This essay is included in Forrest Gander's collection, A Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory, and Transcendence (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005).
There is a Fra Angelico fresco of Saint Dominic meditating calmly on the open pages of a Bible, oblivious to the whirlwind of screaming demons that nip the air around him. Dominic composes the calm center of a circling, rapacious nightmare.
What happens to language when, disengaged from one system, it enters the sphere of another system?
In her book Night Journey, translated by Anne Twitty, the Argentinean poet Maria Negroni's vivid prose poems invert Fra Angelico's schematic. Surrounded by the calm white page, the poems stage themselves as inward, disturbing visions.
And the self-absorbed, those people disinterested in the world around them, will they too suffer the tragedies rendered by that disinterest? Might translation present one means of interacting with the imaginations of others?
Negroni's poems are zocalos of dream, well-trodden and bird-haunted.
Is not thy word a lamp unto my foot and a light on my path?
Throughout Night Journey words flock across deserts, gardens, seas, into historical accounts and myth, into the dominion of angels and animals. As topographies shift, paragraphs break open into paradoxes, into cycles of vanishing and appearance. Phalanxes of brutal male figures sweep through poems and call to mind a century of violence in the poet's native Argentina.
Who asked you to put your world into words and offer it to me?