The measured space between words is more filled with reality than the time needed to read them.
Jean Genet
Perhaps it all begins there, in Guilhem de Peiteus’ verse, “farai un vers de dreyt nien”; “I will write a poem about nothing,” in Eduardo Milán’s translation. In Leopoldo María Panero’s translation, that Occitan verse reads: “I will make a verse taking advantage of nothing.” And Maurizio Medo in Malincour, performing a Poundian make it new on the troubadour’s verse, notes: “My writing is all I could dig up from the arid materials of our time: they speak of nothing.” One speaks of nothing and at the same time digs up the materials. If the earth (memory) is dug up, it is because something is desired to be found. The troubadour is also the one who finds (or invents), the one who discovers unalgo [1]. Medo found a train. The beginning of Malincour is a train called Europe: a non-place in motion, as is the present from which he writes.
Maurizio Medo enters and exits the alphabet, excavates and takes notes. What he shows us is the thread of life with all its gaps, the tension between the past (the photographs) and the present (the writing). Malincour is (de)situated there, in that liminal space between the past and the present, and it is perhaps for this very reason that it becomes necessary to speak more of writing than of poems. An expansive writing that erases boundaries between genres, that transgresses limits. Malincour is poem, essay, critique, metapoetic reflection, narration, autobiography, memory, image, reverie, rewriting; but it is also writing in real time, a daily exercise, the record of that day-to-day life we call the present. Malincour is polyphonic writing (many voices enter) and montage writing (loose pieces in which the blurred image does not stop).
The train is going backwards, it is important to emphasize this. Language seeks an origin. Perhaps that is why Medo embeds a few words in other languages, Ligurian and Serbo-Croatian (the language of his grandparents), but also German and Italian, without providing us with the translation. Maurizio Medo quotes Roland Barthes, pointing to himself: “some children read aloud, all together, different books in different languages, you can’t understand them, but then it will be translated into something.” The grandparents speak another language. The meaning has been lost. The past, the Peruvian writer seems to be telling us, is a language that we read with great difficulty and that hurts to read. Hence, the whisper of language seeps into his writing: that whisper reminds us that all (poetic) writing is a foreign language that shakes the foundations of one’s own language. That is also Malincour. The reader receives that sonorous form, a sensory mark that promises meaning but does not deliver it. There are other marks: crossings-out, graphic symbols, quotation marks, bold and italic typography. Medo works with the signifiers of that past, rather than with the meanings.
All writing is also a difficult, impossible, or only half-possible translation, as Medo notes at various points in his book: “lost in the memory of those submicroscopic moments that cannot be translated with a few words,” “Would it make sense today to translate the phrase from German into Yiddish: Entschuldige, das,” “to speak of my childhood in Spanish is a translation,” “In La Cantuta everything seemed to acquire meaning, even when the wind pursued us with its zigzagging cries.” Entschuldige, das,“ ”talking about my childhood in Spanish is a translation,“ ”In La Cantuta everything seemed to make sense, even when the wind chased us with its cry, zigzagging among the branches of the molles as if trying to scream out its sorrow. // I was unable to translate it.“ ”She couldn’t translate all the pain of traveling in circles for miles enough to ignore that we wouldn’t understand her.“ She is the grandmother, who in my reading is reflected in another grandmother, the one invented by Gloria Gervitz in her long poem Migraciones: ”and she writing letters in a Yiddish that no one speaks anymore.” The distance between languages, but above all, the distance between cultures strains the words: the grandmother (ancestors), multilingualism, migration for survival (in Mexico or Peru), memory, pain, the death of the mother that stops or turns the writing, the vitality of the present, all these motifs unite both books, both stories. There is a path open to be traveled.
Malincour, divided into two parts, is also a journey that, from a multi-spatial dimension (Europe), arrives at La Cantuta (Peru). The thread of the journey is not lost; in the background, that small epic (family migration) and the daily battle (neighbors, garbage, WhatsApp, friends, interference) resonate and are sustained. History with a capital H filters into personal history: “The Remington was my first toy. I made presents. // Mom got lost in the woods of Loano.” And below, as a substrate, the myth appears: “I am Nobody,” cried Ulysses, saving himself from being devoured. “I am also the neighbor,” Medo writes in echo, as if to say, I am “anyone.” It is not, then, a question of searching for one’s own identity or a lost homeland. It is about life and writing. A writer’s homeland, said Juan José Saer, is childhood and language. I think Medo would agree, although he might add that homeland is also love:
I want you by my side, where there is nothing
to put at stake when
we begin
to build our past.
Maurizio Medo’s writing is a gesture of love (without sentimentality) that says unalgo. Affection runs through the book from one side to the other. Love for his mother and father, for Ludy (his wife), for his grandparents, for that lost time that the writer recovers in the space of a train that does not exist, a train that is unalgo. “Whenever poetry says something [points out Jaques Roubaud], it presents itself, for that reason, to many who vaguely sense that ‘unalgo’ is not ‘something’ that could be said, as an absurd activity, and poems [writing] as pure gibberish. ‘Nothing’ could be a name for ‘unalgo’, provided that ‘everything’ was also ‘nothing’.“ Malincour is situated there, between that nothing and that everything, which in the words of Baka (the grandmother) could perhaps be translated as “far away”: that, Medo tells us, is its true place.
If one thing is clear at the end of reading Malincour, it is that poetry, as Maurizio Medo notes in his book, sounds “like the imperfect indicative tense.” Actions completed within a time frame extend into the present. The past, like that phrase by Guilhem de Peiteus, continues to reverberate.
[1] The concept of “unalgo” is from Jacques Roubaud.
