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Abecedary

Abecedary

Pablo Jofré

Translated by Shook, with a prologue by Will Alexander

$11.00 USD
$11.00 USD
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Paperback, bilingual edition, 84 pages
ISBN: 978-1-947322-99-8
Cover price: $14.00

 

Pablo Jofré’s alphabet begins with "Abyss" and travels through "Caravan," "Jewel," and "Narcolepsy" before arriving at "Xenophobia," charting the Berlin-based Chilean poet's obsessive exploration of the world around him through the lens of politics, relationships, and travel. Awarded the Gabriela Mistral Chilean National Literature Contest in its original Spanish, this bilingual edition, Abecedary, is supported by the Chilean government's prestigious National Council of Arts and Culture Translation Support Grant.

Praise for Abecedary

“Jofré’s vision empowers his alchemical expression, swirling as it does his personal monsoon of droplets that casts spells seemingly closer in technique to the creative dossiers of Enrique Lihn and Nicanor Parra. Abecedary condenses via poetic semaphore lingual neutron stars penultimate to incalculable eruption.” —Will Alexander, from the Prologue: "Quantum Lingual Deftness"

“Surely the dream—and nightmare—of many Western writers since the birth of modernity has been to write and impose their own personal dictionary. Some attempt it sneakily; others, head on. Pablo Jofré writes head on and knows what confronts him: he must display his words, which belong forcefully to others too.” —Sergio Gaspar

“Pablo Jofré has already staked a claim on our language—plural, tribal—from which he takes the words that he will make his… the author has constructed a small verbal work, his puzzles of words that he has ordered alphabetically… Abecedary is not sloppy, piled words, but rather a finely knit weaving…” —Elvira Hernández

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Pablo Jofré

Pablo Jofré (born 1974) is a Chilean poet currently living and working in Berlin, Germany. Jofré was awarded the Lagar Prize by the Chilean National Contest of Literature Gabriela Mistral (La Serena) for the poetry collection Abecedario in 2009. After school in Santiago de Chile in 1992, Jofré travelled to Europe for the first time. He spent a year visiting Germany, France, Spain, and Portugal and studied German and English. Back in Chile, he studied journalism at the Diego Portales University and cultural anthropology at the University of Chile. Before obtaining his degree, he went to Barcelona in 2002 to study literary theory and comparative literature at the University of Barcelona. He also studied Catalan and French and attended literary workshops led by Leonardo Valencia and Joan-Ignasi Elias. In 2011, he was awarded Spanish nationality and emigrated to Berlin, where he currently lives. Shook is a poet and translator based at Newt Beach in Northern California. Their most recent translations include Mario Bellatin's Beauty Salon, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi's A Friend's Kitchen (with Bryar Bajalan), and Mikeas Sánchez' How to Be a Good Savage (with Wendy Call). Shook's own poetry has been translated into over a dozen languages, including Isthmus Zapotec, Kurdish, and Uyghur.