Poetry
Spaces to Say the Same [Thing]
Espacios para decir lo mismo
Hanni Ossott · 1974
Synopsis
Prose poems in which the speaker calls herself a multiple self, with contradictory attitudes. Grave and excessive characters, turned toward the outside, pass through them like shapes without a place, which turn upon themselves and conceive of themselves as a multiple space; some define themselves from silence. The text sketches a narrative, with its ghostly figures, then overflows it, and is laden with abstract reflections even in its evocation of the body and of sensations.
Context
The collection was published in 1974. In 2017, the Caracas publisher Letra Muerta brought out a second, bilingual edition, with the English translation and notes by Luis Miguel Isava: three bound volumes, one of them of unpublished photographs by the author, designed after an eighteenth-century Bible and printed in an edition of one hundred and fifty copies at Ex Libris. For the graphic designer Faride Mereb, it is the book in which the author shows herself most innovative; the critic Gina Saraceni sees this work as founded on excess and imperfection, and the books that followed took a more confessional turn, devoted to love, memory and suffering.
Who it is for
A poetic prose work in Spanish, readable in English in the 2017 bilingual edition; a language its translator calls extravagant, to be read slowly.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by the graphic designer of its reissue as the author's most innovative book, and the first text of hers published in English.
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