The Month of the Flies by Sergio Chejfec (Ugly Duckling Presse)

Translated by Silvina López Medin & Rebekah Smith

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.

“I can’t help but love this circuitous, buzzing, knowing/unknowing book.”

—Jen Bervin

“A fascinating book of experimental qualities exploring the limits of language and human existence.”

—Leo Boix, The Morning Star

“These scribblings of eerie beauty haunt and birth the “sequel” of Chejfec, his grappling with the question of the opaque relationships between the two texts. In this tour, many imaginaries arise that activate the graphisms. The graphisms are an island, they are singing, they are tangling, they are cracking. Like musical notation, the poems and the graphisms hold time and are read spatially.”

—Noa Mendoza, The Poetry Project Newsletter