María Negroni's novel-in-verse presents a journey to a terrible yet somehow perfect Hell, poised on that margin where selfhood, suffering, literature, Art, and all forms may be contemplated at that very moment where they fall away

Maria Negroni, Mouth of Hell, Trans. by Michelle Gil-Montero, Action Books, 2013.

The forest dark as ever, without latitudes. An aide-de-camp to say something about nothing and guide us up the river of blood.
María Negroni's novel-in-verse presents a journey to a terrible yet somehow perfect Hell, poised on that margin where selfhood, suffering, literature, Art, and all forms may be contemplated at that very moment where they fall away. Negroni virtuosically joins an intensity of form to a piercing use of image which swiftly dazzles and inevitably saddens, for life cannot be as perfect as this work of Art.


[…]In these wastelands of intimacy and exile, I find nothing, not even the blood-shot ruby I swiped as a child from my father’s icy dream. Wide terrain between two blue oceans: my biography and my park of monsters, who I’ve despised, envied, admired, and loved, deep down, terribly.

[Nada veo en esos páramos de intimidad y destierro. Ni siquiera el rubí sangriento que robé en la infancia al sueño helado de mi padre. Largo territorio que insiste entre dos mares azules: mi biografía, mi parque de monstruos que odié, envidié, admiré, amé, en el fondo, tanto.]
 María Negroni’s Mouth of Hell is well emblematized by that ‘blood-shot ruby’, not worshipped but ‘swiped’. This little volume is like a decadent novella, an intake of breath before a heroine’s death-aria, a continuously restaged opening scene. It burns with Pater’s infamous “gem-like flame”, an intensity stoked by infernal paradox, throwing a mysterious, self-consuming light.  The series is made of extremely brief prose poems, set in little vitrine-like boxes. The poems themselves seem to have plucked words out of the blank air and to arrange them in strange tableaux in which language itself acts paradoxically (or insanely). In Negroni’s hand, language may lounge and rage, collapse and expand, at once languid and acute:

Strange impatience of horses. Jumbled crossbows, arquebusses. Some sort of luxurious circus or royal company. It’s always like this, the beginning of a new militia: the hardest men, the most virile and beautiful, the best disposed to sexual combat, to wrestling one-on-one with death. Often a hand bedecked with rings. Short in the way of chivalry. Conclaves drag on, and that deft sadness of acrobats.

Such acrobatics among the syllables, and the larger acrobatic of replacing  a long winding sentence with a sudden, opaque emblem (“Often a hand bedecked with rings.”) is even more astonishing when one recalls that this is a work of translation; Michelle Gil-Montero is in fact, invisibly and before your lying eyes, double-looping this Latinate reverie into a bewitched, bewitching English.
Mouth of Hell is a book about a place, but that place is both singular and several, actual and allusive. To put it briefly, this book, which seems hovering on the precipice of an event about to occur, is actually tremulous with retrospection: it re-inhabits a roguish mid-twentieth century [Argentinian] novel, Bomarzo by Manuel Mujica Láinez, which itself reimagines a 16^th century [Italian] duke who built himself a park-of-monsters or grotesqueries. Translator Gil-Montero informs us that Negroni’s entire sequence takes place at the moment of the literary character’s death. But the tremulous temporal coordinates of this work– stretched across time and occurring in an instant, looking radically back to earlier works while occupying a fast-elapsing present tense– also enact trauma, and, particularly, the temporal trauma of Latin America’s lost generations, and specifically, of course, Argentina’s disappeared.
The disappeared are both a living memory and a non-thought, an erased generation whose death and gravesites may, in many cases, never be known. The subtraction of this generation makes all subsequent time aberrant, non-linear, glitched, abhorrent. In this sense their loss is truly traumatic, an event which can  never be over because its exact parameters and coordinates can never be known. This is an event whose magnitude can never be bounded, not only because there is in many cases no historical record but because the loss is of a magnitude beyond accounting. There can also, of course, be no retribution, no redemption or reparation of this loss, no way of assuaging or lessening its unthinkable magnitude.
In this sense the paradoxical dimensionality of los desaparecidos forms the flexing, vertiginous field of this book. Their paradoxically present absence is both superimposed on the sequences and seems to occur as its outer limit, the non-place of blackness and erasure the sequence is driving towards. Thus the speaker is at times  bereft, marooned, expressing an adjacency to an action that seems to be happening elsewhere, and at times occupies a position of conviviality with a ghost-like “She”. Often these contradictions happen on facing pages. On page 60,
The rush of words comes unannounced: all at once, jacked into flight like a heraldic bird, mystery feathered in shadow. In this pandemonium of pomp and poverty, as if these past could pardon us, a silver presence : a fistful of cantos to measure the span from sword to soul. All lined up, indelible geometry like lightsome ships set for the great journey.
Across the gutter on page 61, “Surrounded by deep night, after hurrying through the earthly day, they falter. Place and date have fallen back quietly. Place and date have fallen back quietly. Of their private fictions, nothing remains but an almost-island, the saga of a labyrinth with no outcome.”
Yet even in this latter vision, hope finds a way to spark, in however inverted a proportion: “The enamored splinter refuses to surrender.” And so we feel weirdly hopeful, as if we have come into a flickering gathering place of the lost—even if this means joining the lost in the grave.
Mouth of Hell has been designed by Andrew Shuta in a slim, compact edition with a startling blood-red ruby cover and with the complete English and Spanish texts arranged in separate series within. It is as transporting, contradictory, beautiful and troubling as any journey toward this most infernal of thresholds should be.- Joyelle McSweeney


