Overview

The final book by the award-winning and celebrated writer Lyn Hejinian. Lyn Hejinian's Lola the Interpreter is a prose poem in which an 'I' and a series of quasi-characters (including Lola) interpret one another, their quotidian lives, and the terms, categories, and presuppositions that allow fragments of experience to be extracted from the flux of perception and framed as objects of analysis. This work stands as a culmination of Hejinian's lifelong exploration of thought's infrastructure, threading through her oeuvre from A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking to My Life and A Border Comedy, to this, her last book. What perhaps marks Lola as a work of late style, of new experimentalism even at the twilight of Hejinian's life, is the extent to which the interpretation that at first seems to be generated out of discrete events transcends its ostensible occasion and becomes philosophy more broadly, a philosophy poised between a necessary skepticism toward the given or imposed and a life-affirming commitment to the emergent possibilities within the ever-shifting and uncertain domain of daily existence.

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9780819501783

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Reviews

""Lyn Hejinian's final work, Lola the Interpreter, is an extended prose poem considering artists themselves.""--Library Journal ""Hejinian writes with the characteristic mixture of wit and wisdom that define her impressive oeuvre... A sharp poetic investigation of being, this will appeal to curious readers who want to know themselves, and others, more acutely.""--Publishers Weekly ""Reading Lyn Hejinian's new book after her death only reconfirms for me what I already knew: she will never really die. In Lola the Interpreter, we read a Hejinian who is very much alive, as an amalgam of books, ideas, and states of feeling. In Lola, Hejinian is reading her own past work, looking at a whole life lived--her life--lived in pursuit of truth, understanding, presence, and feeling. But we are also reading a Hejinian who is--now, again, endlessly with us--rereading Woolf, rereading Anaximander, rereading David Hume, rereading Aristotle, rereading Camus, rereading Sophocles, rereading Plato, rereading Shakespeare, rereading Freud, rereading Husserl alongside Homer. We are reading a Hejinian who rereads these writers in the spirit of joyful, illuminated skepticism--a doubt that brings not fear, but possibility. Because of the vivacity and buoyancy of Hejinian's style, however, we are not simply reading, we are also living with her, standing beside her in the final luminous halo of her works, lit by her intellect, surveying a life lived in contemplation of reason and poetry, and what it is to know a thing, what it is to feel free. One can't be a scholar of the future, one can't learn from it, one can't even learn about it, she reminds us, but that should not frighten us, because the present we live in is layered with infinite pasts, some dauntingly grandiose (meditations about the nature of nothingness) and some gloriously quotidian (an IPA, a bowl of pretzels): omelet or omniscience. In the plenitude of those pasts, we find our own immortality.""--Eleanor Johnson, Professor of English, Columbia University ""I have never read a book like Lola--this tour de force of the reconnaissance of everyday life. Only Lyn Hejinian could make of exegesis a detective text in which the cast of characters is so ebulliently acrobatic, the plot so protean--all-over meaning's shimmer--and the motive so colossal: the passage of time itself. No other writer has brought poetry so fugally into the agora as a philosophical--and political--necessity.""--Jennifer Scappettone, author of Poetry After Barbarism and The Republic of Exit 43 ""Centuries-old philosophical, aesthetic, and everyday human questions flow sinuously through this landscape of skeptically treated and ""finally"" open-ended propositions. ""Waves of polysemy rolling through . . . the quotidian cosmos of stuff"" a compressed epic of plenitude, an entirely beautiful paean to inexhaustibility, a last book as the ultimate rejection of closure.""--Alan Golding, author of Writing into the Future ""Lola the Interpreter is repertory and alogical, virtuosic and frisky; a tour de temps packed with counter-capital propositions. Obligated equally by fate and absurd possibility, Hejinian and her cowgirl double Lola gift us a fierce playbook for living against 'dismal indifference'. Everything matters - this book is why.""--Kate Fagan, Director, Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University

""Lyn Hejinian's final work, Lola the Interpreter, is an extended prose poem considering artists themselves.""--Library Journal ""Reading Lyn Hejinian's new book after her death only reconfirms for me what I already knew: she will never really die. In Lola the Interpreter, we read a Hejinian who is very much alive, as an amalgam of books, ideas, and states of feeling. In Lola, Hejinian is reading her own past work, looking at a whole life lived--her life--lived in pursuit of truth, understanding, presence, and feeling. But we are also reading a Hejinian who is--now, again, endlessly with us--rereading Woolf, rereading Anaximander, rereading David Hume, rereading Aristotle, rereading Camus, rereading Sophocles, rereading Plato, rereading Shakespeare, rereading Freud, rereading Husserl alongside Homer. We are reading a Hejinian who rereads these writers in the spirit of joyful, illuminated skepticism--a doubt that brings not fear, but possibility. Because of the vivacity and buoyancy of Hejinian's style, however, we are not simply reading, we are also living with her, standing beside her in the final luminous halo of her works, lit by her intellect, surveying a life lived in contemplation of reason and poetry, and what it is to know a thing, what it is to feel free. One can't be a scholar of the future, one can't learn from it, one can't even learn about it, she reminds us, but that should not frighten us, because the present we live in is layered with infinite pasts, some dauntingly grandiose (meditations about the nature of nothingness) and some gloriously quotidian (an IPA, a bowl of pretzels): omelet or omniscience. In the plenitude of those pasts, we find our own immortality.""--Eleanor Johnson, Professor of English, Columbia University

Author Information

LYN HEJINIAN (1941-2024) was a feminist avant-garde poet and scholar. She was the author of numerous books including Allegorical Moments: Call to the Everyday, and the bestselling, My Life and My Life in the Nineties. She was a co-founder and co-editor of a number of publishing ventures and literary journals including Nion Editions, FLOOR, Atelos, Tuumba Press and Poetics Journal. She was the John F. Hotchkiss Professor of English Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley.

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