What is Love

What is Love, a collection of four stories by the Chilean poet, painter and art critic Manuel Magallanes Moure (1878-1924), directly poses the question at the heart of writing and life. These tales set in early 20th-century Chile, deceptive in their illusion of simplicity, portray love at a printing press, on a crowded avenue at New Year, in a Santiago living room on a hot summer's day, and in the home of a new neighbour. They take up the small daily tortures and resignations of a mind conflicted between the regularity of bourgeois happiness and the promises of a life fully dedicated to art in a freer, looser, more open existence. The equivalent of Magallanes Moure's impressionistic visual artworks, they offer ambiguous landscapes of the emotions. This edition also includes an essay by translator Jessica Sequeira about Magallanes Moure's role in the cultural group Los Diez, his correspondence and complicated friendship with Gabriela Mistral that endured for several decades, and the various manifestations of love with its sweet scourges.