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    Night Journey
    Night Journey
    Night Journey
    Ebook147 pages10 hours

    Night Journey

    By María Negroni and Anne Twitty

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    About this ebook

    One of South America's most celebrated contemporary poets takes us on a fantastic voyage to mysterious lands and seas, into the psyche, and to the heart of the poem itself. Night Journey is the English-language debut of the work that won María Negroni an Argentine National Book Award. It is a book of dreams--dreams she renders with surreal beauty that recalls the work of her compatriot Alejandra Pizarnik, with the penetrating subtlety of Borges and Calvino.


    In sixty-two tightly woven prose poems, Negroni deftly infuses haunting imagery with an ironic, personal spirituality. Effortlessly she navigates the nameless subject to the slopes of the Himalayas, to a bar in Buenos Aires, through war, from icy Scandinavian landscapes to the tropics, across seas, toward a cemetery in the wake of Napoleon's hearse, by train, by taxis headed in unrequested directions, past mirrors and birds, between life and death.



    Night Journey reflects a mastery of a traditional form while brilliantly expressing a modern condition: the multicultural, multifaceted individual, ever in motion. Displacement abounds: a "medieval tabard" where a pelvis should be, a "lipless grin," a "beach severed from the ocean." In one poem "nomadic cities" whisk past. In another, smiling cockroaches loom in a visiting mother's eyes.


    Anne Twitty, whose elegant translations are accompanied by the Spanish originals, remarks in her preface that the book's "indomitable literary intelligence" subdues an unspoken terror--helplessness. Yet, as observed by the angel Gabriel, the consoling voice of wisdom, only by accepting the journey for what it is can one discover its "hidden splendor," the "invisible center of the poem." As readers of this magnificent work will discover, this is a journey that, because its every fleeting image conjures a thousand words of fertile silence, can be savored again and again.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateJan 28, 2002
    ISBN9781400824922
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      Book preview

      Night Journey - María Negroni

      Night Journey

      . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

      The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation

      . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

      Editorial Advisor: Richard Howard

      FOR OTHER TITLES IN THE LOCKERT LIBRARY SEE PAGE 129

      Night Journey

      . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

      María Negroni

      Translated by Anne Twitty

      PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

      PRINCETON AND OXFORD

      Copyright © 2002 by María Negroni

      Translations of poems and introduction copyright © 2002 by Princeton University Press

      Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY

      The original poems appeared as El viaje de la noche (Editorial Lumen, Barcelona, 1994)

      All Rights Reserved

      Grateful acknowledgment is made for some of the translations that have appeared previously. In Archipelago 1, no. 1 (spring 1997) (online at www.archipelago.org): Cage in Bloom; The Great Watcher;

      The Infinite Dictionary; Dialogue with Gabriel II; The Deluge;

      The Book of Being; The Roof of the World; Theory of a Good Death. In Hopscotch, 2, no. 2, Spring 2001: The Three Madonnas;

      Letter to Sèvres; Windows on the Century; Blindness;

      Midgard; Hurqãlyã, Peregrine City.

      The following poems appeared in Spanish in Mandorla 3, New Writing for the Americas/Nueva escritura de las Américas, México-New York, 2, no. 1: La jaula en flor, Van Gogh, El mapa del Tiempo, Catástrofe, Eternidad, Tout cherche tout, Rosamundi, El espejo del alma, The Great Watcher, Fata Morgana.

