Small things in reverse
it was maybe in 2010 when I first wrote some poems in german, with a single person in mind. however, my stay at the artists house Villa Waldberta in 2011, fostered by the Instituto Cervantes in Munich and the Kultureferat of the Munich Municipality, gave me the opportunity to dig deeper into a language that had inhabited me for quite some time. kleinigkeiten/cousiñas is the outcome of this process and it is, at the same time, a reverse journey in which translations go in the opposite direction. kleinigkeiten/cousiñas is a poetry collection originally written in german that, due to the spontaneous affection of my publishers, unexpectedly mirrored in galician, something that was not initially intended. translating this book was indeed a peculiar process because the language in which we write determines the communication objective; kleinigkeiten/cousiñas was written in german because its goal was to bring the otherness that galician and myself represent to the core of a central european language and culture in a sort of intimate dialogue, in which a language of power becomes the language of affection and disaffection, of the private and intimate and, in this way, becomes the most political of all languages.
— María Reimóndez