world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women … we will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice” (Documents of 20th Century Art 22). Russolo has a chapter in The Art of Noises celebrating sonic warfare called simply “The Noises of War” (49). These attitudes towards and approaches to war exemplify what Moure struggles against in these poetic cycles when she and Elisa Sampedrín (a Moure polynym) address the affective aftermath of twentieth-century genocides in Europe. The sonic masks provide only one among many techniques of listening that gently but tenaciously refuse the recklessness of the historical avant-garde and insist upon other noise poetics. Theatre and noise poetics join in Moure’s later works in a dramaturgy that does not represent but that casts noise as an ethical threshold, an invitation to expand one’s capacity to listen. In so doing, her theatre (or poetry as theatre) develops an art of memory based not so much on the intensity of the image, as are classical and medieval arts of memory, but on the porosity of external and internal borders and their amplification of sonic ambiguity. In this theatre, actors perform the work of listening and, as such, the traditional hierarchies of Western theatre begin to erode. Rather than looking to find and display artifacts of conflict for the audience, Moure’s theatre acknowledges that conflict is already a condition of life in late capitalism, and instead she uses stagings to shift attention to other life conditions, if only briefly.
In both her Galician and Ukrainian cycles, Moure nomadically traverses social-historical, linguistic, and subjective spaces between urban Calgary and Montreal, rural Alberta, Galicia in Spain, and the Austro-Hungarian imperial province of Galicia, the east of which is today part of Ukraine. Moure has a personal connection to each of these places. Her father’s grandfather emigrated from Spain’s Galicia, one of the reasons that Moure chose to learn the Galician language (Insecession 44). Her mother was born in Velikye Hlibovychi, at the time in Poland, though it was once in Austro-Hungarian Galicia and lies presently in Ukraine. Both these places faced fratricidal and genocidal atrocity in the twentieth century. “There is a side of Europe we do not know and never learned of and still do not learn of … I still seek an ancestral cadence. A cadence of being and thought and harmony with trees” (Insecession 44). In approaching translation and exploring subjectivity (as cadence) in her poems, Moure gleaned cues from Clarice Lispector’s use of aproximação and from the works of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms. For Moure, aproximação means “to give [something] room and listen” (My Beloved Wager 180). She places this translational mode in relation to Fernando Pessoa’s “amplification of identity” (Wager 180) to astonishing effect in her poems, stating that Pessoa does not fragment identity but “embraces it excessively in his heteronyms” (emphasis in original; Wager 181).
In the poems and texts of Little Theatres (2005), the initial book in the Galician series, we are introduced to Galician, a language of the extreme west of Europe, in a homage to water via the ingredients of her mother’s national soup from the east of Europe, borscht. We then meet Elisa Sampedrín, a theatre theorist and director. Quotes from Sampedrín reject the gargantuan theatres of war and their deafening noise in English, in favor of little nicks of time and space and tiny noises in a language that has never been used to declare war, and where “[t]he protagonist … is most often language itself” (37). Sampedrín insists that “even the grass has a voice in little theatres” (40). In saying this, she argues with the idea that Peter Brook put forward in The Empty Space (1968) of “holy theatre,” and leans toward Victor Shklovsky, who wrote in 1917: “And art exists that one may recover the sensation of life” (12). In this way, Sampedrín’s theatre refuses ritual, including the ritual of character in relation to conflict.
In O Cadoiro (2007), the second book in the Galician cycle, Moure travels with books by Derrida on the archive and Foucault on the archaeology of knowledge as she tumbles into the medieval Iberian troubadour songbooks written in Galician-Portuguese. In her own poetic responses to these songbooks, Moure revels in the erotics of noise and noisy subjectivity, making claims for the radicality of lyric at a historical point when verse turned away from epic modes that lauded God or history to address instead a human individual, in a single person’s articulated voice. The book is Moure’s reply to those who would deride lyric, in particular some self-styled conceptualists who, unable to see the lyric as constructed, naturalize it in order to dismiss it, thus missing its transgressive power.
Just as Pillage Laud is a text in excess of the “Citizen Trilogy,” there is now an interlude between Moure’s Galician and Ukrainian cycles in the form of a clamorous collaboration of “resonant impostors” that unseats translation and any standard notion of its reliance on an original: Expeditions of a Chimæra (2009). This time a human collaborator, poet Oana Avasilichioaei, provides the occasion to deviate from the course. A book of pranks and reckless transits, of maps and the endless deferral of “arrival,” it entangles subjectivity and performance in a fast-moving demonstration of translational modes of “passing.” In so doing, it provides passage for Moure’s work between Galicia and Ukraine.
In O Resplandor (2010), the first book in the Ukrainian cycle, translation, reading, friendship, death, and grieving are staged in different tempos. This book derives its title from a Galician word for light emanating from an object, like a halo; for Moure, it is a trope for reading, and for poetry. The optical phenomenon Moure evokes is that of blue light and its effect on our diurnal and nocturnal cycles and our perception of the passing of time. Moure uses this passage of time in the body to queer reading practice itself, as if reading can stop time, and translation reverse it. Elisa Sampedrín, by now considered not just a heteronym (though Moure considers her a polynym, i.e. not only heterogeneous to Moure but polyphonic in her own regard) but a Galician in her own right, reappears in O Resplandor in the mœbius strip of a contradiction: she is bent on translating the poems of Nichita Stănescu from Romanian—a language she does not speak—into English, because she wants to read them. In so doing, Sampedrín jostles at every turn with the unwanted presence in the book of Moure, who is seeking to locate Sampedrín in a time and place that already do not exist. In the second part of O Resplandor, Moure overtly borrows lines directly from an early version of Oana Avasilichioaei’s translations of the Romanian poems of Paul Celan (published in 2015 in Avasilichioaei’s Limbinal) and rearranges them, as she worries the noise of grief into a text(ile) within which to wrap the maternal body.
The Unmemntioable (2012), for its part, articulates a linguistic noise beyond any “unspeakable”; it is the noise, rather, of an interdiction, of what would perhaps be speakable, but is not mentionable. As Moure, in fulfillment of a promise made to her mother to return her ashes to her birthplace, appears in her mother’s natal village in Ukraine, she comes face to face with two registers that trouble all process of memorialization: the legacy of the Holocaust, firstly, and then the legacies of the border changes and ethnic cleansings that by 1945 had brought to an end the multicultural communities in what had once been the east of the province of Galicia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In The Unmemntioable, E.M. the dreamer, on leaving Ukraine, again seeks the pragmatic E.S., Elisa Sampedrín, who desires only to be left alone in Bucharest to conduct her research into experience. E.S., in a fit of annoyance at E.M.’s stalking of her, steals E.M.’s jottings—which turn out to dwell on the infinite, to the disgust of E.S.—and then decides, as a kind of revenge, to use E.M. as her experimental subject. Whereas in O Cidadán, Moure employed the threshold of noise to question Augustine of Hippo’s metaphysics of reading and the ideological limitations of his interpretations of “tolle lege” in the Confessions, in The Unmemntioable, Elisa Sampedrín worries the fabric of Ovid’s poetry in trying to write poetry for Erín Moure. At the end of the book, the two subjectivities merge at an abandoned Art Nouveau or Secessionist style casino (what better way to meld experience and the infinite) at the edge of the Black Sea in Constanța, Romania, and the book ends by offering a wish for courage, in Galician, coraxe. Experience, it turns out, lies outside the book.
In Kapusta (2015), a bilingual poem in the form of a play, the staging of memory of the Holocaust via
