Goro-Goro

Book Design

2025

Goro-goro is a book-object containing this first Italian translation of the extended poem Goro-Goro by Gōzō Yoshimasu, edited by Marco Mazzi and published by Villa Rondinelli Editions.
The book was created based on the idea of a moving landscape – or rather, a map – depicting the very locus of the poet’s wanderings: the Ryūkyū Islands.
The hesitations and rips in language thus result in clusters of black landmasses, at times submerged again by white billows at the turn of each page. The jagged shapes of the islands repeat, divide, come closer and recede again, invade the field of vision until we lose sight of the sea. The island becomes now a lump of meaning, now a gash, a gap in memory, in experience. The island is presence, now absence, potentiality. Language, and even letters, are torn apart, emptied or disappear almost entirely, eroded by the paper.

Author: Gōzō Yoshimasu
Edited by: Marco Mazzi
Graphic design: Elisabetta Porcinai
Published by: Villa Rondinelli Editions

The coordinates along which the islands are placed betray the character orientation of the Japanese original – top to bottom, right to left – and overwrite it with Western horizontality. But not entirely. The different directionalities overlap, in fact, and move over each other like ice sheets carried by contrasting tides, letting their substrate shine through.
Linguistic paralysis, the labored – pathological – advance of language and thought, the lability of mind, memory, the crisis of symbol, silences: the aspects present in Yoshimasu’s poem are concretely embodied in the materiality of this book-object. And so, the written word fades, conceals, lets other words shine through, it blends with words that become images, with images that become words.