Ryoko Sekiguchi takes the letters Fernando Pessoa wrote his would-be fiancée Ophelia Queiroz as her subject matter. She reconceives the Lisbon as a map over which rendezvous, affairs, and liaisons can be continued through writing. “Written words,” she asks, “do they erase themselves? […] or instead do all words, once read, never disappear?”

Ryoko Sekiguchi, adagio ma non troppo, Trans. by Lindsay Turner, Les Figues Press, 2018.


adagio ma non troppo dossier


Ryoko Sekiguchi takes the letters Fernando Pessoa wrote his would-be fiancée Ophelia Queiroz as her subject matter in adagio ma non troppo. adagio’s 36 prose blocks – appearing in Japanese, French, and English for the first time in the 2018 Les Figues Press trilingual edition (trans. Lindsay Turner) – echo the 36 letters Pessoa addressed to Queiroz dated from March 1, 1920 until January 11, 1930.

Sekiguchi reconceives the Lisbon Pessoa and Queiroz describe in their correspondence as a map over which rendezvous, affairs, and liaisons can be continued through writing. “Written words,” she asks, “do they erase themselves? […] or instead do all words, once read, never disappear?” Sekiguchi superimposes objects over a landscape where names carry shapes, directions, and the places to which they refer. In her Lisbon, a chair slid into daylight or set before a window punctuates time like comma in a sentence. An old couple contemplating ducks indicates a line between two points like a parasol taken from its stand announces a departure. As love establishes boundaries and relationships between people, if our objects convey our love for one another, then Sekiguchi traces the paths and perimeters lovers leave behind.

Originally published in a bilingual edition containing Sekiguchi’s self-translation into the French (Le bleu du ciel éditions, 2007), adagio ma non troppo belongs in the same category as the modernist works of Franz Kafka and Pessoa – as well as the recent epistolary work of Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Maggie Nelson, and Claire-Louise Bennett – writing as a philosophic and aesthetic act that reshapes our notions of time, space, translation, and love.

The "occasions" of Ryoko Sekiguchi's adagio ma non troppo are the love letters written by Brazilian Modernist Fernando Pessoa to his fiancé Ophelia Queiroz, a romance begun in 1920 and conducted in conversation as they walked the streets of Lisbon, and in the letters they exchanged, and so, a romance driven by language spoken and written. It is worth noting at the outset that Sekiguchi's focus is on Pessoa. Queiroz's letters, some two hundred and fifty, are not part of her project. Motivated by the fifty or more letters written by Pessoa, Sekiguchi fashions thirty-six paragraphs into an assemblage of lyric meditations on the topographies of love and language. Sekiguchi's love of language is evident throughout the tri-lingual edition: she wrote the meditations in Japanese (published in Japan as Guranana shihenin 2007), and self-translated those into French (published in France in a bilingual edition entitled adagio ma non troppo in 2007). They are now available in English through a translation by Lindsay Turner. The Les Figues Press edition also includes an introduction by Sawako Nakayasu, and a reproduction of a map, drawn by Fernando Pessoa, that traces a walking route through the streets of Lisbon. 

In her introduction, Sawako Nakayasu finds hope in what really matters—"the act of getting together—meeting, rendez-vous, machiawase—for the purpose of love. This act is what lies at the center of this project—love, the true source text, and its partner, translation, bringing us forward and together." At another point she writes, "Love, for Pessoa, comes to life at the moment he achieves his ever-desired encounter with his lover, whereas the textual production of love, for Sekiguchi, comes to life at the precise moment it is written."

I wish I could be as hopeful, at least as far as Sekiguchi's Pessoa traverses the terrain. I find an underlying melancholy in these meditations, a melancholy rooted in the apparent necessity of language in l'affairs du coeur. Without it, there would be no meeting, no rendez-vous, no machiawase, no physical encounter in time and space, for meetings are planned and arranged through language. And yet, language fails. Letters are unsent. Lost. Meetings wind up at best as "narrow misses," encounters not with Queiroz, but with a silhouette wavering in the distance. Some meditations are locked in quotation marks, doubly removed from the world. One meditation laments the sound waves that travel via telephone through a process that "threatens . . . to make the person on the other end evaporate." This failure of language leaves Ophelia Queiroz as a hazy object of desire, an Ophelia Queiroz who is ultimately and only present as a shadow, a silhouette, a ghost, an apparition. Pessoa is trapped by language, the very means that should ensure actual encounters.  

There is one encounter, a moment when "our lips touch." Sekiguchi does not present us with a kiss, with an expression of love, or a "meeting" consummated. This touch, lips pressed to each other, silences language, leaving Pessoa to wonder at the gaps between meetings, gaps that occur without language, but that which is not an "accident," for the accidental encounters are with Queiroz only as shadow. "Ghosts don't need to arrange meetings." 

