With Alejandro Zambra and Ana Martins Marques
Host: Rita Palmeira, literary critic, editor and literary curator
Two early books by the renowned Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra have plants as their fictional catalysts: Bonsai and The Private Life of Trees. In both works, vegetables metaphorically intertwine with relationship stories, which also tell about Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. In his latest book, Chilean Poet, Zambra makes a comeback to his writing’s highlighting themes, including the vegetal metaphor and a map of all the aloe planted in the Maipú neighborhood in Santiago. Ana Martins Marques has distinguished herself as the author of some of the most beautiful poems involving plants in contemporary Brazilian poetry. One of her titles explicitly refers to this theme: O livro dos jardins [The Book of Gardens], divided into two parts. In part I, the texts describe and poetically reflect on cactus, dandelion, rose and sunflower, among other subjects. Part II offers “textual gardens” to female poets, such as Brazilian Orides Fontela, North American Sylvia Plath and Polish Wislawa Szymborska. In the literatures of Zambra and Marques, listening to the green becomes a politically existential urgency.