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ON THE WRITING OF MARIA GABRIELA LLANSOL

“At the level of movement, I went to Sintra, read Hölderlin” (MGL)

There is, in reading, a movement begun in the slight trembling/trepidation of the eyes, which continues down to the top of the feet, swinging beneath the table. There is, in the swinging legs of those who are reading, motionless, an impressive stride, a traversing: those who read, amble.

Any place, any country, nowhere is further away than the page I am reading. The page twenty centimeters from my eyes is, in the end, at a far greater distance; it depends on my willingness to perceive it, that is: to travel it. To perceive something is to travel it: to roam around; to perceive a page is to roam all around that page: we end up tired, we’ve gone too far. “At the level of movement,” says MGL, “I went to Sintra, read Hölderlin.”

Reading as a kind of physical activity, reading as a sport: athletics, soccer, gymnastics, reading an essay, handball, figure skating, reading a poem, reading a novel.

Devising a gym where the user chooses between aerobics, gymnastics, or reading a book of poetry; three movement classes, each lasting an hour.

Writing as a translation of reading. A translation that isn’t only incorrect, or wrong; more than that: it is clumsy. I write trying to translate what I’ve read between two identical languages, but I fail, hence creativity; invention as evident failure, not in repetition but in the attempt to pass from one thing to a whole other side. I lost something in the passage, in the transit, or rather: I gained something, because a table that loses one of its four legs during a move invents, at that moment, another object with three legs. “I write in full possession of my faculties of reading.” (MGL)

“The art of endangering bodies” (MGL)

Excerpts from Gonçalo M. Tavares’s book Brief Notes on Maria Gabriela Llansol, Maria Filomena Molder, and Maria Zambrano, published by Relógio d’Água, 2007.

1.

On the writing of Maria Gabriela Llansol.

Em dashes, a new breath, distance between words, words on their own in a sentence that seems the result of a shipwreck. Words do not necessarily exist in a sentence, they have autonomy, their own biography—for instance, an adjective distanced by graphic signs from the noun it qualifies ceases to be an adjective and proudly becomes an individual word. Words have autonomy.

Signs introduce breath, rhythm. Oxygen, O2, between the words. One word, breathe; Two, three, breathe.

A writing on stage, theatrical.

2.

A sentence as a space, a space to occupy, a space very nearly for manual and hard labor, a space for engineering—beams, lintels, em dashes—it seems an inhabited house, Llansol’s sentence, but a sentence left unfinished, a sentence under construction. The pillars are still there, of course, but perhaps it isn’t a construction, but a reconstruction. The sentence is being recovered, as if it were a sentence with old materials being salvaged for a new time.

The lines are horizontal stakes; stakes that hold the ceiling when they are placed vertically and hold the sentence, hold the words, join the words, when they are placed horizontally.

3.

Characters that have the names of philosophers, of animals, that are Types, aggregates of sensations.

Character-sentences, characters that have a certain style to their sentences.

Characters that cannot be distinguished anatomically, but by the energy their name transmits to the remaining space, to the rest of the sentence.

4.

This is also about sudden illuminations infiltrating what seemed to be a sleeping beauty-sentence. A kiss that awakens the sleeping beauty, that causes it to leap up; not a quiet awakening, but a leap forward, leap upon leap, an excessive leap, beyond the limits of the leap—a leap forward. Thus Llansol’s text. At times we seem to be in the calm, expected sea, and then suddenly, those sentences that make us stop, that demand we read with a pencil, underline, salvage the sentence from that place, from the book, carrying it to the everyday, to reality.

“telling them that, with such cold weather, those sitting in the middle of the horses’ blood would win” (The Book of Communities)

Carry a sentence to reality and let it exist there. It won’t be swallowed or absorbed as if it were made of the same material as reality, or anything like that. The sentence will exist in reality as something that’s on top of something else, and does not mix. Not two liquids, but two solids, one on top of the other. We carry Llansol’s sentences with us, those that leap—like an animal—from the text, those that leap as certain animals leap from the earth that seemed flat and low. And we carry the sentence with us to reality and and lay it down like someone laying a blanket upon a stone. And this is the image—a blanket upon a giant rock, a small blanket, with specific dimensions, a warm blanket, a blanket that raises the temperature placed upon a rock of gigantic proportions. Every sentence is a blanket.

They are small, they don’t cover the entire world, they don’t cover the entire surface of reality, they are minimal, but they cover just a little, they protect—as if they were hiding what is shameful in reality. A kind of modesty and coldness, two problems solved with a sentence. There are small squares of reality that are covered, that is, understood, by certain sentences that come from books. There are many of these sentences in Llansol.

“other children invented that there was a chair in this room with torn stuffing where the sea could be heard, as soon as we put our ear there; now, the springs are damaged.” (The Book of Communities)

5.

What is literature for? For so much, but also for this—a sentence sometimes allows us to understand one square meter of the world, one square meter of reality, let’s think about it like this—as if reality could have this unit of measure. What is the unit used to measure reality, here is a serious question. Time is typically assumed to be what is used to measure reality, but we can think about space as a unit of measure.

One square meter of reality, two square meters of reality, one square centimeter of reality, ten thousand kilometers of reality.

And, yes, a sentence also has width, length, height, volume; it can be carried from a book to the world, to one square meter of the world. And this sentence will cover that square meter of reality, will understand that square meter of reality. It isn’t much, they will say, for reality stretches out endless meters in all directions. True, it isn’t much, but it is something.

Making square meters lucid, transforming the measurements of the world into lucidity. I look around and am able to understand because I brought the right Sentence with me. Sometimes, it is this.

To make at least a few square meters of reality lucid. Like someone carrying a small first-aid kit, carrying sentences from Llansol to the outside world, to the place and moment where you are alive.

6.

This edition of the Geography of Rebels trilogy, which includes The Book of Communities, The Remaining Life, and The House of July and August, and has been published by Deep Vellum thanks to the Espaço Llansol and Audrey Young, is a major event. A great writer like Llansol deserves such an edition in English. May readers enjoy this strangeness, which will, in time, I am certain, win them over.

—GONÇALO M. TAVARES