Elianna Kan Interviews Cecilia Vicuña for Latest BOMB

Elianna Kan interviews Cecilia Vicuña, who has "always understood art as a form of political resistance, weaving together themes of ecological destruction, female sensuality, human rights, and cultural homogenization," for the newest issue of BOMB, #146. "[W]hat does it mean to see the recently published bilingual edition of your poems?" asks Kan. More:

Cecilia Vicuña  My work is really multilingual, and it includes languages I don’t even know myself—meaning languages I feel. I sense they exist because I hear them as a murmur, a sound, a concept. They’re unknown. They may have existed already, or maybe they will in the future.

I work mostly, of course, in Spanish, my native lung—or tongue. And because I’ve been in the US for so long, there’s English too. Also, I always include the presence of other languages, like Mapudungun, Guarani, Quechua, and Aymara. These come across as containers for a philosophy of how language works. They cannot be translated. So, you will find in my New and Selected Poems [Kelsey Street Press, 2018] many different languages—including Greek, Latin, and other ancient tongues as components of contemporary ones.

EK  What are these philosophies of language evoked or generated by the indigenous languages of South America?

CV  In the West, the idea that only the Greeks had philosophy and that indigenous peoples didn’t (and still don’t) is very prevalent. The philosophy of ancient peoples is always included in the composition of their language—the phrases, syntax, and relationship between what you say and what you don’t. For example, in Quechua there’s such precision to an expression: somebody did something. You have to include in the word whether you heard it, witnessed it, or heard it from someone else who witnessed it, and so forth. There are all these specific determinants. So the fact that such expressions have to be as precise as possible and at the same time suggestive of other dimensions is included in the creation of the language as a masterpiece—an artwork.

Read the full interview at BOMB.