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Politics, Context and The Constellation

This essay explores a triple silence in and around one of the most canonical of visual poems. Eugen Gomringer’s ‘Silencio’, a poem that has been misread in almost all its critical commentaries. Such commentaries, which concentrate exclusively on the poem’s formalist ramifications, ignore the poem’s historical and political context. By taking into account the fact that this poem was written within a decade of the discovery of the concentration camps, and discussing its various translinguistic manifestations, the text’s central silence is shown to evoke matters far more sombre than the discourse of aesthetics can account for.