Lola the Interpreter

The final book by the award-winning and celebrated writer Lyn Hejinian

Lyn Hejinian's Lola the Interpreter is a masterful prose poem in which an "I" and a host of quasi-characters, including Lola herself, engage in interpreting not just one another, but also the terms, categories, and presuppositions that shape human experience. 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. In Lola the Interpreter, 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, Hume, Aristotle, Camus, Freud, rereading Husserl alongside Homer. Hejinian reflects on a life lived in pursuit of understanding and presence, seamlessly blending the grand with the quotidian, philosophy with poetry, skepticism with joy. Here, she embraces the emergent possibilities within the uncertain terrain of daily existence, illuminating how the past and present are layered with infinite potential.