Night Journey Read online

  J

  Night ourney

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

  The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation

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

  Editorial Advisor: Richard Howard

           

  NightJourney

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

  María Negroni

  Translated by Anne Twitty

    

    

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

  There lives a freshness deep in me

  That nobody can deny me

  Not even I myself.

  G E

  T o Anne

  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.”

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Dante typeface Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

  www.pup.princeton.edu

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 9 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  10 9 9 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  (Pbk.)

  The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation is supported by a bequest from Charles Lacy Lockert (1888–1974)

  Contents

  ix • Kidnapped by the Inexorable • ’ 

  2 • Esqueletos bajo el cielo

  3 • Skeletons under the Sky

  4 • La jaula en flor

  5 • Cage in Bloom

  6 • Catástrofe

  7 • Catastrophe

  8 • Ecuyère y militar

  9 • Equestrienne and Officer

  10 • Los bosques de mármol

  11 • The Marble Forests

  12 • La pérdida

  13 • Loss

  14 • Gabriel

  15 • Gabriel

  16 • Heráldica

  17 • Heraldry

  18 • Van Gogh

  19 • Van Gogh

  20 • The Great Watcher

  21 • The Great Watcher

  22 • El espejo del alma

  23 • Mirror of the Soul

  24 • La ciudad nómade

  25 • Nomadic City

  26 • El padre

  27 • The Father

  28 • Diálogo con Gabriel I

  29 • Dialogue with Gabriel I

  30 • Lido

  31 • Lido

  32 • La visita

  33 • The Visit

  34 • La guía telefónica

  35 • The Telephone Book

  36 • El mapa del Tiempo

  37 • The Map of Time

  38 • Napoleón II

  39 • Napoleon II

  40 • Los amantes

  41 • The Lovers

  42 • Los ojos de Dios

  43 • The Eyes of God

  44 • El caballo blanco

  45 • The White Horse

  46 • El bebé

  47 • The Baby

  48 • Las tres madonas

  49 • The Three Madonnas

  50 • Tout cherche tout

  51 • Tout cherche tout

  52 • Carta a Sèvres

  53 • Letter to Sèvres

  v

  Contents

  54 • El diccionario infinito

  55 • The Infinite Dictionary

  56 • Las ventanas del siglo

  57 • Windows on the Century

  58 • Diálogo con Gabriel II

  59 • Dialogue with Gabriel II

  60 • Los dos cielos

  61 • The Two Heavens

  62 • Fata Morgana

  63 • Fata Morgana

  64 • New Jersey

  65 • New Jersey

  66 • Rosamundi

  67 • Rosamundi

  68 • Encrucijada

  69 • Crossroads

  70 • La ceguera

  71 • Blindness

  72 • Midgard

  73 • Midgard

  74 • La ropa

  75 • Clothes

  76 • El diluvio

  77 • The Deluge

  78 • Sleeping Beauty

  79 • Sleeping Beauty

  80 • El viaje

  81 • The Journey

  82 • Die Zeit

  83 • Die Zeit

  84 • Diálogo con Gabriel III

  85 • Dialogue with Gabriel III

  86 • Teoría de la luz

  87 • Theory of Light

  88 • Los hilos del ser

  89 • Threads of Being

  90 • Over Exposure

  91 • Over Exposure

  92 • Eternidad

  93 • Eternity

  94 • Los osos

  95 • The Bears

  96 • El mundo no termina

  97 • The World Doesn’t End

  98 • Cuento de hadas

  99 • Fairytale

  100 • Terra Incognita

  101 • Terra Incognita

  102 • Peridural y despojo

  103 • Epidural and Plunder

  104 • Hieros gamos

  105 • Hieros gamos

  106 • Diálogo con Gabriel IV

  107 • Dialogue with Gabriel IV

  108 • Simurgh

  109 • Simurgh

  110 • El libro de los seres

  111 • The Book of Being

  112 • El techo del mundo

  113 • The Roof of the World

  114 • El juego sin nombre

  115 • The Anonymous Game

  116 • Hurqãlyã, ciudad

  117 • Hurqãlyã, Peregrine

  peregrina

  City

  vi

  Contents

  118 • Los cielos del otoño

  119 • Autumn Skies

  122 • Teoría del buen morir

  123 • Theory of a Good Death

  124 • Casandra

  125 • Cassandra

  126 • Carta a mí misma

  127 •
Letter to Myself

  vii

  This Page Intentionally Left Blank

  Kidnapped by the Inexorable

          ’             

