Adagio Ma Non Troppo

By Ryoko Sekiguchi and Lindsay Turner

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Translated by Lindsay Turner. Introduction by Sawako Nakayasu. Ryoko Sekiguchi takes the letters Fernando Pessoa wrote his would-be fianc e Ophelia Queiroz as her subject matter in ADAGIO MA NON TROPPO. ADAGIO's 36 prose blocks--appearing in Japanese, French, and English for the first time in the 2018 Les Figues Press trilingual edition (trans. Lindsay Turner)--echo the 36 letters Pessoa addressed to Queiroz dated from March 1, 1920, until January 11, 1930.

Sekiguchi reconceives the Lisbon Pessoa and Queiroz describe in their correspondence as a map over which rendezvous, affairs, and liaisons can be continued through writing. "Written words," she asks, "do they erase themselves? ...] or instead do all words, once read, never disappear?" Sekiguchi superimposes objects over a landscape where names carry shapes, directions, and the places to which they refer. In her Lisbon, a chair slid into daylight or set before a window punctuates time like comma in a sentence. An old couple contemplating ducks indicates a line between two points like a parasol taken from its stand announces a departure. As love establishes boundaries and relationships between people, if our objects convey our love for one another, then Sekiguchi traces the paths and perimeters lovers leave behind.

Originally published in a bilingual edition containing Sekiguchi's self-translation into the French (Le bleu du ciel ditions, 2007), ADAGIO MA NON TROPPO belongs in the same category as the modernist works of Franz Kafka and Pessoa--as well as the recent epistolary work of Marguerite Duras, Roland Barthes, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Maggie Nelson, and Claire-Louise Bennett--writing as a philosophic and aesthetic act that reshapes our notions of time, space, translation, and love.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1934254703
• ISBN13: 9781934254707
• Release Date: September 2018
• Publisher: Les Figues Press
• Length: 110 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.8" x 6.5"