Pablo Martín Sánchez is an ‘Oulipiano’. There is no need to rush or be scared. The Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature) is not a destructive sect, but a constructive group founded in 1960 by French writers and mathematicians such as Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Creative and recreational writing. The Oulipo, emphasizes the author of ‘Frictions’ – an unequivocally Borgesian title – is at the base of his poetics: «Texts that engender other texts. Literature to continue making literature. Martín Sánchez warns that Oulipo is too often confused with the literary avant-garde. «Before ‘The Kidnapping’, by Georges Pérec with his writing without the letter E, we had the Spanish-Portuguese Alonso Alcalá Herrera and his five courtly novels in the 17th century. In each of them he deleted one of the five vowels,” he explains. These “Frictions” of 2024 (Acantilado) make up a new expanded and revised edition of the first installment of that book that Martín Sánchez published in 2011. In the prologue or exordium Sara Mesa announces “a spectacle of fireworks (or games)” and In his apostille Eduardo Berti closes the volume with fifty greguerías to what he calls “Friction Science.” Martín Sánchez describes a kiss with the icy language of a pharmaceutical leaflet: the kiss is taken orally and usually appears in the form of a bilabial muscle. He recreates an encounter with Roberto Bolaño that a friend told him and recycles it into a story. It narrates a suicide from various angles, starting from the inverted pyramid of journalism: what, who, when, where, how, why? Medicine language and agency news schemes. Literature born from a tanatopractor manual, “the one who makes up the dead” and a tribute to the work ‘Exitus’, by Diego Lorca and Pako Merino. «A pharmaceutical leaflet can be literature. “Why can’t gray literature acquire color?” asks Martín Sánchez. Friction is also “self-friction.” A love story can emerge from a brief announcement in words. When Martín Sánchez (Reus, 1977) turned twenty-five years old, they gave him a copy of La Vanguardia from the day of his birth. After browsing through the news of that March 18, 1977, he stopped at the classified ads with the crazy idea of calling the telephone numbers of those offers for apartments, jobs and an exchange of French-Spanish conversation. «The answering machine came on and I hung up. But then, I don’t know why, I called again and left a message with my details and my phone number. And this is when the literary magic of ‘frictions’ begins. «After three days they woke me up from my nap. ‘Hello, I’m Faustine,’ said a female voice with a strong French accent, ‘I’m calling about the exchange’…» Related news standard Yes Hervé Le Tellier, lost and duplicated somewhere in the world Mercedes Monmany standard No ‘No. ..?’, the same story told over and over again Julio BravoTranslator and writer – his long-seller ‘The Anarchist Who Was Called Like Me’ is now in its eighth edition – the ‘Oulipian’ Martín Sánchez, weaves his frictions with the arts of intertextuality: “We do not write from nothing, but with friction and friction with other cultures and literary traditions,” he points out. The job of translating helps the friction that gives rise to affection for other voices from other fields: «Translation is a friction. To translate is to interpret, to make your own a foreign text. Rewrite it in another language. As Saramago said, if national literature is made by writers, universal literature belongs to translators.
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