  A, apparitions, skewed dimensions, transports, irre-sistible transits, oracular pronouncements, metamorphosis—

  the dream rules by fiat. In Night Journey María Negroni has preserved these qualities, choosing to reproduce the arbi-trary 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 Ar-gentine 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 understand-ing 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 ix

  Translator's Introduction 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 to accompany the dreamer beyond volition to the slopes of the Himalayas, to a bar in Buenos Aires, toward a cemetery in the wake of Napoleon’s hearse. I too became a passenger in those taxis heading toward an unwilled and unpredictable destination, and once, from a hotel room in Milan, plunged headfirst down the well of time into another century. Confronted with excursions like these, the dreamer sometimes reacts with alarm, uneasiness, aversion, or sheer horror; the translator’s reactions are irrelevant. For her, it is wiser to abandon prejudice and preconcep-tion, the lesser and most deceptive variants of individuality.

  I was fortunate to hear many of the dreams that emerged into Night Journey before they took up a new life in poetry. I may have thought that I knew what to expect. But there was no way of knowing how, in the workings that took place between the dream and the page, the poems would turn out.

  (And aren’t these workings part of another dream? The sea change, a slow accretion that, like much of the process of writing, happens out of sight?) In a sense, these translations are made from two originals: the dream experience and the poem in which it is subsumed. One of the virtues of María Negroni’s literary enterprise has been to accomplish this transformation without disrespecting the dream state or subjecting it to interpretation. Although the dreamer—unbeliev-ing, ecstatic, terrified—is often deprived of speech, in these new creations the dream itself acquires a voice. What remains on the page is the armature of language, which makes the poem a last defense against rapture.

  The work of translation begins not with words, but with x

  Translator's Introduction listening. Falling silent in order to absorb words and inten-tions. Unquestioning, the listener sits beside the river or the city, a nomadic city that begins to rock like a boat or flow like a river: “Back up, here comes the city!” a voice cries. It is fur-ther necessary, and explicit in this poetry, to listen to the silence that precedes, interpenetrates, and surrounds the words.

  Writing, like music, does not exist without the presence of silence and its intervals. In Night Journey one of the oracular presences advises the dreamer to “write in the mute gap between words.” How apposite this is to the mute astonishment that is the only true response to revelation.

  Returning to the words themselves, one finds, inevitably, the gap between languages and between the historical sensi-bilities embodied in them. Any given language is dated, in that it results from long-ago perspectives, accidents, and choices that have hardened into custom. An innovative poet must wrench her language out of mind and out of place even while she exploits it. Reconstructing a poem in another language re-quires a parallel yet lateral move across the chasm of silence, time, and incomprehension. The details of this effort—the fumbling, the mistakes, the discards, the discoveries—are familiar to anyone who has ever made even a cursory attempt at it, as they are to all writers, and need not be repeated here. I take heart from Valéry’s dictum: “A difficulty is a light. An insur-mountable difficulty is the sun.”

  Some years after beginning to attempt these English ver-sions, I was led to revisit the definition of the word “translation.” Along with other meanings suggestive of movement, there is a specific and lesser-known reference: the transfer of relics from a previous shrine to a new one, which cannot be sanctified until the relics have arrived. (I owe this reminder, appropriately enough, to Michael Sells’s introduction to Sta-tions of Desire, his translations of poems by Ibn Arabi, the xi

  Translator's Introduction great dreamer and master of dreams who presides invisibly over Night Journey as a tutelary saint.) Contemplating this reli-quary vision of the translator’s endeavor, an elongated work in progress, I find it particularly suited to María Negroni’s nomadic geography. It is a mode of transport that has been both my inspiration and my aspiration.

  Anne Twitty

  xii

  Esqueletos bajo el cielo Donde debiera estar la pelvis (entre la cintura y el nacimiento de las piernas), el cuerpo está ausente. Lo suplanta una cota medieval que deja entrever el aire.

