Description
Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Translated by Whitney DeVos. Argentine poet Samich moves from the provinces to the outskirts of Buenos Aires and decides to turn his life into a work of art. Fumbling through a world constructed of intuitions and beliefs, he has scant preparation and few firm ideas about how to do this. Nonetheless, he develops a cult following. Fiction writer and essayist Sergio Chejfec offers a series of numbered notes as an outline of Samich's thinking-in-process, investigating the pamphlet form as a "megaphone" for the dissemination of "views" bound by "a situation of existence" of a poet who "aspired to a voice permanently lowered." As if to say: by means of the pamphlet, the biography becomes the work.
Author Bio
Sergio Chejfec, originally from Argentina, has published numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays. His novels translated into English: My Two Worlds (Open Letter); The Dark (Open Letter, 2012); The Planets (Open Letter, a finalist for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award), BARONI: A JOURNEY (Almost Island, 2017); and The Incompletes (Open Letter). Some of his short stories and essays in translation can be read at Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Music & Literature, and elsewhere. He currently teaches in the Creative Writing in Spanish Program at NYU.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA
Whitney DeVos is a writer and translator living in Mexico City, where she is completing a doctoral dissertation on documentary and investigative poetics in the Americas. Her translations have appeared in the Acentos Review and are forthcoming in the Chicago Review.
Author City: USA