Sebald Dictionary
09 .03 .2015 - Jorge Carrión & Mario Hinojos
“When will books be written like catalogues?” was Walter Benjamin asking himself in One Way Street. Surely the two eccentric French copyists Bouvard and Pécuchet, brought to life by Flaubert to gather the knowledge of the World, would have agreed.
Beyond the confusion between symbol and reality that both characters are thrown into, it seams symptomatic of our time to have the ambition to gather disparate ideas under a capricious or literary unifying criterion. It has been called “Archive Fever”, this craze of modern society for filing, recording, archiving and documenting facts. According to this sensitivity which, among other things, is completely SEBALDIAN, we have taken on the task of composing our own dictionary. We do this by gathering almost thirty voices scattered around the world, who share the practice of the Spanish language; a profound literary vocation; and the recognition of the project by the German writer W.G. Sebald as a pillar of prose and contemporary creation. Narrators, essayists, writers, artists and readers in general, gather in small micro-videos, which serve at the same time as dictionary entries, a compendium of concepts that in their understanding best define the sebaldian galaxy, and at the same time are more attuned to their own work and interests. “Whoever writes something should be, in the most literal sense, an archivist, a scribe whose work does not consist in recreating a vanished world, but rather in joining their traces, their remains, ruins […]” wrote Danilo Kiš in his Encyclopedia of the dead, and we follow suite, eager to implement our own archival impulse, and convinced that these whimsical, personal, subjective, incomplete files will be the best excuse to approach the work of the author of Vertigo and The Emigrants.
[Translation: Gigi Guizzo]
Concepts published:
01- (K) Korsacov. Juan Gabriel Vásquez, writer [Colombia]
02- (R) Requiem. Edgardo Cozarinsky, writer [Argentina]
03- (U) Uncertainty. Laureano Debat, journalist [Argentina]
04- (P) Privation. Oliverio Coelho, writer [Argentina]
05- (D) Destruction. Meruane Lina, author [Chile]
06- (S) Sebaldian. Agustín Fernández Mallo, writer [Spain]
07- (F) Fiction. Juan Trejo, writer [Spain]
08- (H) Homeland. Albinson Linares, journalist [Venezuela]
09- (N) Noise. Sergio Chejfec, writer [Argentina]
10- (D) Dictionary. Andrea Jeftanovic, writer [Chile]
11- (W) Walk. Marc Caellas, writer and director [Spain]
You can see all concepts refer here [Content available only in Spanish and English]
