María Negroni is one of Argentina’s most celebrated poets, essayists, translators, and academics, and is coordinator of the creative writing program at the UNTREF in Buenos Aires.
This is an adapted excerpt from a conversation on the Hablemos, escritoras podcast, hosted by Adriana Pacheco.
Adriana Pacheco: María, what a delight it must have been to translate Emily Dickinson. Let’s start by talking about translation, what does it mean to you?
María Negroni: In my opinion, translation is an intensified form of reading. It’s the best way to read because only when you try to convert a text written in another language into your own, into your native tongue, can you truly grasp the number of elements at play in just one word, let alone in a verse. That’s really how I began translating. When I first moved to the United States, I had a good grasp of English, enough to communicate without any problems, but poetry requires something more, something deeper. So, I started reading and was particularly interested in what American women poets were writing at the time, as I hadn’t really studied them in Argentina.
Poetry “has no theme,” the theme of poetry is language itself; therefore, to be able to understand in your language what a poet in another language is doing, you need to dive in deeply. As Alejandra Pizarnik used to say, every word “says more, and something else, and something else.” In each word, you find rhythm, sound, the poet’s diction. So, I began translating to understand, specifically to understand what these poets were doing with language, in this case, English.
In the process, I discovered several things. Whilst English has words with Latin roots, its strength lies in its Saxon-origin words, which, as you know, are generally monosyllabic and full of consonants. When I started reading Dickinson, whom I consider the greatest of all poets—American or otherwise—I realized the genius of what she does with language. That’s when I also realized that translating her is nearly impossible. She has verses made entirely of monosyllables. For example, one of my favorite lines is “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” That’s seven monosyllables. I looked at Silvina Ocampo’s translation here in Argentina, and she translated it as something like “di la verdad, pero di la sesgadamente.” By the time you get to sesgadamente (with all due respect to Silvina Ocampo, whom I have loved as a writer for a long time—and still do up to this very day), the verse has fallen apart, it’s slipped off the table. What I have translated of Emily Dickinson’s is not her poetry, but rather quartets she wrote that could have become poems, but are not the poems themselves. I’ve refused to translate her poetry.
A.P.: Do you feel that today, translation in general will help Latin American literature?
M.N.: Translation is always a first-rate creative act. I feel a bit hesitant saying this, but for me, writing, reading, and translating are on the same level. When I say, “Tomorrow, I’m going to write,” that includes reading. If I spend the whole day reading a book, I feel fulfilled. Writing is no more important than reading or translating. As I said before, translation is an intensified form of reading. The work you do with language is always dissident, always rebellious—it proposes things you don’t expect. Translation is the same; it expands the world.
A.P.: Let’s talk about your book El corazón del daño, which has been categorized as a novel, although I’m not sure how concretely it can really be considered in this way. With so much emphasis on fitting works into categories, we sometimes miss the subtleties of books. How does one write a book that, from the beginning, is meant to be posthumous?
M.N.: Now we’re entering into a more complicated area. It’s hard, it’s difficult to explain what you do and how you’ve done it; we only have a partial, fragmented view of what we are doing, we don’t fully understand it. I don’t really know how I came to write that book. I don’t believe much in literary genres, let’s start there. All good writing is very close to poetry. The novels and books I like have many poetic moments, breaks which I call poetic moments or moments of beauty. It’s what the English critic George Steiner called “ruptures.” In order for there to be beauty, something has to break, something has to fracture from common sense. You’re reading, and all of a sudden, you think, “What just happened?” Sometimes it happens through syntax, through word usage, or through an unusual use of adjectives. And sometimes it’s not even that, but a kind of conceptual break.
As for how I wrote El corazón del daño, I don’t know. I do know that the initial trigger was the death of my mother. It happened in 2016, and at the same time, while she was dying, I was asked to write a book about my relationship with books. I had written the first sentence, which was, “In my childhood home, there were no books.” But then I set it aside because I was dealing with something else. Then one day, I started writing again from that sentence, and it turned into what you read today. So, I think the book is an attempt to understand, to improve the quality of the questions we ask of life.
A.P.: In a conversation with Eduardo Halfon at the Buenos Aires Book Fair, you spoke about obsessions, and the idea of writing about obsessions. What are your obsessions?
M.N.: Obsessions are connected to how we stand in front of the world, what we pay attention to and what we don’t. To begin with, I wouldn’t say that El corazón del daño is a book that deals with the obsession of motherhood, for example. Rather, I think the book arises from and works through a wound, a very conflicted relationship. Perhaps the question behind the book is also, how did I become the writer I am? How is the journey I experienced, the suffering I experienced early on in life, related to writing? How did I make the transition from suffering to writing? That’s one of my questions, but, of course, I have other obsessions.
For example, I’m also deeply interested in language. What is the relationship between words and the world? Why is language never enough? It’s never enough to say what we want to say. Language falls short. Even though it seems so rich, it’s always insufficient. Another obsession of mine is that we can’t understand death. No one has come back to tell us what it’s like. We also can’t understand why everything constantly changes, something we might call the precariousness of existence: the constant transformation, physical deterioration, aging, the loss of youth. The third axis of what we don’t understand is where we come from, our origin. There’s also the concept of failure. Failure is inherent to writing. If you think you’re going to succeed in writing, I’ll quickly disappoint you and tell you to do something else, because there’s no success here. Sure, you might do well, maybe even become a bestseller, but that’s not what I’m referring to.
A.P.: You’ve said that writing and failure come as a kind of pair.
M.N.: Yes, they are two sides of the same coin. It’s like Octavio Paz once said: “The poet,” and he used the masculine form, but it applies to us too, “is like Sisyphus,” the mythological figure.
A.P.: When you look at your work, do you see a change? It’s hard to compare, for example, the beginning of Andanza to Teatro de sombras.
M.N.: I grew up in a middle-class family in Buenos Aires. There was a time when I was a very intense political activist, right before the dictatorship. I participated in one of the most difficult and atrocious moments in our recent history, and then I experienced what it was like to live in Argentina in a kind of internal exile during the military dictatorship. So, who would have thought, with that beginning, I’d end up living in New York to pursue a doctorate in literature? What I mean is, things change, but life is also very unpredictable and rich, it keeps bringing you things. And really, we go around in circles. I think this is reflected in different books; we live through various stages.
When I first returned to Argentina in the nineties, it was disastrous. Those five years were very difficult and ended with a divorce and my kids wanting to return to the US. Suddenly, I started reading Gothic literature, and I spent years—maybe four or five—reading Gothic novels. From that period came Museo negro and La boca del infierno. Another reverberation of that phase is the book you mentioned, Teatro de sombras. But then that phase ended because I moved back to New York, and other things happened.
I believe every book represents a specific conjunction of form and content, or form and obsession. That’s what a book is, it’s the moment. Andanza, the other book you referred to, is written in verse, eight verses per poem, structured around the eight steps of the tango. When you learn to dance tango—which is what I did with a German teacher in New York—it’s built on those eight steps, and the whole book revolves around dance. That’s why it’s called Andanza, it’s about dance, about movement. It also has to do with the female body, but that was just a phase too.
A.P.: What a wonderful conversation, María. You’ve left me with so many thoughts and reflections. Thank you for being who you are as a writer, as a poet, and, above all, as a thinker about literature and language.
M.N.: Thank you.
You can listen and read the complete interview in Spanish
on the Hablemos, escritoras website.
Translated by Alice Banks
