Visible Text Image 6 Calico

Brimming with enigmatic photographs, future memes, and mud drawings, Visible showcases six genre-defying works from around the world that raise questions about the relationship between how we see, how we read, and how we write in “the age of the calligram.” In a rewrite of René Magritte’s “Les mots et les images,” Verónica Gerber Bicecci (translated by Christina MacSweeney) considers “images that think” and the internet. Marie NDiaye’s “Step of a Feral Cat,” translated by Victoria Baena, follows an academic, inspired by a portrait of an entertainer, as she walks the slippery space between literary ambition and exploitation. Monika Sznajderman (translated by Scotia Gilroy) assembles a fractured family history through photographs of a time she can never possibly know: “the pre-Holocaust world.” Focusing on those whose stories have yet to be told—the black Cuban singer Maria Martinez, a Polish family murdered in World War II, workers at a noodle shop in Busan, and the tallest man in recorded history—Visible asks us to interrogate the thin traces of shifting meaning we find in and between words and images, and how we can change that meaning for the future.

Marie NDiaye as born in 1976 in Pithiviers, France. She is the author of around twenty novels, plays, collections of stories, and nonfiction books, which have been translated into numerous languages. She’s received the Prix Femina and the Prix Goncourt, France’s highest literary honor, and her plays are in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française. She lives in France.

Victoria Baena  is a PhD candidate in comparative literature at Yale University. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Diacritics, and elsewhere. Her academic research focuses on the modern novel and narrative theory, with an eye to questions of gender, class, and empire across the Atlantic. She has also taught courses on translation and on literature and revolution at Yale College, Bard Microcollege at Brooklyn Public Library, and the Yale Prison Education Initiative. Victoria lives in Connecticut.

Verónica Gerber Bicecci  is a visual artist who writes. Her work has been exhibited internationally and she has published several books, including Conjunto vacío, which was awarded the 3rd International Aura Estrada Literature Prize. She also curated a selection of artworks from La Caixa Collection, exhibited in Whitechapel Gallery, London in 2020. She presently lives and teaches in Mexico City at the SOMA art program, a space dedicated to cultural and artistic exchange.

Christina MacSweeney  received the 2016 Valle Inclán prize for her translation of Valeria Luiselli's The Story of My Teeth, and Among Strange Victims by Daniel Saldaña París was a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award. Among the other authors she has translated are: Elvira Navarro (A Working Woman, Rabbit Island), Verónica Gerber Bicecci (Empty Set, Palabras migrantes/Migrant Words), and Julián Herbert (Tomb Song, The House of the Pain of Others). She lives in the UK.

Yi SangWoo  (b. 1988) made his debut when he was awarded the 2011 Munhakdongne New Writer in Fiction Prize. His stories have been collected in ??? [Prism] (Munhakdongne, 2015) and warp (Workroom Press, 2017). His most recent book ? ??? ??? [Two people walk by] (Moonji, 2020) collects interlinked stories together into a long form and reflects his ongoing interest in exploring the visual, aural, and formal facets of the story and the book. He lives in Berlin, Germany.

Emily Yae Won  is a literary and art translator working in Korean and in English. Recent translations include Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, Jennifer Croft’s Homesick, Han Junghyun's Kyoko and Kyoji, Hwang Jungeun’s DD’s Umbrella (forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press, 2023), Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living, Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, and stories by Han Kang, Pak Kyongni, and Yi SangWoo.

Rodrigo Flores Sánchez  (Mexico City, 1977) is a poet interested in experimentation, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary inquiry. He is the author of five poetry collections: Ventana cerrada (2020), Tianguis (2013), Zalagarda (2011), estimado cliente (2005 and 2007), and baterías (2006). He and Dolores Dorantes co-wrote Intervenir/Intervene (Ugly Duckling Presse, translated by Jen Hofer). His poems were collected in the two-author volume Flores + Espina alongside the work of Uruguayan poet Eduardo Espina. He lives in Mexico City.

Robin Myers  is a Mexico City-based translator and poet. Recent book-length translations include Copy by Dolores Dorantes (Wave Books), The Dream of Every Cell by Maricela Guerrero (Cardboard House Press), Tonight: ^The Great Earthquake by Leonardo Teja (PANK Books), The Book of Explanations by Tedi López Mills (Deep Vellum Publishing), The Science of Departures by Adalber Salas Hernández (Kenning Editions), and Another Life by Daniel Lipara (Eulalia Books). She lives in Mexico City.

Monika Sznajderman  has been the head of Czarne, Poland’s leading publisher of literary non-fiction, since 1996. She is a cultural anthropologist, author, and editor of numerous works of cultural criticism. Her father, Marek Sznajderman (whose story, among others, is told in The Pepper Forgers) was a renowned cardiologist, and her grandfather (also in the book) was a renowned neurologist. Her husband is Andrzej Stasiuk, one of Poland’s best-known writers of fiction and literary journalism. Monika lives in Poland.

Scotia Gilroy  is a literary translator from Vancouver, Canada, now based in Kraków, Poland. She studied English literature at Simon Fraser University and Polish language and literature at the Jagiellonian University’s Centre for Polish Language and Culture. She was a mentee in the National Centre for Writing’s Emerging Translator Mentorship in Norwich, England, in 2016/2017. Her translations have been published by Panel Magazine, Widma, Asymptote, Tablet, Brill, Terra Librorum, Comma Press and Indiana University Press. Scotia lives in Krakow, Poland.

Monchoachi  was born in 1946, in Martinique. His writing is marked by the astonishing character of the Creole language, a language rich in its very poverty, having preserved a speech unaltered by Western rationality, which is reflected in particular in its articulations and the constant play that inhabits it with the invisible. There he finds a resource from which to draw what the word as such has to say about our relation to the world, obstructed and deafened by its present course. Following a period of bilingual publication, Monchoachi transported Creole into the body of a writing that presents itself with a French surface, and there makes its own mark. Monchoachi lives in Martinique.

Eric Fishman  is an educator, writer, and translator. His most recent translation is Outside: Poetry and Prose by André du Bouchet (Bitter Oleander Press). He is currently translating a selected volume of poetry by Monchoachi. Eric is also a founding editor of Young Radish, a magazine of poetry and art by kids and teens. He lives in Boston, MA.

David Damoison  is a Martinican photographer based in France.

South African  Dineo Seshee Bopape is a Polokwane-born multidisciplinary artist who combines a myriad of mediums using sounds, videos, and organic elements. Bopape’s material and immaterial objects engulf the audience and attempt to understand the world and its narratives. Influenced by literature, thinkers, TV, books, music, popular culture, and recordings, Bopape creates experimental and playful video works and sculptural installations that reflect various aspects of culture. She finds inspiration in the metaphysical, spiritual, and cultural aspects of the earth—soil, clay, dust—which she reconstitutes as artistic forms that gently let the audience mediate and make their own interpretations. She lives in Highlands, South Africa.

Sarah Coolidge is the editor of the Calico Series from Two Lines Press. She lives in Oakland, CA.