Writings on the Other Animals

The Spanish-language debut of Manuel Becerra's award-winning La escritura de los animales distintos, with Kathleen Archer's English translation, bound at the top in a reversible style.

Manuel Becerra, a contemporary Mexican poet, has published six books of poetry and won six national poetry awards; his LA ESCRITURA DE LOS ANIMALS DISTINTOS won the Enriqueta Ochoa National Poetry Prize. The La escritura collection has been translated into WRITINGS OF THE OTHER ANIMALS by Kathleen Archer and is published as a bilingual, Spanish-English edition. Influenced by various poets (Juan Gelman, Edgar Lee Masters, Fernando Pessoa, and Leopoldo María Panero), Writings features a range of poetic forms, from conventional short lines justified to the left, to syntactically fractured lines scattered down pages, to prose-poems. This collection of poems is unified by Becerra's well-considered use of rhythm, repetition of words and images, and recurring themes such as circular time or looping, the notion of looking to the stars for guidance, and superstition.

Notable among Becerra's themes is beauty. His Theory of the Toadseries challenges traditional notions of beauty and value. With these poems, instead of exalting the beauty of, for example, swans, a symbol of purity in Latin American Modernismo, Becerra wanted to create poetry that sings a different kind of beauty. Here, he focuses on that of the toad, which symbolizes transgressive beauty. A poem in the toad series goes into a more detailed description of the toad, not just of its physical form but from different literary perspectives. Becerra references Borges when he writes that the toad is the archetypal toad, because the individual, in its own right, is the whole species. In other words, each individual, human or animal, is the whole species, and as such, there is a dissolution of the Other. All part of the pulsing planet, every creature, human or animal, has a unique beauty.

Several aspects of the form of the book Writings on the Other Animals are unusual. Manuel Becerra's original, LA ESCRITURA DE LOS ANIMALS DISTINTOS, debuts in this publication, a departure from the usual practice of translating previously published literary works. Becerra's concept for the original work, a series of poems printed on one long sheet of paper, was influenced by Oquendo de Amat's 5 Meters of Poems and Octavio Paz's Blanco, which was also printed on one long page and folded into a book. Becerra's concept was realized in a limited-edition art book (Song Bridge Project, 2021). In that edition the sheets were letterpress printed, English on the front, Spanish on the back, and folded accordion style between two unbound covers. The design for this book, WRITINGS ON THE OTHER ANIMALS, is intended to reproduce the aesthetic sense of both Becerra's concept of a collection of poems on a continuous sheet of paper folded accordion style, and the art book. Consequently, the book is perfect bound at the top in a reversible or t'te-b'che style, a structure with two fronts. The poetry is presented from one side in its English translation and from the other side in its Spanish original. The text runs parallel to the spine; the pages are turned by lifting them up.

Poetry. Art. Translation.