Secession/Insecession is a homage to the acts of reading, writing and translating poetry. In it, Chus Pato’s Galician biopoetics of poet and nation, Secession – translated by Erín Moure – joins Moure’s Canadian translational biopoetics, Insecession. To Pato, the poem is an insurrection against normalized language; to Moure, translation itself disrupts and reforms poetics and the possibility of the poem. In solidarity with Pato, Moure echoes Barthes: “A readerly text is something I cannot re-produce (today I cannot write like Atwood); a writerly text is one I can read only if I utterly transform my reading regime. I now recognize a third text alongside the readerly and the writerly: let’s call it the intranslatable.”

In Secession/Insecession, a major European poet and a known Canadian poet, born on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the mid twentieth century and with vastly different experiences of political life, forge a 21st century relationship of thinking and creation. The result is a major work of memoir, poetics, trans-ethics and history.

Chus Pato’s Secession was chosen as 2009 Book of the Year by the Revista das Letras, literary supplement of Galicia Hoxe (Galicia Today).