Sur(rendering)

Mario Martín Gijón’s (Sur)rendering is a sequence of short pas-sionate lyrics describing a love lost and found. This might sound like nothing new in the history of poetry, but the poet immerses us in his story by a complex process of linguistic recreation: recreation in the sense of re-invention and recreation also as play, or playfulness.         Eduardo Moga explains his method: ‘The poetry of Mario Martín Gijón is characterised by a morphological promiscuity which springs from an intense awareness of the susceptibility of language to experiment. Words become lexical clay in the hands of the poet, or articulated entities into which other words may be telescoped. Words break, unscrew, crumble onto the page like sand. They are like scattered pieces of a mosaic reassembled to form a new puzzle. This is done by the insertion of brackets around letters, slashes allowing a choice between letters, dashes severing or connecting syllables, suffixes or prefixes belonging equally to the words surrounding them. It multiplies the ways in which a phrase can be read, multiplies its potential simultaneous meanings.” So the poet is able to juggle the memory of pleasure with present suffering, joy and pain in a single verse: (pre/es/ab)sence. Ambiguity striving for synchronicity, the language of love becoming as fraught with contradiction as love itself.

Mario Martín Gijón was born in Villanueva de la Serena, Spain, in 1979. He holds a doctorate in Hispanic Philology from the University of Extremadura. He has taught at the universities of Marburg (Germany) y Brno (Czech Republic). Since 2010 he has been a lecturer in the Teacher Training department of the University of Extremadura, Cáceres. His essays have received a number of awards including the Gerardo Diego Prize for literary research, 2009, the Amado Alonso Prize for literary criticism, 2012, as well as the Arturo Barea Prize 2013). He has published the novel Un día en la vida del inmortal Mathieu (2013) y two collections of poetry: Latidos y desplantes (2011) and Rendición (2012). Terence Dooley has recently put the finishing touches to an anthology of contemporary Spanish women poets for Shearsman. Previous translations include The Year of the Crab by Mariano Peyrou, Selected Poems by Eduardo Moga and Streets Where to Walk Is to Embark, an anthology of exiled (or expatriate) Spanish poets in London from 1811 to the present day.