Commonplace

Hugo García Manríquez’s Commonplace, originally published in Spanish as Lo Común, erases and rearranges an increasingly militarized and nationalized Mexico City. Eight long poems gather fractal impressions of a city, listing military budget statistics, imperiled animal species, and various types of guns imported into Mexico from corporations in the United States and Western Europe. A central preoccupation of this book is the city’s Palacio de Bellas Artes and its architecture; García Manríquez names the European architects and sculptors whose work enshrines colonial histories, and the poems respond by fashioning unrealities around and of the space’s “lateral facades.” The Palacio’s famed crystal ceiling depicting Olympus and nine muses surrounding Apollo, for example, is portrayed in nightmarish terms, “encircled / by the importation of arms,” by “212,208 SEDENA troops” and “18 EC725 / Super Cougar helicopters.” All art, we learn, is “of the Mexican army,” including the Palacio and its parts, and time itself is “sculpted by a series / of semiautomatic weapons.”

This bilingual edition is the first volume translated by NAFTA (the North American Free Translation Agreement/No America Fraught Translation Argument), a translation collective that is deeply engaged with García Manríquez’s work and whose name recalls the author’s first book, a bilingual erasure of the text of the 1994 NAFTA agreement called ANTI-HUMBOLDT. 

In Commonplace, García Manríquez records the collapse “of a previous order,” “of abstraction,” “of 27 columns,” and of “a list that collapses onto the forms of life / that collapses on a floating platform / of 221 animals on the brink of extinction.” Through repetitions and disintegrations, these recursive poems attempt an original form in which inventory serves as anti-narrative, a willing witness to the collapse of the city’s very architecture.