Fonte da imagem: https://revistacult.uol.com.br/home/escritor-e-acusado-de-racismo-por-trecho-em-biografia-de-clarice-lispector/
No próximo dia 13 de outubro, teremos finalmente disponível, pela Amazon, a Trilogia dos Rebeldes, de Maria Gabriela Llansol, traduzida para o inglês, esta língua que atravessa continentes. Saudamos a edição americana desses livros que inauguram a textualidade llansoliana, embora com pesar, por um prefácio que não faz jus à força do vivo, tão evidente em seus livros.
Lamentamos ainda o “empuxo ao comparativismo binário”, que não se desloca do eixo de fontes e influências, proposto por Benjamin Moser, em seu prefácio. E aqui aproximamos Maria Gabriela Llansol de Clarice Lispector e ainda de Carolina de Jesus, não porque cada uma delas tenha se deixado influenciar pela outra, mas justamente porque cada uma, incomparável em sua solidão essencial, sustentou, em seus textos, a força de existir e a pujança do vivo.
A estas três absolutamente sós aqui rendemos homenagem, com o breve comentário de Lucia Castello Branco, originalmente escrito em inglês, para que possa ser lido na língua do outro, na esperança de que o outro possa receber, um dia, a radical estrangeiridade de Maria Gabriela Llansol.
We’re alive, among the living
(reading Maria Gabriela Llansol) [1]
“Life for the dead resides in a remembrance (by the living) of their story; justice for the dead resides in a remembrance of the injustice and the outrage done to them […] [The] responsibility is not only to remember but to protect the dead, from being misappropriated.”
Shoshana Felman [2]
In 1992, when I first met Maria Gabriela Llansol and her books, I had immediately the impression that they were going to remain to the rest of my life. But, at this point, I had no idea about what the rest of a life could mean to a writer, a professor, a psychoanalyst and also a woman who was already a little bit tired of literature and teaching. At this moment, I haven’t read Barthes’ text about Proust, when he says that the middle of a writer’s life is not a chronologic, but a semantic point. Everything changes, after that semantic mark: not only the writer’s writing, but mainly his or her way of perceiving the world. [3]
Now, after 25 years working with this text, after directing 2 movies about the writer, after directing more than 20 academic works about her literature, after having deserved from Llansol more then 30 letters, after having published more then 3 books about this writer and after having maintained, since 2011, a blog dedicated to Llansol’s reception, in Brazil (www.fiodeaguadotexto.wordpress), I shall say that is really a great pleasure to see her first trilogy, Geography of Rebels, finally translated into English and promising to the world another kind of joy: the joy of the “figural world”, where the figures (different from the characters of the realistic novel) are always alive, even when they are inspired in death historical heroes as Aossê (inspired in the Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa) or Dom Arbusto (inspired in the Portuguese king, Dom Sebastião).
This is the first lesson to those that are reading her books for the first time: that the dead, in her texts, are still living, still breathing, still writing, still making love. For Llansol, this is the last aspiration of her “burning text”: the bodies resurrection. The second lesson shall be as strange as the first one: it’s necessary to look forward the “Aesteticum Convivium” to read Llansol, and specially to support the impact of the experience of reading this text that announces that the “landscape is the third sex”, as complex as the woman’s and the man’s sex. The third lesson is about what the writer calls “um corp’a’screver” (“a body’ in’ writing”). And she adds: “Only those that cross this experience know what this is. And anybody is interested about this”.
“Who is capable of supporting this experience of emptiness?” – we read, in the preface of The Book of Communities. And the answer is: “Maybe nobody, not even the book”. And her books, full of this kind of emptiness, are also full of life, full of love and sensuality, full of joy. And these are her questions, that still remain among us: “How to continue the human project? What are we going to do with us? Which dream will dream about us? Where has the flash point gone? How can we break the scenario of ‘déjà vu’ and ‘déjà revu” which enclosure us?” [4]
In one of the first interviews we had, in 1992, Llansol dreamed about the future of her text: “It seems to me that these books will arrive in Portugal after they cross other countries…” [5] Now, they are arriving in U.S. by the translation of Audrey Young, from Deep Vellum Publishing, and they will certainly cross the world by its own strength, but also by the strength of the English language. We shall thus celebrate this great event, reminding Llansol’s words: “Text, a place which travels”, “Text, the shortest distance between two points”.
For us, from the South, in the other side of America, her “legentes” since 1992, who dedicated not only the academic or the poetic life to this text, but also the “rest of a life”, it only remains a single expectation, the same Llansol wrote in one of her books: “Be tender with my shapes”.
Lucia Castello Branco
Writer, Professor of Literary Studies
Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
castella.branco@gmail.com
[1] In reference to LLANSOL, Maria Gabriela. Geography of Rebels Trilogy, Deep Vellum Publishing, Dallas, 2017.
[2] FELMAN, Shoshana. The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Trauma in the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, Cambridge/Massachussets/London, 2002, p. 15.
[3] BARTHES, Roland. The Preparation of the Novel, trans. Kate Briggs, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011.
[4] LLANSOL, Maria Gabriela. Lisboaleipzig: O Encontro Inesperado do Diverso; O Ensaio de Música, Assírio & Alvim, Lisboa, 2014. p. 129.
[5] LLANSOL, Maria Gabriela. Entrevistas, Autêntica, Belo Horizonte, 2011, p. 51. [Interview to Lucia Castello Branco, 1992]