  Lo mismo ocurre con el brazo y la mano derecha. El niño llora, su rostro a la deriva. Habrá un incendio bajo las telas del corazón cuando mi mano acaricie su nalga de metal. ¿Pero qué puede hacer con el metal un brazo inexistente? Adivino tu perfil de isla y de tropa pisoteada. Las tumbas dadas vuelta. Todo al aire libre.

  Hacía frío bajo las sábanas estériles. Un silencio de hielo y celosía. Una playa dividida del mar, un castigo, vaya a saber, alguien nos echó de algún lado. En todas sus edades hablando de sí mismo bajo túneles, como quien pierde cosas y se asusta. Habrá que buscar más culpables. Revolver. Soplar cenizas. Hasta que arda esta imagen calcárea y ciega y misteriosa.

  2

  Skeletons under the Sky

  Where the pelvis should be (between waist and groin), the body is missing. In its place a medieval tabard, glimpses of thin air. Absent too, the right hand and arm. His face adrift, the boy is crying.

  Will flames flare under heart tissues when my hand strokes his metal rump? But how can an

  immaterial arm touch? I sense your profile: island and trampled soldiers. Pillaged graves. Everything out in the open. It was cold under the sterile sheets. A shuttered, ice silence. A beach severed from the ocean, a punishment, who knows,

  someone expelled us, where from. At every stage, speaking of himself under tunnels, like someone frightened by a loss. Must hunt down more

  culprits. Ferret around. Blow on ashes. Until this limestone, blind and mysterious image calcines.

  3

  La jaula en flor

  El tren nos deja en el gran canal de una ciudad helada y majestuosa. Ah, los pájaros volverán a atravesar este invierno y el precio de las noches pálidas, sin luna. Oigo cómo silbás una canción que yo compuse, y no sufro. Sufrir me distraería de este sitio donde ni vos ni yo tenemos nombre. Te dejo, semidormida, en un hotel que es un barco y me alejo pensando en nuestra casa futura, esa isla que todavía no ex
iste, esa promesa nueva de despojos. No siempre es fácil entender por qué huimos. El país nos abandonó hace tiempo con algunas penas y un

  miedo de no ser nada sin ellas. La ciudad donde dormís ahora se mece como queja, golpea contra el muro desolado de los muelles. Yo comienzo a

  desvestirme en una jaula que florece. Te amo. Es Estocolmo la que viaja, no nosotras.

  4

  Cage in Bloom

  The train leaves us at the grand canal of an icy and majestic city. Ah, the birds will fly once more across this winter and the price of the pale nights, moonless. I hear you whistling a song I wrote, and do not suffer. Suffering would distract me from this place where there are no names for us. I leave you, drowsy, in a hotel that is a ship and walk away thinking of our future home, that island that does not exist yet, that promise of renewed depredation. It isn’t always easy to understand why we are fleeing.

  Our country abandoned us some time ago with a few pangs and a fear of being nothing without them.

  The city where you are now sleeping rocks like a lament, thuds against the desolate wall of docks. I begin to undress in a cage sudden with blossom. I love you. We are at rest. It is Stockholm who travels.

  5

  Catástrofe

  En un galpón gigante nos agolpamos en espera de la repetición. Hemos regresado de la muerte para eso.

  La primera vez morimos por castigo, por habernos burlado de una bruja, una mujer vieja y desgreñada.

  Nuestra risa rompió la noche y después la catástrofe, la tierra abriéndose, tragándoselo todo. Hemos regresado de la muerte para vivir la muerte, hemos regresado para eso. Pero alguien afirma otra cosa: dice que unos hilos nos salvarán. Ahora no reímos, nos mantenemos en silencio, casi reverentes. No somos sino un cordón de hombres aferrados a

  cuerdas doradas como una procesión de ahogados.

  Mientras llega la hora, seguimos caminando. Sólo se ven los hilos atravesando la noche dorada del tiempo y de las repeticiones irregulares.

  6

  Catastrophe

  We have crowded into an enormous warehouse to await repetition. We have returned to life for this.

  The first death punished us for having mocked a witch, an old slattern. Our laughter rent the night and afterwards, catastrophe, the earth gaping, swallowing everything. We came back from death to live death, that is why we came. But someone has another idea: says that certain threads will save us. Now we are no longer laughing, we