Lenguas vivas
Luis Sagasti
FICTION | 2023 | 160 pages
A hypnotic book that contains a group of minimal stories that are like treasures, depicting known objects described from different perspectives and linked to endearing intimate scenes
How many languages have been registered through the history of humanity? How many different colors are named by those languages? How many verb tenses are used? Do they have an alphabet? How many are living languages today?
Luis Sagasti has put together an unclassifiable and hypnotic book where he tells minimal stories, the kind that leave their mark on time like the songs soldiers from both sides would sing in the trenches of World War I at sunset or the biographies of unknown collaborators of encyclopedias and dictionaries, or the registers of the last speakers of a language, or the frenetic correspondence of translators attempting to translate an English story into Spanish, then back into English and again to Spanish and so on and so forth, infinitely.
They are often stories about known objects described with a different perspective: like a Matisse painting, an Agota Kristof diary entry, a Nick Drake melody. Others are private scenes like the memory of childhood calligraphy, an invented and secret language, or the attempt to recover the sound of the voice of someone who is no longer with us but who we can still hear.
RIGHTS: spanish ETERNA CADENCIA
“Sagasti has made a place for himself in the Hispanic meta-literary tradition.”
“Luis Sagasti and I have such similar interests that I sometimes am afraid that we will end up writing the same book —which wouldn’t be the worst thing, because I love what he does.”
BY LUIS SAGASTI:
Lenguas vivas
FICTION, 2023
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