      www.pup.princeton.edu

      eISBN: 978-1-400-82492-2

      R0

      Contents

      ix • Kidnapped by the Inexorable • TRANSLATOR'S’ INTRODUCTION

      3 • Skeletons under the Sky

      5 • Cage in Bloom

      7 • Catastrophe

      9 • Equestrienne and Officer

      11 • The Marble Forests

      13 • Loss

      15 • Gabriel

      17 • Heraldry

      19 • Van Gogh

      21 • The Great Watcher

      23 • Mirror of the Soul

      25 • Nomadic City

      27 • The Father

      29 • Dialogue with Gabriel I

      31 • Lido

      33 • The Visit

      35 • The Telephone Book

      37 • The Map of Time

      39 • Napoleon II

      41 • The Lovers

      43 • The Eyes of God

      45 • The White Horse

      47 • The Baby

      49 • The Three Madonnas

      51 • Tout cherche tout

      53 • Letter to Sèvres

      55 • The Infinite Dictionary

      57 • Windows on the Century

      59 • Dialogue with Gabriel II

      61 • The Two Heavens

      63 • Fata Morgana

      65 • New Jersey

      67 • Rosamundi

      69 • Crossroads

      71 • Blindness

      73 • Midgard

      75 • Clothes

      77 • The Deluge

      79 • Sleeping Beauty

      81 • The Journey

      83 • Die Zeit

      85 • Dialogue with Gabriel III

      87 • Theory of Light

      89 • Threads of Being

      91 • Over Exposure

      93 • Eternity

      95 • The Bears

      97 • The World Doesn’t End

      99 • Fairytale

      101 • Terra Incognita

      103 • Epidural and Plunder

      105 • Hieros gamos

      107 • Dialogue with Gabriel IV

      109 • Simurgh

      111 • The Book of Being

      113 • The Roof of the World

      115 • The Anonymous Game

      117 • Hurqãlyã, Peregrine City

      119 • Autumn Skies

      123 • Theory of a Good Death

      125 • Cassandra

      127 • Letter to Myself

      2 • Esqueletos bajo el cielo

      4 • La jaula en flor

      6 • Catástrofe

      8 • Ecuyère y militar

      10 • Los bosques de mármol

      12 • La pérdida

      14 • Gabriel

      16 • Heráldica

      18 • Van Gogh

      20 • The Great Watcher

      22 • El espejo del alma

      24 • La ciudad nómade

      26 • El padre

      28 • Diálogo con Gabriel I

      30 • Lido

      32 • La visita

      34 • La guía telefónica

      36 • El mapa del Tiempo

      38 • Napoleón II

      40 • Los amantes

      42 • Los ojos de Dios

      44 • El caballo blanco

      46 • El bebé

      48 • Las tres madonas

      50 • Tout cherche tout

      52 • Carta a Sèvres

      54 • El diccionario infinito

      56 • Las ventanas del siglo

      58 • Diálogo con Gabriel II

      60 • Los dos cielos

      62 • Fata Morgana

      64 • New Jersey

      66 • Rosamundi

      68 • Encrucijada

      70 • La ceguera

      72 • Midgard

      74 • La ropa

      76 • El diluvio

      78 • Sleeping Beauty

      80 • El viaje

      82 • Die Zeit

      84 • Diálogo con Gabriel III

      86 • Teoría de la luz

      88 • Los hilos del ser

      90 • Over Exposure

      92 • Eternidad

      94 • Los osos

      96 • El mundo no termina

      98 • Cuento de hadas

      100 • Terra Incognita

      102 • Peridural y despojo

      104 • Hieros gamos

      106 • Diálogo con Gabriel IV

      108 • Simurgh

      110 • El libro de los seres

      112 • El techo del mundo

      114 • El juego sin nombre

      116 • Hurqãlyã, ciudad peregrina

      118 • Los cielos del otoño

      122 • Teoría del buen morir

      124 • Casandra

      126 • Carta a mí misma

      Kidnapped by the Inexorable

      TRANSLATOR'S INTRODUCTION

      ABDUCTIONS, apparitions, skewed dimensions, transports, irresistible transits, oracular pronouncements, metamorphosis—the dream rules by fiat. In Night Journey María Negroni has preserved these qualities, choosing to reproduce the arbitrary and seemingly capricious course of dream logic in all its precision. The tension that vibrates into intensity within the poems emerges from a distinct and indomitable literary intelligence that lends itself to the dream plot and extends it into the logic of the poem. Kidnapped by the inexorable, and mastering an underlying terror, the writer makes her own choices, cool and assured. Absolutist, in fact. The Argentine critic Jorge Monteleone has described the effect as a music of serene horror.

      This interplay between subjugation and domination is one of the recurring themes in Night Journey; the subject/object’s resistance to helplessness is coupled with the rare understanding that this helplessness is a destiny that must be fulfilled. Only through surrender—or, as the archangel Gabriel puts it, absolute compliance—can the poem be completed and the writer pass beyond the limits of the known, to the other side of the dream mirror.

      I am struck by the resemblance between this process and the work of translation. The operations peculiar to analysis and criticism are virtually irrelevant to the translator, at least to a certain kind of translator, to me. Any literary work worth reading creates a world of its own. The choreography of the dance is already established. To perform it—to take a given choreography and translate it into the idiom of another body of literature—is to enter willingly, even helplessly, into a zone of experience, a vocabulary of gesture, a tone of voice, a way of looking at things. In Night Journey, as it happens, I found myself as translator obliged

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