House of Anansi Press, 2007
Read by Erin Gray
“All in all, we must confess that the cantigas present difficulties: problems with interpretation, ambiguities, confusing passages and points of obscurity.”
- Marques Braga, 1945
Erin Moure did not write O Cadoiro. Rather, she read it into being, gathered its contents from a wandering and a fall.
Moure has a peculiar standing in the experimental Canlit canon; she is one of the most critically lauded and successful Canadian language-poets, and has received a series of coveted awards for her collections of poetry. Yet, Moure is often criticized for her opaque, unabashedly intellectualized poetic renderings. Her writing has been dubbed “inaccessible,” “baffling,” “masturbatory,” “offensive,” “egregious,” and, perhaps my favourite, “minimalist English poetry with the texture of pre-solidified concrete.” [1]
Her most recent work, O Cadoiro, is undoubtedly hermetic in its seemingly random accrual of pedestrian images and wanton wordplay. Many a reviewer (Lily Gontard in Geist, for example) has noted his or her bored and bitter slog through the book’s meditations on “falling” (o cadoiro means “the place where falling is made,” which Moure, in her postface, describes as “the place of poetry”). Moure is a challenging writer, and much of her work is unpleasant to read.
As I toiled through O Cadoiro, confused by the confluence of playful paratextuality and self-referential lyricism, I found myself wondering what was on Moure’s mind as she composed such lines as “for by them yo9 do mewell. 7God” (from “Befallen II,” 95). Ultimately, O Cadoiro contains enough intellectual intrigue – and, at times, charm – to have inspired this reviewer to read, and reread, and reread yet again. And it is reading that Moure seeks to trouble; the time of reading, the place of reading, the how of reading, the why. In O Cadoiro, Moure dons the mask of the troubadour as she turns her attention to the medieval Galician cantiga, an Iberian archive of love, lyric, and error.
As Moure explains in the book’s postface[2] there are three types of cantiga: the cantiga of courtly love (de amor), of longing for an absent lover (de amigo), and of scorn and slander (de escarnio e maldizer). It is perhaps the cantiga de amigo that exerts the most influence over O Cadoiro’s telepoetic verse. Moure seems most attuned here to subjectivity’s lack, to moments of yearning and quiet restraint; and this concern slips into, or perhaps from, her postmodern concern with language’s defects. Take a poem from “Befallen I,” for example:
What if I talked to you again?
Could the street sing any wider?
The raisonnement of my cancion s
ever been lacking
Where lyric foils me, the poem
the poem
the poem
[the transcription is excelente and mui limpa]
[the excriptora has at last been paid]
the foil” (36)
In O Cadoiro Moure embraces failure, seeing in loss a pregnant silence worthy of contemporary cantigaic vitality. Here, we have Moure interpreting a largely outmoded style of poetry in order to comment on the Derridean problematic of the origin and archive of writing. Waterfalls, snow, sheaves of paper, sleep, absent mothers; O Cadoiro, as both document and act, is marked by the syncope of “empty” changes, and, with these cantigas’ recurring focus on absence – on sexless tension and withholding – Moure is having another go at the author issue.
As Moure notes in the postface, the main question that drives this collection forward is What does it mean to “trobar” today? To trobar is to invent song, to compose in verse. Curiously, it also means to find, to disturb, to turn up. In the cantigas’ sonority, Moure senses the feverish shiver of language’s insufficiency, its near-constant deferral of meaning. Hence the incoherent footnotes, references to writerly failure, and Moure’s discomforting co-habitation with language as bedfellow and spawn:
Please waken. I am suffering from so many
consonants, consoants, and I am
not a good sufferer.
My modem and god awakens me
light over Lisbon.
There should be rhymes…” (44)
Much of this book is a mapping of Moure’s process, of her unsettling insertion into the labyrinthine aphasia of poiesis: “variations on a word, then its opposite. the languages mixed up in my head.” But within this effacement, she finds in the renewed Galician lyric a humanist gesture of perseverance. Fundamentally, the cantigas offer Moure another chance to investigate the ethics and erotics of transelation: Quebecois language feminist Nicole Brossard’s refiguration of translation as a procreative act rather than a mimetic retelling. O Cadoiro does indeed contain translations, as well as poems written in Galician, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. These romantic languages seem to hold sway over Moure; but her adaptations are far from direct transcriptions. More like “(shallow r ripples),” they occur through a sonic, rather than representative, exchange.
This is, ultimately, a book of strange markings, of foreign words connected by arrows and gaffe. Writing into the echoic aura of error, Moure allows us to experience some of what she encountered when she read Galician poetry – in order to study the sixteenth-century poems, Moure had to engage with a copy of a copy of a copy: a lithographed reproduction of a photographic facsimile of a sixteenth-century manuscript. And it is to Moure’s credit that she is able to re-create this contradictory, and thoroughly unsettling, experience for her readers; in its disjunction and incomprehension, O Cadoiro writes beyond signification, nudging us into language’s phatic sway, where “perplexity and silence” give way to suture.
Footnotes:
[1] Shane. “Dealing With Erin Moure.” http://www.goodreports.net/essays/jury24.htm.
Accessed March 18, 2008.
[2] Available in full at http://www.anansi.ca/ocadoiro/postface.
