Poetry review – DIS(ILLUSION): Ian Pople explores the complexities of Mario Martín Gijón’s distinctive poetic style
Dis(illusion)
Mario Martín Gijón
translated byTerence Dooley
Shearsman
ISBN 9781837380220
£12.95
This is Mario Martín Gijón’s second volume from Shearsman; the first being Sur(rendering) published in 2020. As we can see straight away from the titles of both these books, Martín Gijón’s poetics include what Eduardo Moga calls on the back cover blurb, ‘morphological promiscuity.’ This ‘promiscuity’ includes the brackets involved in both book titles, but such promiscuity also includes the use of italics, obliques, square brackets and other typological devices to shift and even dismember words. Here, I am including both the original and Terence Dooley’s ‘translation,’
petición
olvid[da]dme
con vuestro olvid(o/e)
mayor vida
. bre
. ve[o]
más c[l]ara y sin cera
petition
for get me
. out of your life
for give me
with your for getting
more life
. open/brief I see
(d/cl)earer sincerer
The obvious thing here, even to a non-Spanish speaker as I am, is that Terence Dooley’s ‘translation’ does not attempt an equivalence to Martín Gijón’s original. On the one hand, it is entirely possible that such equivalence is simply not possible. To return to Moga’s declaration of ‘morphological promiscuity,’ it must be clear to anyone witnessing the difference between one language and another that the morphological construction of one language and another is simply not equivalent. Hnce, the ‘translation’ that I have put in scare quotes is not a translation in the pure sense of the word. Such a ‘translation’ is a rendering into English of some of the impulses that drive Martín Gijón’s approach to poetry. And thus, Terence Dooley is almost as much of the author of these English versions as Martín Gijón is the originals. Thus, Dooley is involved in a complex of renderings. The first of these is what we might call the surface ‘promiscuity’ of the texts; those typological devices that Martín Gijón uses to create that promiscuity. But Martín Gijón is using those devices to affect meanings. And this, too, has its own complexity; the meanings are affected on the morphological level. In the case of the titles, we can see that the initial morphemes are separated from the ‘meanings’ of the stems. Here, it is the stem that is bracketed off, so it is almost as though the initial morpheme becomes the important part of the work. The meanings of ‘illusion’ and ‘rendering’ are held away inside the brackets. The reader’s sense of what a word may ordinarily ‘signify’ is disturbed into a new hierarchy.
Martín Gijón is not afraid, either, to use French and German in the writing and sometimes Terence Dooley is content to leave those languages in the original. In the case of Eliot’s famous ‘borrowing’ from Baudelaire, ‘mon semblable, mon frère,’ the reader may not need a translation. However, occasionally, it may not be clear quite what Martín Gijón’s or Dooley’s intentions are.
In addition, Dooley becomes a co-author in the sense that he is ‘rendering’ the ‘meaning’ of the text/poem. In ‘petition’, there is a first person and a second person. The first person issues a series of disrupted imperatives. And, not only that, the imperatives become entangled with the rather large object of the ‘life’ of the ‘you’; ‘your life.’ The first person, too, wants to get inside the mind of the second person, and this is, perhaps, where the broken nature of ‘for get me,’ becomes relevant. The ‘for’ in the English might be a substitute infinitive of purpose ‘in order to’ i.e., ‘in order to get me out of your life.’ That meaning becomes more available below with the phrase ‘with your for getting / more life.’ At the end of ‘petition,’ the emotion of the poem is rendered more explicit, the narrator seeing ‘open’ly, perhaps; the last line offering a kind of rest within its own disruptions.
It is clear that much of the volume is about the loss of love, the loss of a relationship, perhaps. In the case of ‘da(i)re’ which uses the Eliot/Baudelaire quotation mentioned above, Martín Gijón writes,
Air
. (dis)sections
of me
say them
in the format
of letters
piercing me
. whoever
may
The reader here appears to be overhearing the kind of accusations that lovers may exchange. The implicit ‘you’ here is seen as airing these ‘(dis)sections’ of the narrator in letters that pierce. In this context, the word ‘letters’ has its own ambiguity; not only the letter of the postal service but also in the letters which comprise the text and the language. And Terence Dooley chooses to make the emotion absolutely explicit with the word ‘piercing.’
There is much to admire in this book. In another cover note, Ian Seed comments that the approach ‘harks back to the Cubists.’ The Cubists had the advantage that there subjects they were depicting were reified and stabilized in paint even in the moment that the painter was fracturing the perspective of the view. Martín Gijón’s poetry attempts to look at, in particular, a set of emotions and relations not only between the subject and the object, but also, as Fiona Sampson comments, ‘the way his own consciousness is fractured.’ Martín Gijón’s poetics show the way that language gives way in the welter of emotion, the signifier not only split from the signified but also fracturing in the moment it attempts to signify. And Terence Dooley is to be much applauded for making all of this so alive in English.