The act of getting together, the rendez-vous, etc., is not so much about love as physical contact, as it is about love as face-to-face conversation. In the tenth paragraph/meditation, Pessoa argues the optimal intersection between a conversation and a walk: he plans a route that will maximize his contact with Queiroz, a walk that is timed to conversation. The goal—to maximize conversational contact and to match that time with the space traversed. As Sawako Nakayasu writes, "in adagio ma non troppo the geometric figure of the epigraph contextualizes the book: Pessoa's hand-drawn figure maps his 'strategy' for maximizing the time it takes to walk Ophelia, his love, home."

For Pessoa, the underlying fear is silence. So, the walk follows the words, not the other way around—the words following the walk. One can always add steps if the conversation is still in play. Apparently, one cannot add words to a conversation if the walk is still in play. Pessoa's desire is not for Queiroz, but for conversation, for linguistic expression, which leads to Sekiguchi's love of language, and a different kind of maximal contact, one between languages. As Nakayasu notes, for Sekiguchi language itself creates love. Working in two languages amplifies the love. 

Sekiguchi has written extensively on self-translation. Her short essay "Self-Translation: Or The Artifice of Constraint" in Four from Japan (translated there by Chet Weiner) offers a succinct set of propositions. The source/target language distinction is largely effaced, in part because the same writer is 'creating' both the original and the translation. The self-translation is a 'version' constrained by the original, but also necessarily changing the original. Furthermore, choosing to translate into a language means that the translator must recognize that each version is participating in its own language's poetic/literary history. The Japanese version is embedded within Japanese culture and literary traditions, similarly for the French version. From those positions, they 'talk' to each other, both in space and time. This multiplicity allows her to 'stretch' languages and their relationships with cultures. 

In the literary domain into which the two texts are thrust, each find a different problematics and contexts which belong to them alone. In this impossible situation which consists in paying to attention to both contexts at the same time, the text can no longer be taken for granted and is forced into a problematic position . . . The texts relate more intensely to literature itself, escaping from their anticipated, biographical, national, etc. positionality.

This is but a small part of Sekiguchi's playground as she "stretch[es] the surface of the text." Jousisance. 喜び. - Rick Henry

http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist/2018/10/3/adagio-ma-non-troppo-by-ryoko-sekiguchi.html

Ryoko Sekiguchi, Heliotropes, Trans. by Sarah O’Brien, La Presse, 2008.

The role of proper names and their power over both named and namer is a subject Sekiguchi has addressed in her critical work. Now she returns to the theme in these poetic prose blocks. Set in a Portuguese botanical garden, they reconstruct the plant, animal, and aviary worlds through the lens of language.

Ryoko Sekiguchi, Two Markets, Once Again, Trans. by Sarah Riggs, Post-Apollo Press, 2008.

This is the latest and possibly the culmination of the Post-Apollo pocketbook series which includes such luminaries as Fanny Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Claude Royet-Journoud. Deceptively small, this little book packs a wallop. Sekiguchi is a master of the experimental prose poetry sequence:

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Pages the letters fling themselves against which could have been traced directly by this firm hand, chapters unaware of changes in line or punctuation, the act of reading that engenders space, that surrounds us.

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A text which proves upon further reading to be highly dense and multilayered despite the relative lack of torque, which I suspect may be due to its having travelled first through its French version, translated here by Sarah Riggs, an American poet living in Paris (generally the distance between Japanese and English creates more resistance in translation and hence more difficult sentence structures… but more on translation later). And the lines continue:

The exceptional intensity in pronouncing the time clause at that very moment caused us to whiten immediately, alerting us to the error in reading it, but too late, this intensity creates here a market instantly, a market that had always existed, where we had always lived.

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Ryoko Sekiguchi is perhaps one of the most engaging poets of that generation now approaching mid-career currently writing in Japan. Though she maintains a recognizable relationship to developments in Japan’s late Modernism, she has stretched the available avant-garde vocabulary in the Japanese language to include, as seen in one of her earlier books, Luminescent Diapositive, graphic elements reminding one of Charles Olson, or the playfulness of the Japanese Dadaist cutups of an earlier era, something which was rejected by Japan’s Modernists as they grew older and more stuffy. In her more recent work, Sekiguchi has managed to mold this foundation in the highly controlled formal experiments of her predecessors to more recent interests in Japanese women’s poetry, which tends to explore the textures and patterns of feminine speech and experience. Sekiguchi’s own version of these more recent developments in Japanese women’s writing is, however, more intellectually dense, more highly complex than most other writers.

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Sekiguchi has lived in Paris since 1997, is fluent in French and apparently a number of other languages, and translates/rewrites her own work into French. This in itself is quite an interesting cultural development, as in the recent past, it would have been extremely difficult to find acceptance as a poet in Japan and be an expatriate at the same time. Until recently, the assumption would have been that in order to be completely Japanese and completely authentic as a poet, living for such long periods of time in a foreign country, and especially, actually attaining fluency in the language, would somehow dilute whatever it is one is looking for in a writer, and in a work of the caliber that might be considered for inclusion in a ‘national literature.’ Obviously this is no longer the case in the era of writers like Haruki Murakami and the era of the internet, where physical space and ‘culture’ in the traditional sense seem to have lost some of the more precisely defined boundaries they once had. And perhaps it is also this shift in modes, in the location of the poetic topology from the actual to the imagined, from physical to virtual, that in an odd way informs this text.

