Pedro Sobrado
Maria S. Mendes
The experience of interpretation leaves us scarred, wounded. A poem which doesn’t change our gait hasn’t been truly read. The poem does not merely give us its blessing, its solace – it also gives us a good beating. We end up cross-eyed, limping. Sometimes, we are taken to intensive care. We think of reading as amplification, as strengthening to some extent. But actually the best a poem can offer may simply be the impairment of our faculties, even of our potency to explain, because it forces us to face our own failure, because it discloses, before our very eyes, the radical insufficiency of every name. We limp, on our way to reconciliation.
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