Matrix Lux

Lila Zemborain

Matrix Lux, this fourth book in the Germinal Texts series, is a bilingual edition of a poem sequence by the Argentine poet Lila Zemborain, translated from the Spanish by her son, Lorenzo Bueno. The Spanish was first published in Zemborain’s collected works, also titled Matrix lux (Bajo la Luna, 2019). Matrix Lux presents an extended meditation on illness, the body, and spirituality, as the author brings us into her solitary daily meditation practice during her cancer diagnosis and treatment. In entering the body, language, and motherhood at an unfettered and cellular level, Matrix Lux wrests itself away from received notions of gender, formulating instead an inter-lingual feminist ecology, a visceral tenderness. Language from healers, doctors, and spiritual guides form a netting through which Zemborain’s verse glides, passing also through the boundaries of the individuated body. An interview with Zemborain and her friend, the poet, translator, and editor Silvina López Medin, contextualizes the book within the poet’s life and oeuvre. The introductory translator’s note is at once a statement about the uncertainty and care work of translation and the mother/son relationship. In 2001, Zemborain published Belladonna* chaplet #17, Pampa, translated by Rosa Alcalá from Ábrete Sésamo debajo del agua (Último reino, 1993). Zemborain’s bilingual Mauve Sea Orchids (Belladonna* Series, 2007), translated by Mónica de la Torre and Rosa Alcalá, first pushed Belladonna* into its project of bookmaking.

Existing within a fluid liminality outside narrative time, Lila Zemborain’s Matrix Lux oscillates between meaty embodiment and the otherworldliness of illness. The poems read like a series of paintings that capture not moments, but states—ekphrases of an unseen self/subject, white light spilling over everything. Lorenzo Bueno’s translation of his mother’s encounter with mortality creates an almost unbearable intimacy that’s addictive. Like all relevant poetry these days, Matrix Lux offers an antidote to the fragmented banality of our digital age. -Dodie Bellamy