Keywords: Poetry, Contemporary Brazilian poetry, Language, Myth, Ruin, History.
Patrícia Lavelle
English-Spanish-Portuguese
Translated from Portuguese to Spanish by Jesús Montoya
Translated from Spanish to English by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Epilogue by Susana Scramim
2025
Hardcover | 264 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 inches
Paperback | 262 pages | 5.5 x 8.5 inches
BYE BYE BABEL
◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆◆
The body writhes
an unmelodic
move
insinuates rhythms
in an arrhythmic twist
of lips
Between two plots
(phonemes
words
syntagmas
syntax
senses
twixt parentheses)
a hiatus:
caesura the—semantics
pause
I jump
— Patrícia Lavelle
Bye bye Babel is divided into five parts. It begins with “Ruins,” followed by “Hybrid Word,” “Eros & Logos,” “Verb Tenses,” and “Echoes and Voices.” In all of them, we perceive a tension—created by the way language operates in the poems—between contending with the abstractions of language and wishing to make said abstractions operate in an absolute present tense. With no hopes of attaining and “resolving” this dialectic, the poems “merely” demonstrate their “desire.” This is made evident in the untitled poem with which the book’s second part begins.
— Susana Scramim
PATRICÍA LAVELLE (Rio de Janeiro, 1971). Poet, translator, and professor of literary theory at the Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro. She holds a doctorate in philosophy from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris (EHESS). She has published poems, translations, and essays in France and Brazil, and has published several books, notably on Walter Benjamin. Her second book of poems, Sombras longas, was published in 2023 by Relicário Edições.