Erin Mouré
Erín Moure is a transborder poet and translator of poetry and poetics. In Canada, the USA, and the UK (variously), she has published seventeen books of poetry, and several books of prose including a memoir and a book of short takes on translation. Her most recent book is Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erín Moure (ed. Shannon Maguire, Wesleyan 2017). She is the translator or co-translator of seventeen books of poetry and three books of non-fiction (biopoetics) from French, Spanish, Galician, and Portuguese into English. Her translation of Wilson Bueno’s Paraguayan Sea (Nightboat, 2017) was a finalist for a 2018 Best Translated Book Award. She holds two honorary doctorates for her contributions to poetry and translation, from Brandon University in Canada and the Universidade de Vigo in Spain. She lives in Montreal.
“In us they are the sign of the whole.”
“Experience appears in this world as a birth. A birth which takes as assistants sky and earth and the water and wood and mountains and the clouds. Experience does not come out of the mind or imagination but from a deep and irrecusable need. It rents the entire person.”
“Look up for the stars. Where light meets earth, the land rolls back to ache of verges but do not with it turn.”
“We who are lost love you to in each.”
“There were cries, screech , it weep.The rest weep from we, who emerge.There was one wall of weeping. And we have parted with you.”
“When there was no one left, it became nowhere. There were no more letters after the w.”
“mine is an ongoing subsection more passive than any passivity.”
“In one ear the anthropologist (daughter): how are you? meaning: stay alive. In the other the artist (mother): I don't know. meaning: prepare to die, and transmit.”
“On the date before the date, time reverses.”
“Numeration comes from 1 and 2, not 0 and 1. The 2 is silence, unanswerable without the 1. How: a means. Are: exist. You: subject, other?”
“To know any thing, time must go backward.”
“If experience requires entry into language, then we cannot experience death, for language ceases. There is no remnant.”
“Unfortunately, censure has cut history up.”
“There are persons who can speak no more, whose very names have vanished. Yet a name excised from the verge where it once lived still casts its sound on all who sleep there and enters their throats.”
“A mother is the unmemntioable boundarythat can never come fully clear.”
“That there is a before-speaking, that we did not always speak.”
“For if thought that exceeds what has yet beenthought were not possible, the infinite would not be possible, and self/itself or subjectivity its intermediary transcendence/ incendiary.”
“this responsibility for the death of my (m)other, is a significance so irreducible that it is from it that the meaning ofdeath may be understood. Responsibility here is no dictate but all the gravity of love of the neighbour upon which the congenital meaning of that word loverests and which every literary form of its sublimation or profanation(I, je, eu) presupposes.”
“is speech a subject's very constitution and assembly, which then makes experience possible.”
“Today, I refuse to be pinned down to an identity. Right away, I want to betray it.”
“[Take me in your arms] a way of seeing then.”
“Some people come from nowhere.”
“this was passed towriting and the content of a writing burned can no longer behanded back to memory, for writing abolishes memory and as whatwas written can no longer be passed down, it has no Author in the oldsense: no ability to act as proxy to, to verify on behalf of.”
“People who are making sense are just making me laugh, is all.”