SOBRE A SIBILA — ABOUT SIBILA

SIBILA
Odile Cisneros

Sibila journal was founded by São Paulo poet Régis Bonvicino in 2001.  I was invited to collaborate as editor starting with the second number. Currently (2008), the two co-editors are poet Bonvicino and poet Charles Bernstein, with my occasional edition assistence. 

Sibila has clearly evolved from the circa 80 pp of its 0 inaugural issue launched in the spring of 2001 to over 250 pp in a double issue (8-9) published in November 2005), which also includes a CD of sound poetry. It is a handsomely designed magazine that strands graphically in the middle—featuring original artwork and illustrative photography as well as striking covers but not allowing the visual to interfere or distract from the verbal. Images are almost never printed next to or as illustrations of poems. Sibila has a number of semi-regular sections, for instance "Pares contemporâneos" ("Contemporary Pairings"), which has featured interviews or dialogues with international and Brazilian intellectuals of the stature of Marjorie Perloff, Michael Hardt, Carlos Zílio, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Jerome Rothenberg, Rolando Sánchez Mejias and Eduardo Milan.

The presence of international voices in Sibila is abundant and noteworthy.  For one thing, world poets are given as much space (if not more) than local production. Russian, Peruvian, Mexican, German, French, Italian, Argentine, Cuban, American, Swedish and Czech poets, among others, have appeared in its pages.

It is Sibila's editorial policy to almost always print the poems in the original and in translation, even in the case of a language as close to Portuguese as Spanish. Another policy has been to give space to other manifestations of Portuguese outside Brazil and Portugal, with a couple contributions from Macau. Sibila's main mandate, however, has been the question of innovation in poetry. Still, it has often sought to feature little-known authors and unpublished or hard-to-find materials (a note by Lúcio Costa, a short story by Mário de Andrade, drawings and texts by Flávio de Carvalho, etc.).  One notable piece published in Sibila No. 7 (2004), is the essay by Alcir Pécora "Momento Crítico:  Meu Meio Século" ("Critical Moment: My Half-Century"), where the critic, on the occasion both of his 50th birthday and a coincidental invitation to participate in the launch of a didactic volume on contemporary literature published by Folha de S. Paulo, does his own rigorous stock-taking of the high and low moments of the current literary scene of Brazil, taking precisely as his foil the said volume.

Now, Sibila has became an electronic journal. 

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