Bye Bye Babel

With its title alone, Patrícia Lavelle's book of poems Bye bye Babel calls to mind two films as iconic for Brazilians as they are for the French: Bye bye Brasil (1979) by Cacá Diegues and Adieu au langage (2014) by Jean-Luc Godard. Each of these films built, in its own time, an image of origin, of diversity, and of decline. The book's title brings to mind the communication breakdown that comes with a loss of meaning. Its initial images lead me to the idea that language has failed and is failing, and that nonetheless, despite it all, it will try not to fail. Going on to read the poems themselves, organized into blocks whose strongest imagery is that of disappearance, another sensation rushes over me. I feel I am faced with poems whose temporality is marked by a metamorphosis that is, simultaneously and paradoxically, both mythological and historical.
-Susana Scramim