This book is the translation by Blanca Gago and Ignacio Caballero into Spanish of artist’s book WORD RAIN (or A Discursive Introduction to the Intimate Philosophical Investigations of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says) published by Madeline Gins in 1969.

LLUVIA DE PALABRAS is full of textual appropriations, typographic games, sentences, paragraphs and words defined through algebraic notation variables with which Gins tries to define the formula of reading and the relationships between meanings. The many resources she uses in the text must bear now a new layer: the translation, a new level that fits in without garishness thanks to the precise architecture of the work, which seems designed to support it. Just as the last page contains all the words of the book, our translation is just one of the many possible translations. Just as the very form of the book is questioned in it, the translation —understood as an intervention in the text— must be questioned too.

The translation of the editorial design and conception has also been a subtle process, considering that the Spanish editorial adaptation had to have its own entity while respecting the original one. Details such as the “mise en abîme” of the jacket —or the inclusion of greylock’s own paratext— entailed a more laborious task of analysis than it might initially seem in search of this constant balance between the Spanish edition and the original from 1969. Both translators (Blanca Gago and Ignacio Caballero) and the editor tried to imbue the Spanish translation with so many open possibilities as the original, to preserve as faithfully as possible the spirit, the fluidity, the ambiguousness, the will to play on words of the English text. It was certainly a challenge, a very creative process we were lucky to share and discuss.

Text in Spanish