Polyvocality in the Market: Guernica Editions’ Fall 2013 Launch
Antonio D'Alfonso, founder of Guernica Editions.On Sunday, September 15th 2013 I attended Guernica Editions’ Fall Launch at Supermarket in Kensington. I’ve only ever been to Supermarket between the hours of 10 p.m. and 1, or 2 a.m., so it was a lovely surprise to see the venue just as packed as always, albeit with a slightly older crowd than usual.Antonio D’Alfonso founded Guernica Editions in Montréal in 1978 with an aim to expose underrepresented authors, especially those from Italo-Québécois communities. Since then, Guernica has moved to Toronto and broadened its scope to include female writers, authors of colour, and bilingual poetry and prose. While most publishing companies are concerned with what is new, exciting, and likely to be popular, Guernica Editions maintains a strictly social mandate. Guernica has a very refreshing business model that shifts the focus away from the publisher’s identity to that of the writer. With over five hundred authors and thirty years of experience, Guernica Editions proves that one can couple a social conscience with longevity without the fluff and nonsense of bland and predictable bestseller lists.With food, a lot of people assume that if it’s good for you, it must taste bad. In the case of literature, a large majority maintains that if the piece teaches you something it can’t—or doesn’t—entertain you at the same time. (Dan Kois playfully calls this “eating your cultural vegetables.”) Fortunately, Guernica Editions’ Fall launch provided a great example of how you can diversify your palette, immerse yourself in a breadth of cultural offerings, and thoroughly enjoy yourself at the same time.Karen McPherson began the readings portion of the evening with excerpts from her translation of Louise Warren’s Delft Blue & Objects of the World: Archives I & II, which traces her experiences interacting with cultural artifacts from around the world. Her use of poetic language and creative syntax transforms the essay form into something much more adventurous and reminds me of the avant-garde theories of artistic creation that surfaced during the peak of modernism.Warren writes of a “childish energy” she feels when learning another language, and the exhilaration of discovery truly comes through in lines where “each object looking at me is looking at me in Spanish.” Antonio D’Alfonso, as well as being a publisher, has himself been a translator for thirty years. Before launching into his translation of Jean-Pierre Vallotton’s Wings Folded in Cracks, he reflected that translation is about trying to find the right word to translate an image. It was an especially enlightening experience then to hear Christine Tipper, also a translator, read alongside Francis Catalano from his poetry collection Where Spaces Glow. Catalano’s book is published in both English and French and ought to be a very insightful and useful text for anyone interested in learning French or reading French poetry. When Catalano read, his poetry sounded luscious, rhythmic, and his imagery evinced a sense of nostalgia for an ancient time. He enunciated each word so precisely that his r’s rolled, his s’s slithered, and his vowels were so elongated as if to give an impression of yearning for a time beyond his reach. Tipper’s translation lost some of that acoustic energy by virtue of the English language’s lack of sex appeal in comparison to the French, but it nonetheless captured Catalano’s concern with history, place, and fluidity.Not all of Guernica Editions’ offerings are bilingual, so if you dropped out of grade nine French there still may be something of interest to you. Brian Day, for example, indulged the audience in his sumptuous poetry describing the erotic lives of religious deities. His poetic voice is decadent, deliberate, and oozing with lust, so if you’re into queering scripture then his collection The Daring of Paradise is for you. John O’Neill offered yet another perspective on forbidden love and his novel Fatal Light Awareness appears to be a promising addition to the Guernica family. In the excerpt O’Neill read, the novel’s main character Leonard Edison comes home to his wife after a tryst with another woman. The scene is fraught with tension and while listening to O’Neill read, I could imagine every appliance in the kitchen electrified to bursting. O’Neill clearly has a talent for subtle details and is capable of creating dynamic moods without going over the top.Jim Christy was the last reader of the afternoon and the ex-boxer tickled everyone with his sharp wit and powerful stage presence. One could describe him as something of a bad boy poet, dodging the draft, coming to Canada in 1968, and churning out thirty books. When he got on stage he asked, “What am I supposed to do with seven minutes? I’ve got haikus longer than seven minutes” and, being a smooth operator, read his “Yonge Street Haiku” about an empty topless and bottomless bar (the joke being that in an empty club, there are no tops or bottoms to be found). If his reading of “Archie Marries Veronica” is anything to go by, his new collection, This Cockeyed World promises to be just as exuberant as its author. Pop culture, humour, and experimentation all rolled into one, Jim Christy’s writing resists standardization and provides a healthy dose of attitude to Canadian poetry.Guernica Editions turned what could have been a typical Sunday into a multicultural trek through Canada’s literary landscape and if you need some variety in your life, stay tuned for their forthcoming launches this fall.
