I was a little concerned when Ugly Duckling Presse announced early this year that its 2020 program would be devoted to twenty pamphlets with essays “on subjects close to UDP’s commitments—collective work, translation, performance, pedagogy, poetics, and small press publishing,” rather than any new books of poetry. Not that I don’t applaud anyone pausing their usual work in order to reflect, but am I wrong in thinking small-press poetry publishing seems more fragile than ever? So that one of the best literary presses around was not publishing any new poetry this year felt like a bad sign. That said, I was grateful when the press sent me a handful of the new pamphlets. The one that takes the most original approach to reimaging the essay form, among those I received, bore a name unfamiliar to me: Sergio Chejfec. He turns out to be an Argentine novelist living in New York. Notes Toward a Pamphlet is at once an essay and a work of fiction, perhaps in the tradition of Jorge Luis Borges (though the ruminative tone of Chefjec’s prose is dissimilar). Consisting of an eleven-page Introduction, thirty-three pages of Notes, and a one-page Coda, it is a commentary on the life and work of an eccentric Argentine poet of the twentieth century, a certain Samich, who, if you google him, turns out to have been the protagonist of Chejfec’s untranslated 1990 novel Moral—or rather, as it’s been described, an “antinovel” that “defies being read as one is accustomed to reading a narrative”; “the basis of Chefjec’s novel” being (according to a reference work on Jewish Writers of Latin America) “the sensation of recursive digressions that provide a cumulative mosaic of pointlessness.” That sounds less like the description of a real novel than of the kind of novel a Latin American novelist would imagine one of his characters writing, so even without being able to read Moral—I have no Spanish—I already feel caught in its iterative coils. And besides, who could prove that Samich never existed, since his work, immune to the press, remains “stored in boxes few know about and that for years no one has opened?” Samich, known in his time only to “his small and vague group of close friends and admirers,” seems to be the secret double of almost any poet, the poet one would be if one were truly as dislocated in life as one is in the secret heart of the poem that is forever unknowable even or especially to oneself, which might be the fiction that poetry operates not through the empirical act of reading and writing, let alone publication, but by osmosis or, as Chefjec puts it, “irradiation.” Of course, the public and declarative nature of the pamphlet as a genre is entirely alien to everything Samich represents, which is probably why Chefjec has written, not a pamphlet as such, but merely notes toward a pamphlet that does not exist. His straightfaced explication of this tragicomic condition “allows Samich to be seen as a shadow in the middle of his pensive laboring, hunched over some papers spread across the bed,” with irony and sympathy.
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Sergio Chejfec, Notes Toward a Pamphlet (2020), translated by Whitney DeVos, is published by Ugly Duckling Presse.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.