May 5 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Mario Martín Gijón
Poetry review – DIS(ILLUSION): Ian Pople explores the complexities of Mario Martín Gijón’s distinctive poetic style
Dis(illusion)
Mario Martín Gijón
translated byTerence Dooley
Shearsman
ISBN 9781837380220
£12.95
This is Mario Martín Gijón’s second volume from Shearsman; the first being Sur(rendering) published in 2020. As we can see straight away from the titles of both these books, Martín Gijón’s poetics include what Eduardo Moga calls on the back cover blurb, ‘morphological promiscuity.’ This ‘promiscuity’ includes the brackets involved in both book titles, but such promiscuity also includes the use of italics, obliques, square brackets and other typological devices to shift and even dismember words. Here, I am including both the original and Terence Dooley’s ‘translation,’
petición
olvid[da]dme
con vuestro olvid(o/e)
mayor vida
. bre
. ve[o]
más c[l]ara y sin cera
petition
for get me
. out of your life
for give me
with your for getting
more life
. open/brief I see
(d/cl)earer sincerer
The obvious thing here, even to a non-Spanish speaker as I am, is that Terence Dooley’s ‘translation’ does not attempt an equivalence to Martín Gijón’s original. On the one hand, it is entirely possible that such equivalence is simply not possible. To return to Moga’s declaration of ‘morphological promiscuity,’ it must be clear to anyone witnessing the difference between one language and another that the morphological construction of one language and another is simply not equivalent. Hnce, the ‘translation’ that I have put in scare quotes is not a translation in the pure sense of the word. Such a ‘translation’ is a rendering into English of some of the impulses that drive Martín Gijón’s approach to poetry. And thus, Terence Dooley is almost as much of the author of these English versions as Martín Gijón is the originals. Thus, Dooley is involved in a complex of renderings. The first of these is what we might call the surface ‘promiscuity’ of the texts; those typological devices that Martín Gijón uses to create that promiscuity. But Martín Gijón is using those devices to affect meanings. And this, too, has its own complexity; the meanings are affected on the morphological level. In the case of the titles, we can see that the initial morphemes are separated from the ‘meanings’ of the stems. Here, it is the stem that is bracketed off, so it is almost as though the initial morpheme becomes the important part of the work. The meanings of ‘illusion’ and ‘rendering’ are held away inside the brackets. The reader’s sense of what a word may ordinarily ‘signify’ is disturbed into a new hierarchy.
Martín Gijón is not afraid, either, to use French and German in the writing and sometimes Terence Dooley is content to leave those languages in the original. In the case of Eliot’s famous ‘borrowing’ from Baudelaire, ‘mon semblable, mon frère,’ the reader may not need a translation. However, occasionally, it may not be clear quite what Martín Gijón’s or Dooley’s intentions are.
In addition, Dooley becomes a co-author in the sense that he is ‘rendering’ the ‘meaning’ of the text/poem. In ‘petition’, there is a first person and a second person. The first person issues a series of disrupted imperatives. And, not only that, the imperatives become entangled with the rather large object of the ‘life’ of the ‘you’; ‘your life.’ The first person, too, wants to get inside the mind of the second person, and this is, perhaps, where the broken nature of ‘for get me,’ becomes relevant. The ‘for’ in the English might be a substitute infinitive of purpose ‘in order to’ i.e., ‘in order to get me out of your life.’ That meaning becomes more available below with the phrase ‘with your for getting / more life.’ At the end of ‘petition,’ the emotion of the poem is rendered more explicit, the narrator seeing ‘open’ly, perhaps; the last line offering a kind of rest within its own disruptions.
It is clear that much of the volume is about the loss of love, the loss of a relationship, perhaps. In the case of ‘da(i)re’ which uses the Eliot/Baudelaire quotation mentioned above, Martín Gijón writes,
Air
. (dis)sections
of me
say them
in the format
of letters
piercing me
. whoever
may
The reader here appears to be overhearing the kind of accusations that lovers may exchange. The implicit ‘you’ here is seen as airing these ‘(dis)sections’ of the narrator in letters that pierce. In this context, the word ‘letters’ has its own ambiguity; not only the letter of the postal service but also in the letters which comprise the text and the language. And Terence Dooley chooses to make the emotion absolutely explicit with the word ‘piercing.’
There is much to admire in this book. In another cover note, Ian Seed comments that the approach ‘harks back to the Cubists.’ The Cubists had the advantage that there subjects they were depicting were reified and stabilized in paint even in the moment that the painter was fracturing the perspective of the view. Martín Gijón’s poetry attempts to look at, in particular, a set of emotions and relations not only between the subject and the object, but also, as Fiona Sampson comments, ‘the way his own consciousness is fractured.’ Martín Gijón’s poetics show the way that language gives way in the welter of emotion, the signifier not only split from the signified but also fracturing in the moment it attempts to signify. And Terence Dooley is to be much applauded for making all of this so alive in English.