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Uxudo is a musical text,
although its medium is visual and verbal. The verbal component is termed
"plurilingual" by the author. Using German, English, Hungarian,
French, as well as invented words, Anne Tardos builds her poems out of
sounds which reflect both remembered and current experiences in the world.
The accompanying visual image are not mere illustrations. They emerge
from a life's mysterious terrain and remain as non-verbal memories.
From Caroline Bergvall's Foreword:
It is in the rapid language switches that the plurilingual
text first and foremost announces itself. It’s in the stop-start
structure which routes out the languages framed and in use, and the various
ways in which they intersect, through mixed speech, borrowings and compounds,
and neologistic sounding games, that the mechanics and polemics of such
a textual environment find themselves defined. The reader, pressed hard
between words written in language they don’t know, words written
in language they know, words written in language they thought they knew.
. . . The intricacies of such disruptive, uprooted
dealings inevitably add humourous correspondences to the work. Nothing
equals another thing equals another equals another. In cross-lingual pollination,
the linguistic sign seems as differential as any saussurean stylistics
might wish for it. And the sonic games, cross-lingual puns, private riddles
and neological turns which, rather gleefully, punctuate most of the plurilingual
work I have come across, would seem to push this point.
. . . This framed echo-chamber does not illustrate
nor translate. Nor does it erase its elements into one, seamless, cohesive
readerliness. It enriches its gymnastics of clues and games of tones with
clashes between personal grammars and social usage. Only the precision
of such divided attentions can carry off the emotive and psycho-social
genealogies which the plurilingual text is interjecting into the overall
cultural body.
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