What is Love

Author: Manuel Magallanes Moure

Translator: Jessica Sequeira

Publisher: Snuggly Books (2022)

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 neighbor. 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.