A01=Maria Negroni
Alejandra Pizarnik
Anne Twitty
Argentina
Author_Maria Negroni
book of dreams
Borges
Buenos Aires
Calvino
Category=DCF
dreaming
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
haunting imagery
Maria Negroni
multicultural
National Book Award
Night Journey
personal spirituality
poems about dreams
poems about psyche
poet
poetry
poetry books
princeton university press
South America
Spanish
Translated
Product details
- ISBN 9780691090986
- Weight: 142g
- Dimensions: 140 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 17 Feb 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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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 Maria 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.
Maria Negroni was born in Argentina in 1951. Recipient of the 2000-2001 Octavio Paz Fellowship for Poetry, she has published a novel, two books of essays, and six books of poetry in her native Spanish, as well as numerous translations from French to English. Night Journey is the English-language debut of El viaje de la noche (1994), which received an Argentine National Book Award in 1997. She teaches Latin American Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College. Anne Twitty's translations have been widely published and include the bilingual edition of Negroni's Islandia.
