Night Journey

by Negroni, Maria

• ISBN13: 9780691090986
• ISBN10: 069109098X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-01-28
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

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 Journeyis the English-language debut of the work that won Mariacute;a 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 Journeyreflects 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.

Table of Contents

Translator's Introduction	ix
Skeletons under the Sky	3	(2)
Cage in Bloom	5	(2)
Catastrophe	7	(2)
Equestrienne and Officer	9	(2)
The Marble Forests	11	(2)
Loss	13	(2)
Gabriel	15	(2)
Heraldry	17	(2)
Van Gogh	19	(2)
The Great Watcher	21	(2)
Mirror of the Soul	23	(2)
Nomadic City	25	(2)
The Father	27	(2)
Dialogue with Gabriel I	29	(2)
Lido	31	(2)
The Visit	33	(2)
The Telephone Book	35	(2)
The Map of Time	37	(2)
Napoleon II	39	(2)
The Lovers	41	(2)
The Eyes of God	43	(2)
The White Horse	45	(2)
The Baby	47	(2)
The Three Madonnas	49	(2)
Tout cherche tout	51	(2)
Letter to Sevres	53	(2)
The Infinite Dictionary	55	(2)
Windows on the Century	57	(2)
Dialogue with Gabriel II	59	(2)
The Two Heavens	61	(2)
Fata Morgana	63	(2)
New Jersey	65	(2)
Rosamundi	67	(2)
Crossroads	69	(2)
Blindness	71	(2)
Midgard	73	(2)
Clothes	75	(2)
The Deluge	77	(2)
Sleeping Beauty	79	(2)
The Journey	81	(2)
Die Zeit	83	(2)
Dialogue with Gabriel III	85	(2)
Theory of Light	87	(2)
Threads of Being	89	(2)
Over Exposure	91	(2)
Eternity	93	(2)
The Bears	95	(2)
The World Doesn't End	97	(2)
Fairytale	99	(2)
Terra Incognita	101	(2)
Epidural and Plunder	103	(2)
Hieros gamos	105	(2)
Dialogue with Gabriel IV	107	(2)
Simurgh	109	(2)
The Book of Being	111	(2)
The Roof of the World	113	(2)
The Anonymous Game	115	(2)
Hurqalya, Peregrine City	117	(2)
Autumn Skies	119	(4)
Theory of a Good Death	123	(2)
Cassandra	125	(2)
Letter to Myself	127