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Two Markets Once Again is an especially satisfying example of recent developments in the writer’s work. It is a landscape which is at once the imagination, the actual world through which the author travels in a mixture of distance and awe, and the text itself – text as field, as the eroticism of language, and as a topology of markers and signs.

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Sekiguchi makes her way deftly through this landscape, taking the reader on a tour as it were, through the labyrinth of language. Here, identity of author, reader, and text, a text which itself is also the labyrinth of the mind, become intermixed.

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Sekiguchi weaves in and out of this textual and textural landscape, occasionally allowing surreal glimpses of the actual world she travels through (texts were produced on trips to Syria and Iran) which exudes the smells of coffee and coriander.

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The ‘market’ is the open space in the text, the gap or dislocation in language through which the reader/writer slips, as well as the strange, unidentifiable sense of place the traveler finds in the unknown country.

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It is also a journey through a language being learned – the language of classical Arabic, as well as all the visual and sensual experience of being in that new environment.

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The voice of the poem fights against the text, but is finally always drawn back in. And yet the gap or dislocation as represented by the market is also the site of all possibility and experience, ‘for this market, the act of writing, in itself, is always possible.’

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It is the dislocations in language that make writing/poetry possible – the chiasm is poetry itself. And yet it is also ‘The trace of negation or refusal’ –

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In every part, in the debris or the remainder of text, we recognize the trace of negation or refusal

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The text is interspersed with Arabic, Latin, Italian, and Provencal — She quotes a line from the Latin text of the Stabat Mater; she quotes the poetry of the troubadours and Dante’s Inferno (most likely from the narration of the encounter with the ghost of Francesca Di Rimini, a name mentioned elsewhere in the text). There are also allusions to Greek tragedy (most likely Euripides), the voice of Persephone speaking in one of the poems of Sappho, Homer, and other classical Greek texts.

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The more one reads and rereads the text, and the more languages you know or are willing to google, the more numerous and intricately interwoven become the meanings and allusions. This is most certainly a book that can bear many readings. Despite the fairly small number of pages in this little book, it is a gigantic work and has a far reach beyond all the assumed cultural and linguistic boundaries.

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As for the question of translation, it would be more appropriate to understand this text as a recreation or ‘multiplication of versions’ in the words of Sekiguchi, and Sarah Riggs not merely a translator, but a partner in the creation of a collaborative work which has already travelled from Japanese to French and now finds its third extension in the English of this text.

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Sekiguchi, speaking of her self-translation into French, notes that, ‘The very idea of an original text subsisting through the displacement of one language into another is therefore put into question… ’ [tr. Chet Weiner, in Four From Japan, Edited by Sawako Nakayasu, Litmus Press]

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The text itself is nothing but a particular and infinite instance… It is therefore no longer a question of depth but of stretching the surface of the text: such is the aim of this effort at self-translation/multiplication of versions.

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Sekiguchi is a must-read, not only because of the intricacy and delicacy of her writing, a writing which carries both the density and weight of a fine-tuned intellect and yet offers turns of a certain lightness, the tongue-in-cheek, and the simple enjoyment of language, but because the increasing availability of hers and other works of contemporary and Modernist avant-garde Japanese poetry in English means there is no longer an excuse for American readers having a complete lack of familiarity with this dynamic and ever-changing modern tradition.

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we read and are read, we call and are called, in reading, sounding out, the text remaining silent, we ourselves becoming texts

- Eric Selland

http://jacketmagazine.com/37/r-sekiguchi-rb-selland.shtml

Ryoko Sekiguchi, Tracing, Trans. by Stacy Doris, Duration, 2003.

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A tale of two tongues: self-translation in Sekiguchi Ryōko’s poetry (pdf)

Born in Tokyo, Ryoko Sekiguchi has lived in Paris since 1997. Her work has appeared widely in French and Japanese; her books in French include La Voix sombre (2015), Manger fantôme (2012), L’Astringent (2012), Ce n’est pas un hasard (2011), adagio ma non troppo (2007), Deux Marchés (2005), and Héliotropes (2005). Three of her collections have previously been translated into English: Heliotropes (Sarah O’Brien, La Presse, 2008), Two Markets, Once Again (Sarah Riggs, Post-Apollo Press, 2008), and Tracing (Stacy Doris, Duration, 2003). In addition to her recent culinary performances, Sekiguchi has collaborated with visual artists and sound artists including Suzanne Doppelt, Christian Boltanski, and Ranier Lericolais. Her translations into Japanese include works by Jean Echenoz, Mathias Enard, Atiq Rahimi, and Daniel Heller-Roazen.