Miquel, Dolors / Bush, Peter (tr.): El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove

Tenement Press, paperback

Translated by: Peter Bush

Publication Date: June 7th, 2023

Publisher Marketing: **In a first-time English language translation by Peter Bush, Tenement Press presents a bilingual edition of Miquel's seminal collection, awarded the Ausiàs March de Gandia 2016. For an excerpt from the collection published in Granta, see here.** Life asked Death why he needed her to live / And Death asked Life why she needed him to die … So begins Miquel's El guant de plàstic rosa / The Pink Plastic Glove, a lyrical, acute, and metaphysical sequence of poems some fifteen years in the making. At the heart of Miquel's collection, we've a central image. An unnamed man in a state of constant decomposition, rotting away in the kitchen sink. Piece by piece, his slow unbinding underpins a train of images wrought in sensuous, playful, and dynamic language. Stark vignettes spun from everyday colloquy—run through with the aura of Catalonian Renaissance writings—and gilded with a patina of light, a glut of shadow, and a blur of sensory experiences. El guant de plàstic rosa houses 36 studies of the dynamics of decay. The purr and buzz of bees humming, off-stage asides, slaughtered cows, mountains made of olive stones, the hum of a permanently empty refrigerator, and edible dreams littered with dahlias and roses, with carnations and colourful chrysanthemums. Here, sex rattles the bones; Miquel's pages percolate with love, with life—the subjectivist and social connotations of disease and decay—and on the prospect of mass destruction in a world itself on the brink of a self-inflicted extinction. In Bush's visceral new translation, this chaos of signifiers sing-speaks its way through the undying days of a century beyond its "sell-by," and cogitates on life—so furnished with all its illusions and ironies—in an age consistently defined by its constant decline. Bush's translation is punctuated by photographs by Barcelona based artist and photographer, Helena Gomà. Dolors Miquel (Lleida, 18 July 1960) is a leading Catalan poet. From an early age, her distinct and critical voice—as evidenced in her writing for the page and the stage—upset many in her provincial birthplace. Expelled from a school run by nuns, Miquel studied in Barcelona, where she founded the literary magazine La Higiènica and, in the mid-90s, began to publish poems in a variety of styles. In collaboration with other Catalan poets, Miquel would organise week-long tours of small towns (ever keen to perform her works) and her writings—sharp, clear-eyed and ever-political—distill her roving criticality in a poetry that desecrates everything: 'the Church, politics, and, naturally, the male figure' (María Eloy García). In Gitana Roc (Llibres Del Segle, 2000), Miquel would express the core of her work as follows: 'I talk about the damage caused by social structures, such as the family or the police. Love is the most frightening contract of fear, also the most powerful safeguard of society, and sex is the carrot.' This aura of critique defines Miquel's extensive bibliography (with over twenty collections under her name to date), and she has received numerous awards, such as the Rosa Leveroni (1989), Ciutat de Barcelona (2005), Gabriel Ferrater (2006), and Ausiàs March de Gandia (2016). She has published numerous collections, among them La dona que mirava la tele / The woman who watched TV (Edicions 62, 2010) and La flor invisible / The invisible flower (Bromera, 2011). Her latest book, Sutura / Suture (Pagès, 2021) is her final work as a poet; Miquel lives and works in Torredembarra, and continues to publish theatrical texts and other writings. Peter Bush is a translator. His first literary translation was Juan Goytisolo's Forbidden Territory (North Point Press, 1989) and Bush has to date translated eleven other titles in Goytisolo's bibliography, including The Marx Family Saga and Exiled from Almost Everywhere. He has translated many Catalan writers including Josep Pla, Mercè Rodoreda, Joan Sales, Najat El Hachmi and Teresa Solana. His most recent effort is A Film (3000 meters) by Víctor Català, the classic 1919 feminist novel set in Barcelona's criminal underworld. Bush lives and works in Bristol. Praise for The Pink Plastic Glove *The Pink Plastic Glove is language fighting for its life, or more appropriately, for its death. It points to what lies beyond language in a way that opens onto the archaic, and in a way that makes you gasp. Dolors Miquel is the grand disappearer of words, with a style so lucid, and savage, that it makes tangible the invisible behind words and the long blank at the end of meaning without ever losing faith in the power of language to do exactly that. I'm struggling to say exactly what the experience of reading this book feels like, which is exactly the effect of this supremely discomfiting book, to be in the un-worded presence, through words themselves, of the sacred. *The Pink Plastic Glove* is a supreme act of faith and despair.* David Keenan Erotic, caustic, uncompromising, alive… Dolors Miquel's poems are a pulsating delight. Nadia de Vries Dolors Miquel is a blast of fresh water irrigating the stony terrain of Catalan poetry. Francesc Gelonch *One day, when I happened to be holding *The Pink Plastic Glove, my grandmother, who has lived ninety-eight years and is wiser than all the literary critics I have ever known, used the word 'miquel' as a noun: 'Aquell em fot cada miquel!' she said, ('That book gives me such turns!'). It was then I discovered that the word 'miquel,' according to the Institute of Catalan Dictionary, meant 'an unexpected swipe, refusal, reprimand, contempt, scorn, etc. that leaves someone in a bad place, that mortifies and humiliates them.' That lexical find seemed an appropriate way to enter into Miquel's project and measure its tone: fierce, cheeky, firm, spare, bitter … Take, for example, 'Voluptuous Finale' in which the wretched dead man resting on his autopsy bed only craves to be buried 'stark naked with my erect penis marking position 32º latitude North.' That is, even with both feet on the other side, this poor male can't give his testosterone a rest, or free himself from the very heterosexual modus operandi practiced by many men and women who have an allergy to hosting a hint of dissidence between their legs, because Miquel doesn't just hand out gratuitous "miquels" and keep quiet, but calls on women shoring up the patriarchy with their aesthetic and matrimonial submission to savour a spot of disorder. Laura G. Ortensi, La Lectora *The Pink Plastic Glove has a complex architecture that works as a series of interwoven poems, but can also be read as a novella or even as the script for a theatrical drama. In the latter guise, the influences derive above all from classical Greek theatre, in which tragic destiny can never be spared the heroes or heroines of antiquity allowing their audiences to experience catharsis by dint of the public suffering and punishment they receive from the gods. The main god in *The Pink Plastic Glove* is Hades, he of the underworld and death, who hovers over and inside every one of the lines that construct Miquel's narrative; a poetic voice that finds the corpse of a dead man in her sink, the first of many other cadavers to keep appearing.* Jaume C. Pons Alorda, Nació The 36 intense, fierce poems about death, grief, and beauty are connected. In her prologue, a prose-poem in itself, Miquel tells how the death of others close to her left her "a flower without roots" (p.17). She dwelt in "the belly of death" herself. Then she started to cry. "Weeping rents the air. To weep is to come out of the bier" (p. 17). Death and decay, and the fight for life, pervade the book. […] Death dominates with humour (the Psychiatrist for the Dead; a collection service for corpses), enquiry (poems on rubbing and scrubbing and kissing the dead), lyricism (a crow with a worm in its mouth), but most of all with rage. Miquel moves out from her own fight to survive to a poem listing animals made extinct or another recalling the massacres of Cathars and at Nagasaki. […] Miquel loves distorting language, finding double meanings. This makes translation a tough task, but Peter Bush succeeds by translating loosely where necessary, prioritising rhythm and word-play over literal meaning.It's a challenging book, but worth the effort. Michael Eaude, Catalonia Today