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This is a rhetorical gesture I desperately want to believe in. I want to believe that the crises both of our recent past and our unfolding present might represent opportunities for us to construct more liberatory futures. I want to believe that a preferable future is now more possible than ever. The alternative is too much to bear. In Dysphoria Mundi, Preciado begins the urgent task of theorizing how struggles for those better futures might shift and adapt to make use of our polycrisis.
While Archivist Scissors certainly reads as Waldman’s attempt to piece together a tapestry of her corner of the literary world, the project extends far past her life and lens. The crux of the book lies in the question: how do we remember others?
Patchwork is not just a novel or an absurdist work of art. It is a reminder that despite the chaos of it all, human beings will always be connected with one another. We will dance, persistently, precariously, along the same imprints in the dirt.
To crave sex with the dead, to be voracious in a time of AIDS, to masturbate and discuss it, to objectify one’s genitals purely for pleasure. In reading Hemphill’s work we do not ask the poet to take responsibility for his words and desires. We soak in them instead, learning how they resonate with our own thoughts and allowing his honesty to soften the edges of our judgement.
I Found Myself itself exists as a tripartite translation, with Mahfouz moving from his unconscious to his conscious, and from the voice of the diarist to that of the writer, with Matar completing the process with a translation from Arabic to English. Matar’s remarkable ability to capture all of these dimensions, without sacrificing the stylistic qualities of Mahfouz’s prose, is what makes this translation so masterful. Whether you are interested in Arabic literature, a fan of Mahfouz’s work, or simply an admirer of dreams, there is something in this collection for everyone. If for no other reason than afterwards, after being engrossed in page after page of Mahfouz’s quiet serenity, you will feel as though you have made a new friend.
In the original Spanish, Di Benedetto distills his clear and incisive prose down to its indispensable elements. He then breathes life into it with plenty of Argentinian colloquial speech and occasional rhetorical flourishes. Some of it was left untranslated, like all the Spanish honorifics and several other words like patrón and tío/a. These small elements transport the reader to a Spanglish literary space, which an American readership usually associates with a space very different from 1960s Argentina: the South of the United States and the North of Mexico.