The Month of the Flies is Sergio Chejfec’s response to Mirtha Dermisache’s Book N ° 8: 1970. Here Dermisache’s book functions as the “original” from which Sergio Chejfec’s poetic text takes shape. Chejfec’s lines are dynamic, occupying the same space as each of Dermisache’s lines, as if using language to approach her visual frequencies. The spreads appear to establish a relationship of original and “translation,” but the project pushes against this reading, exposing the cracks in the legibility of such a “translation,” which, in its relation to Dernisache’s own “illegible writing,” could in fact be nearly anything else. This text, Chefjec writes, is something of an “arbitrary sequel” to a text which “both demands to be read, yet remains silent.
The Month of the Flies
Mirtha Dermisache
Sergio Chejfec
Translated by Rebekah Smith, Silvina López Medin
November 2024
About the Authors
Mirtha Dermisache was born in Buenos Aires in 1940. She studied visual arts at the Manuel Belgrano and Prilidiano Pueyrredón National School of Fine Arts. In 1967 she finished her first 500-page book after which she continued with the development of her graphisms. Her works were published between 1970 and 1978 by the Center for Art and Communication, led by Jorge Glusberg. In the 1970s her graphisms were published by Marc Dachy and Guy Schraenen in Antwerp as well as in the magazines Flash Art, Doc(k)s, Kontext, Ephemera, and Ax. Her work was exhibited by Ulises Carrión in the gallery Other books and So (Amsterdam), and by Roberto Altmann in the Malmö Konsthall (Sweden). During this same time she created the Workshop of Creative Actions in Buenos Aires. In 2004 with Florent Fajole, Dermisache carried out a series of publishing devices that explore the dimensions of installation and printing processes, highlighting different conceptual aspects of publications in the same spatial reality. Her first solo show in Buenos Aires was presented by The Edge, followed by exhibitions of her work at the MACBA (Barcelona) and the Center Pompidou (Paris).
Sergio Chejfec (1968-2022), originally from Argentina, published numerous works of fiction, poetry, and essays. His novels translated into English: My Two Worlds (Open Letter); The Dark (2012, Open Letter); The Planets (Open Letter, a finalist for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award), Baroni: A Journey (Almost Island); and The Incompletes (Open Letter). Some of his short stories and essays in translation can be read at Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Music & Literature, and elsewhere. Sergio was a fiction writer and essayist. Between 1990 and 2005 he lived in Caracas. He was writer in Residence in the MFA Creative Writing program in Spanish at New York University at the time of his death. He has been translated into English, French, Portuguese, German, Turkish and Hebrew. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Resident of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
Praise
Praise for Previous Work
In Notes Toward a Pamphlet, a world of endless digressions is the real discovery, a space where unknown perceptions and experiences can take place. This understanding of the alveolar, the digressive and the non-linear, I believe, is not separate from the cultural history and space that Chejfec came from, one where perhaps the fixity of the linear and its hierarchies have created unending anguish.
Sharmistha Mohanty
I can’t help but love this circuitous, buzzing, knowing/unknowing book.
Jen Bervin
About the Translators
Rebekah Smith is a writer, editor, and translator.
Silvina López Medin was born in Buenos Aires and lives in New York. Her books of poetry include: La noche de los bueyes (Madrid, 1999), winner of the Loewe Foundation International Young Poetry Prize; Esa sal en la lengua para decir manglar (Buenos Aires, 2014; That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove, tr. Jasmine V. Bailey, Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021); 62 brazadas (Buenos Aires, 2015); and Excursion (Buenos Aires; Oversound Chapbook Prize, 2020). Her hybrid poetry book Poem That Never Ends won the Essay Press Contest and is forthcoming in 2021. Her play Exactamente bajo el sol (staged at Teatro del Pueblo, 2008) was granted the Plays Third Prize by the Argentine Institute of Theatre. She co-translated Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet (2015) and Home Movies (2016), by Robert Hass, into Spanish. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, Hyperallergic, Brooklyn Rail, and MoMA/post, among other publications.
Links
Publication Details
Chapbook
Saddle-stitched. 48 pp, 6 x 8 in
Publication Date: November 15 2024
Distribution: Asterism Books, Inpress Books (UK)