In a crowded corner of a SoHo bookstore, the audience begged for one more poem. Maria Negroni, the poet and SLC Spanish faculty member, smiled and conferred with her translator. They had brought no more poems in English, but the young translator insisted she could do one by memory: Negroni's poem was unforgettable.
The new book of poetry is just one of Negroni's recent accomplishments. A prolific writer and translator, she recently won the prestigious International Prize for Essay Writing from Siglo XXI, a publisher in Mexico City, for her book Galería Fantástica ("Fantastic Gallery"). Last year she helped launch Babel, a translation magazine, at Sarah Lawrence.
The following is an expanded version of the interview included in the print version of Sarah Lawrence.

SLC: What was the inspiration for your new collection of poetry, Andanza?

MN: I wrote three books that I call the Buenos Aires trilogy. The first is a book that I did with a visual artist, Jorge Macchi, called Buenos Aires Tour. It's a poetic guide to Buenos Aires. We broke a glass on top of a map of Buenos Aires, so it's a very arbitrary guide.

The second one is a novel, called La Anunciación, which deals with the political experience in Argentina during the '70s. And the third one is Andanza, which is a book of poems. It is inspired by the tango. It's a very erotic dance, but it's also a very sophisticated, intellectual dance. I took the eight basic steps of tango as my form. Every stanza is eight lines. I don't know which came first, the dance or the idea for the book. But they grew up together. My parents have danced tango all their lives; it's a very Argentine dance.

SLC: Is there a type of writing you prefer-poetry, nonfiction, fiction?

MN: I don't believe in genres. I believe in your perception of language. When I write, it is always as a poet who is making the decisions.

SLC: What was the inspiration for Babel?

MN: A few years ago, I began encouraging students to translate as a way of better understanding what they are reading and also capturing more of the richness of the language that comes forth in poetry. Then I realized that I had very talented translators among the students, and I started playing with the idea of having a magazine. This is the second year that we've published Babel. We recently did a reading at Cornelia Street Café in Manhattan. It was fantastic. We had French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish.

SLC: What are your goals for the magazine in the future?

MN: It will evolve. I would like to have more faculty involved. There are many faculty in the college who, in one way or another, deal with translation. I think it has a lot of potential.

SLC: Why is translation important in today's world?

MN: It is a very complex question. Translation has to do with diversity, difference, with the way different cultures perceive the world. And so that would be reason number one: It opens up the world and perception. You cannot go through a translation process untouched. It is a very deep process. You inhabit that other poet, and for the time that you work on her or him, you are that person. You cannot translate someone if you are not fully into the whole process of creation. You are creating anew.
Reason number two: when you translate, you work at a very deep level with language, and you inevitably become aware of the gap that exists between words and reality. Most people are usually not aware of that gap. In normal life, we think that language obeys us. But that's not true. And I think that awareness is a sort of antidote against dogmatic thinking. Poetry and translation help you move with that ambivalence, to recognize that there are no guaranteed, fixed, closed concepts. That there is always something that you cannot grasp. I think that the task of translating reminds you of that, constantly.

