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Tuesday 17 May 2011

GALICIAN'S LITERATURE DAY 2011: LOIS PEREIRO


Luis Ángel Sánchez Pereiro alias Lois Pereiro (born in Monforte de Lemos, 16 February 1958-died in A Coruña, 24 May 1996) was a Galician poet and writer. The Día das Letras Galegas ("Galician Literature Day") will be dedicated to him in 2011.
He was born in Monforte de Lemos, in a family from O Incio. He studied in the school of the Escolapios, and began to write at the age of 15. After finalising the COU left to Madrid, where he initiated the university studies of Political Sciences and Sociology. After a stay in Monforte working in the familiar company, devoted to the glass industry, he returned to Madrid to study English, French and German. There he founded the magazine Loia with Antón Patiño, Manuel Rivas and his brother Xosé Manuel Pereiro.
In 1981, he goes to live to A Coruña, where he joins to the magazine La Naval. In this period he made contact with a group of poets participating in several anthologies.
Between 1983 and 1987 he travelled throughout Europe. He worked as a German, French and English translator of scripts and, especially, for television, dubbing conventional series (episodes of Dallas and Kung Fu).
He published two collections of poems while alive, "Poemas 1981/1991" (1992) and "Poesía última de amor e enfermidade" (1995). In 1996, year of his death, "Poemas para unha Loia" was published. It collects works of his period in Madrid, published in the magazine Loia.
Pereiro suffered from AIDS, but the final cause of his death was a liver failure. Officially and according to a sentence of the Provincial Audience of Lugo, after a lawsuit, the reason of his death was an intoxication by rapeseed denaturalised oil.

Lois Pereiro's poems have been translated into English. Here's one translated by Jonathan Dunne:
V
What can I offer the one who attempts me?
Numbered days of inert passion
and eternal love always shared
with the debt owing to an existence
redeemed for usurious payments
conjugating the verbs “live” and “love”
in the first person plural
reduced to the forms of the present.

What can I offer the one who attempts me
if I’m a loose thread of the hope
Penelope weaves
and unweaves?

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