otros poemas de Paul Celan (2022). He lives in Santiago de Chile, where he coordinates the poetry magazine Mar con soroche (Santiago/La Paz) and teaches Andean literature at the University of Chile.

Erín Moure is a poet and translator based in Montreal. She has published nineteen books of poetry, essays, articles on translation, and two memoirs, and is translator or co-translator of twenty-six books, from French, Galician, Portunhol, Portuguese, Spanish, and Ukrainian into English, and Galician into French. Most recent translations include Chus Pato’s The Face of the Quartzes (2021) and Chantal Neveu’s you (2024). Theophylline: an a-poretic migration via the modernisms of Rukeyser, Bishop, Grimké, was published in 2023 from House of Anansi Press in Toronto.

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