Contributions by Pola Oloixarac
Pola Oloixarac ‘s first novel, Las teorías salvajes (The Wild Theories) has been translated into French, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Portuguese, and English. In 2010, she was the recipient of a National Award for Literature from the National Arts Fund, was chosen as one of the best young Spanish-language novelists by Granta magazine, and participated in the International Writers Program at the University of Iowa. She has been a Literary Fellow at Yaddo (USA), the Meet Maison des Ecrivains Etrangers et traducteurs (France), the Amsterdam Writer’s Residence (Holland), and at Dora Maar (France). She has contributed to publications including The New York Times International, São Paolo’s La Folha, The Telegraph UK, and Etiqueta Negra. Her love affair with English began with H.P. Lovecraft and E.A. Poe as a little girl, and deepened progressively with Carl Sagan, Pynchon, Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Watson, and the American novels of V. Nabokov.
An American Poet’s Dream: an interview with David Shook
Interview and introduction by Pola Oloixarac
translated by Heather Cleary
A young professor of literature in Los Angeles collects funding and poems online in order to make his dream a reality: he wants to fly over the territory, dropping poems like bombs. He believes that, in light of the recent history of the United States, cleaving the air with his own drone is the best way to protect poetry: everything else can collapse—NASA can close its doors and employees of the State can fall victim to the shutdown—but military programs remain intact, the drones still carry out their secret missions. By joining with these unmanned vehicles, poetry refuses to capitulate, David muses, twirling his long connoisseur moustache.
The son of preachers from the heart of Texas, David Shook grew up having faith in the spoken word. He studied the … Read More »
Omnia Caro Tenebrarum
Pola Oloixarac
translated by Maxine Swann
The living and the dead at his command,
Were coupled, face to face, and hand in hand
Virgil, The Aeneid, VIII 483-88
In rock caves like these, Cicero reports (Aristotle confirms) the obscure metaphysics of the Etruscan pirates. Their domination spanned the Tyrrhenian Sea up to the Cisalpine Gaul as far as Alalia and the Latium, before the coalition of Carthage; Herodotus mentions that “their ships brandished enormous golden spiders or gigantic octopuses.” They secured the ships to rocky formations of alum, remnants of the marine floor elevated to the surface that was man’s; then they descended with ropes into the caves turned tombs.
(These grottos have been known to attract human beings. They are not indifferent to the organic. It’s the voice of the tundra that coats beings with its excretions, without distinguishing … Read More »
On Repetition: Nietzsche, Art Basel, and the Venice Biennale
Mariano López Seoane
translated by Pola Oloixarac
In fairy tales, curiosity, one of the forces that sets the story in motion, is always punished. This ancestral warning has stopped few, even though punishment has rained down upon us from Eve’s appetite for apples to the present day. It was the desire to see things up close, to be where the action was, that drove me to visit the Venice Biennale and Art Basel in the space of two weeks. The punishment was not long in coming. Like a hero in disgrace, I was condemned to repetition: in both places, the same artists, the same names, the same questions and, what’s worse, the same experience.
There’s little to say, in critical terms, about Art Basel. It’s a fair: it aims to sell works and make names circulate, ignite careers, turn artists into … Read More »
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