SLC: What are some of the challenges a translator encounters?

MN: The challenges that a translator can face are the same challenges that a creative writer faces because you have to make the poem work in your language. You always have to translate into your mother tongue. That's where you have more mastery of the language. It's not a question of a literal, word-by-word translation. You have to understand what the poem is trying to do, what the characteristics of the poet are. You have to get his or her rhythm, diction, and then the world of obsessions that is underneath what is written on the page. Then you can work with all that and come up with your own version.
For example when you have to translate an emotion, there are so many words that you can use. You have to make a choice that makes you aware that there is no literal meaning to words. "Obscure" is not the same thing as "somber"; it's not the same thing as "dark." It depends on how the poet is using them, the context. This helps you be aware that language is a creature; it's alive. It's not an easy instrument that you use at your convenience. Every word is a world made of sounds. The words are charged. They are energetic entities.

SLC: Can we get a little background on your life? Has the life of an expatriate influenced your work?

MN: I came to the United States in 1985; I did my PhD at Columbia. I stayed until 1994, and then I went back to Argentina. I came back to the US to work at Sarah Lawrence in 1999. Absolutely, living away from my country has influenced my work. The displacement, in whatever shape it takes, makes more evident that gap that I was talking about. Being far from your roots, from your family, from your culture, your society, opens up the lens a little bit. You have a slant look at both your own culture and the culture you live in. It has some disadvantages too, as you can imagine. But I think that it helps you to have a little bit of mistrust of what other people take for granted. - Interview by Sophia Kelley
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Hell has many mouths . . By Maria Negroni
Translated by Michelle Gil-Montero

Hell has many mouths. One is the addled letter of my life, which bears the mark of my death. I've gazed at that mouth before. A terror there, a field of intense, lugubrious energy. From a distance, it resembled a temple, a seething smoke cloud, a few hyenas looking on with lascivious fervor. To that abstract emblem, I owe my best pages, the least false.


Five Poems from Mouth of Hell (La boca del infierno)

María Negroni ( translated by Michelle Gil-Montero)

Strange impatience of horses. Jumbled crossbows, arquebuses. Some luxurious circus or royal company. It’s always like this, the beginning of a new militia: the hardest men, virile and beautiful, most disposed to sexual combat, to wrestling one-on-one with death. Often a hand recapped with rings. Lacking much in the way of chivalry. Endless conclaves, and that deft sadness of acrobats.

Aberrations with no preliminary sketch but this: men train in carnal emotion, perfect a repertoire of doubts, come and go on platforms like malevolent gods. Safe and unsafe, they gnaw their fingernails, hunt, and dedicate verses to a single two-headed ambition: to be and not to be luxurious birds caged in mortality. These scenes do not belong to reality. They hardly aspire to it. They depict it as a fall, an endeavor in favor of an urgent wound.

Hand like a tulip, a secret on the brief chest. Against a nest of shadows, lunar apparition, the body reeling into a form of conviction. In that live pandemonium, specters dance, motionless monsters trade terrible gazes with no one. What to make of all this covert ambiguity? Of a conscience that drives out the world just thinking of it? Now and again, from a lascivious earth to a troubled beyond, the thread of my hallucinated life.

Enslaved by furor and plunder, now and then, the city, last bastion of nothing, recrudesces and festers. Wantonness on the swollen streets. All the women, returning from parties. Screams bounce off the tapestries. In such horrific conditions, it isn’t strange to overhear the river of the rabble, its raucous progress, alert for an instant to the writ of disaster.

Fire City geography. 150 yards for a perimeter of hate. Descending circles, circumference nowhere. Infringements and abuses of sufficient reason. Farther off, the wheels of machinations, people grave and trivial, the pomp of regalia out for a little throb of stupor or marvel. Closer, in the range of the arts, by adultery and politics, the mouths of books, open to imperfection.   María Negroni was born in Rosario, Argentina. She has published eleven books of poetry, three collections of essays, and two novels, as well as works in translation from French and English. Her work has appeared internationally in literary journals, including Diario de Poesía, Página 12, The Paris Review, Circumference, and Bomb, among others. She has been awarded two Argentine National Book Awards, for her collection of essays Ciudad Gótica (1996) and her poetry collection Viaje de la noche (1997). Her book of poems Islandia, in Anne Twitty’s translation, received a PEN Translation Award in 2001. She has been a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Fundación Octavio Paz, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and others. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.



