What is Love
Manuel Magallanes Moure
Translated by Jessica Sequeira
What is Love, a collection of four stories by the Chilean poet, painter and art critic Manuel Magallanes Moure (1878-1924), directly poses the question at the heart of writing and life.
These tales set in early 20th-century Chile, deceptive in their illusion of simplicity, portray love at a printing press, on a crowded avenue at New Year, in a Santiago living room on a hot summer’s day, and in the home of a new neighbour. They take up the small daily tortures and resignations of a mind conflicted between the regularity of bourgeois happiness and the promises of a life fully dedicated to art in a freer, looser, more open existence. The equivalent of Magallanes Moure’ s impressionistic visual artworks, they offer ambiguous landscapes of the emotions.
This edition also includes an essay by translator Jessica Sequeira about Magallanes Moure’ s role in the cultural group Los Diez, his correspondence and complicated friendship with Gabriela Mistral that endured for several decades, and the various manifestations of love with its sweet scourges.
About the Author
Manuel Magallanes Moure was born on November 8, 1878 in La Serena, Chile. He studied at the “Escuela de Bellas Artes” to become a painter, and wrote journalism for “El Mercurio” and “Las Últimas Noticias”, among other publications. He was best known to his contemporaries, however, as a poet. Along with Pedro Prado, Baldomero Lillo, Augusto D’Halmar and others, he formed part of “Los Diez”, one of the most famous Chilean cultural groups of the 20th century. He was a judge for the Juegos Florales literary prize awarded to Gabriela Mistral in 1914, and the two began a correspondence and complicated friendship that endured for several decades. That same year, he published the stories of Qué es amor (What is Love). For many years he lived in San Bernardo, where he also served as mayor, and he died there on January 19, 1924.
About the Translator
Jessica Sequeira was born in San Jose, California in 1989, and currently lives in Santiago de Chile. Her works include the novel A Furious Oyster (Dostoyevsky Wannabe), and the collection of essays Other Paradises: Poetic Approaches to Thinking in a Technological Age (Zero). Her translations include Adolfo Couve’ s When I Think of My Missing Head (Snuggly) and Liliana Colanzi’ s Our Dead World (Dalkey Archive).
Paperback, 124 pages
Release date: October 4, 2022
ISBN-13: 978-1-64525-109-5
Price: US$16.00