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OS DIÁRIOS DE LLANSOL
EDIÇÃO AMERICANA
Acaba de sair em livro (a versão e-book já estava disponível antes) mais uma edição de Maria Gabriela Llansol em inglês: A Thousand Thoughts in Flight (Editora Deep Vellum, Dallas-Texas), que reune os três diários publicados em vida pela Autora (Um Falcão no Punho, Finita e Inquérito às Quatro Confidências), uma nova tradução de Audrey Young, que já traduziu para a mesma editora a primeira trilogia, The Geography of Rebels, saído em 2018.
[A edição está disponível no site da editora (store.deepvellum.org), da Amazon e da Bookshop].
Esta edição dos Diários é acompanhada por um texto de João Barrento sobre a escrita do Diário em Llansol, que aqui se deixa na versão agora publicada:
LLANSOL: THE UNENDING DIARY
A reflection on the practice and place of Maria Gabriela Llansol’s diary writing—the nature, structure, and content of her diaries, as well as their connection with the rest of her work—inevitably leads to something like a general theory of Llansol’s writing. It is often thought that the diaries might be a good entry point into her work, and for more than one reason. Indeed, the pieces published here are not substantially different from much of the rest of her work and the distinctive hybridity of her writing. Her diaries (a microcosm of her entire body of work) give us immediate access to the modes of writing specific to that work. And as we know so well today, all of Llansol’s works originated in the uninterrupted diaries that are her writing notebooks, which are thus conceived as part of a sequence that she herself saw as a single, uninterrupted book.
But in order to truly understand this aspect of her writing, it is essential to identify what may be a paradox, one I will endeavor to elucidate as I proceed: although Llansol was a writer who kept diaries, her writing is not “diary writing” in the most conventional sense of the term and “genre.” The diaries published during her lifetime—the three you find here—are never simply circumstantial accounts; they were osmotic diaries: their genesis, their development, and their final form are inseparable from Llansol’s other books, which always accompany them and are interwoven with them. And this osmosis becomes even more apparent in the posthumous diaries now being published in Portuguese—the “Books of Hours”—in which the great constellations of her work are all present. The handwritten notebooks where everything is conceived indeed form a rhizomatic network of boundless entries, from the reflective to the informative, from the introspective to the critical, from the contemplative to the ironic, from the properly “diaristic” to the fictional, from simple lists to records of dreams, all of which are present in them since the late 1960s. The handwritten notebook thus becomes the true seminal place and the original chaos out of which emerges all of Llansol’s writing, her thinking, the ethics and aesthetics that inform this work, often in its final form. When speaking about this unending diary that is her day-to-day writing in the notebooks—singular and diverse and with no immediate purpose—Llansol often mentions that it is a question of privileging the compulsion to write and the unpredictable outcome of the transit from notebook to book, along pathways that the published diaries allow us to better understand.
The decision to “create readable volumes” out of the diaries using her handwritten, numbered and dated notebooks, which since 1974 accompanied the passing of her days and the genesis of her books in a disparate but insistent way, emerged during the final phase of her twenty-year exile in Belgium. But the writing in these notebooks (like that in the three diaries presented here) was never undertaken by Llansol in a systematic way or with any definite purpose, apart from certain stages during the intense preparation of specific books, when there is a greater degree of discipline in the diary entries, and even a rigorous planning of the structure of the work—although it is never seen as definitive, as is evident from the titles, which frequently change. The inherently fragmentary, non-narrative, and non-sequential nature of this writing means that there are no essential differences between the “storehouse”—impressions, images, visions, readings—of the notebooks and the rhizome of the books. Her writing is singular and diverse, a way of “absorbing the experience of time,” of all the times, tonalities, and gradations of the boundless experience of an author with multiple registers, ever-mutating, always different, and yet very similar.
But what exactly is a diary by Llansol, a diary for Llansol? In the first posthumous Book of Hours, we come across a striking sentence: “Good writers keep bad diaries.” The distinction drawn is between “writing well” and not wanting to write “well,” the decision to write outside the norm, as is the case with Llansol when she arrives at the great inflection point in her writing: between orderly, defensive writing and a writing that takes risks; and it can also mean contrasting the “writer” (author[ity]) with someone who simply writes (the “writing being”), transforming body and world into writing as the days elapse—this is the diary for Llansol, day-to-day writing, not necessarily following the most common rules of the diary genre. Writing seen as “the double of living,” always more attentive to the “folds of the world” than to the circumstances of the days, which can transport us into a bright, fragrant, musical atmosphere, as well as a dark, heavy or acrid one—but never into an artificial space. The function of the diary for Llansol is thus to be a mirror of the fragmentary dynamism of the world and of the “I” (as in any of her books). Of the world refracted through the filter of an “I,” of course, but an “I” that prefers to become a we, to shift into the third person, to become impersonal, clearing away the excess of oneself, even when saying “I.” Because “a diary can be more objective than a personal life.”
In its unstable and hybrid typology, in its polyphony of voices, the diary for Llansol is neither a circumstantial account, nor an archive of memories, nor (merely) a writing workshop or a breviary of reflections—it is all of these things, just as it is pure autobiography with a total rejection of the autobiographical. Because the “I” that speaks always does so in the name of “an absolute and subjectless speaking” (as the great essayist Eduardo Lourenço once wrote).
The gaze upon the world—the small and the large, the inner and the outer, the visible and the invisible—of someone who writes in this way, explains the paradoxical statement above: Llansol is not a writer of diaries, yet she did nothing else all her life other than write a diary! It is the gaze of someone who, by immersing herself in the most enigmatic and incandescent aspects of the everyday, knows that this everyday—one of common experiences, of reading, of small and large gestures and epiphanies—can transport us outside the narrowest orbit of existence. It is the “dog’s eye” that Llansol speaks of in Inquiry into the Four Confidences, which, as has been said, is a gaze “that seeks the light which emerges somewhere between the ethics of responsibility, the uncompromising pursuit of beauty, and the soaring, just expression.” There it is: the perfect radiographic image of Maria Gabriela Llansol’s singular and unending diary-book.