Maria Negroni, Night Journey, Trans. by Anne Twitty, Princeton University Press, 2002.
 

read it at Google Books

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 Mara 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.

One of my own newest designated dreamers is the Argentine poet Maria Negroni, whose debut volume in English, Night Journey, takes the wordless logic of dreams and turns it into her own precise, oracular music. This book is pervaded by the spooky sense of a woman traveling in many directions, most of them unrequested, jouneying through shadows and mirrors, navigating the mysteries by shuttling between life and death. - Edward Hirsch
Night Journey is a collection of prose poems, each recounting a dream sequence. . . . Many of Negroni's dreams combine elements of surrealism and lyric narrative, which creates a matrix of symbols both archetypal and idiosyncratic through which the poet confronts generally nameless, yet recognizable, fears. . . . It reminds me that when we read wonderful poetry it's as if we are privy to a delicious rumor, and we must pass it on. - Priscila Uppal

Arising from this intricate collection is a message. The poet comes to learn that her quest is both multiple and unified; for her, the act of writing cannot be separated from loving, from remembering, from voyagin out. - John Taylor 
A mysterious configuration of presence and absence, Night Journey is an intricate symbolic mapping of identity. María Negroni has written a book in which each poem is an open window allowing us to observe the dangerous clash of unreality and reality. For as she writes: 'I began to name things, that is, to conceal them.' And so the reader enters the fascinating universe of a woman traveling amid and beyond fear, mirrors, and shadows. Night Journey: a book where existence is a daring language of dreams.- Nicole Brossard
  "Calvino's prose (as in Invisible Cities) is the only predecessor I can cite for María Negroni's sophisticated texts, and Anne Twitty's remarkable translations are quite as striking and idiomatic as William Weaver's celebrated versions of the Italian master. These prose poems have all the glamour of narrative fables and all the lyric density of odes. One reads through Night Journey with the rare certainty that this is literature, a sequence of passionate, sorrowing renunciations; and the singular elegance of the utterance, in English as in Spanish, brings these illuminations precisely to the level where Rimbaud had left that word."--Richard Howard

"In El viaje de la noche, a sense of the uncanny is presented with a precise eloquence that preserves its hermetic nature. . . . Here we have an exceptional book, one that transforms its dark, serene, and fearsome music into a desire to read and reread."--Jorge Monteleone

    From the collection Riddance (Original Spanish title: Andanza)

Am I that woman in the dance
raising inexperience like light
addressing herself like a feather
to her most elusive whereness?
Strange flower growing soft
out of the frame of language
trying on sandals and flinging
into writing unscathed by writing.

*
Winding the body’s lexicon
it hit me in the takeaway
shown my treasure in nothing
I wavered: submit or escape
it’s a question of what is lost
in the beat of a voluptuous skirt
what battle is evaded what dire
endearing enemy abandoned.

*
Strange as if lit from within
with the indicative expounding
from neckline to poem curve
I learned to conjugate affairs
but for what if the nitty-gritty
of nothing like eternity
consisted in leaving me naked
doubtlessly an odd privilege.

*
What if time were lawless?
Where do you keep what wasn’t?
They go on like this and that
you never know what kills you
and January sun and you just came
just like a breath and worked me
to confine my body’s surrounds
to the exacting beauty of lack.
*
And I who’d thought to interject
geography as flamboyant sun
retrace my past in slip-ups
sweet-talking myself tough
and even pin on you a trinket
clinched knees sissy feet
which you’ll interpret as expertise
but is just a pretense for hurt.

*
If together where the belly bends
if I contracted and opened for you
if something like a sky disclosed
to what encloses inside blue
if you drew me so disposed
if I existed where you lost me
if a spasm and other orphandoms
if imperfection is a gift.

*
Contrary to the clock hands
too long in two voices unreleased
you walk me through my legs
to tumult with no predicate
while I angle for the occasional
avails of female cunning
tattooing the flipside of language
digits an animal won’t give up.

*

Night is a house to wander
with Spanish moss poison
I mean, to look for looseness
beyond your foremost failure
maybe that was the attraction
out of all you gave me and got
how you tossed me into boleos
heart antsy the secret clear.