Coney Island
How does a disciplinary sea compare to a didactic sea? Or a choppy sea to a verbalized sea? You never know. Meanwhile, this sea begins to seem remarkably like the sea. You only need to wait for the day and night of reality. The sea’s strategy is its own concern. That’s its noblest quality: being an architecture that lost its mind in mid-August. There’s nothing else to see here. Just some children with conflicting wings whose presence alludes to the purest form of an absence.
A River Runs Through It
The river is a sunrise of flying fish. (This is a gift.) But there are days when the river delivers a tainted message, or no message at all: no language for the flowing road, no inky fish to quell the speed. (This is also a gift.) Was there something here, before something was here? Nobody answers. Sooner or later, all things converge, and the river takes them, leaping over rocks, to the wavery basement of eternity.
Monts Déserts: 7 Statements In Homage to the Horizon
Most striking is its invisible occupancy. The magnificent doors are shut, as if a temple. A sudden crush of clouds, naturally free and in silence. Here and there, inevitabilities surface as signs: there is no sadder violence than the word island. What resembles an inner world? What white bird that looks out for itself? Maybe someone will tell the biography of a journey. Time is told in syllables.
Botany of Death
Some say that, at The Door of a Hundred Regrets, things meet. The desert, Hell, the oasis, and the most decrepit, perplexed books. But that’s exaggerated news. What heavenly or earthly object could it possibly apply to? What tender malevolencies? What scrappy little horse girl with her fabulous animal? Look within, say the guides: this is the only pain that counts.
Artwork by Fidel Sclavo
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María Negroni is an Argentinian poet, essayist, novelist, and translator. She is the author of more than twenty books, most recently El Corazón del daño (Penguin Random House, 2022). Her most recent books in English translation are Exilium (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2022), Berlin Interlude (Black Square Editions, 2021), and The Annunciation (Action Books, 2019), translated by Michelle Gil-Montero. She has been awarded two Argentine National Book Awards, a PEN Best Translation Award for Anne Twitty’s translation of Islandia (Station Hill Press, 2001), and the Siglo XXI International Prize, among many others. She is Director of the Maestría en Escritura Creativa at the Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero, Argentina’s first creative writing program.
Michelle Gil-Montero is an Argentine-American poet-translator. She has translated several books of contemporary Latin American poetry, hybrid-genre work, and criticism. Her recent translations include Berlin Interlude and Exilium by Argentine writer María Negroni. Her work has appeared widely in journals and has been supported by the NEA, Howard Foundation, PEN, and Fulbright. At Saint Vincent College, she directs the Minor in Literary Translation and is the founding editor of the translation micropress Eulalia Books.
Fidel Sclavo was born in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, in 1960. His visual work, which spans collage, watercolor, oil painting, drawing, and printmaking, sustains a singular playfulness and naiveté. He has written and illustrated more than sixteen books and exhibited in art galleries in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. His works are part of private and public art collections around the world, including the Collection Phelps Cisneros, Collections Sayago & Pardon, and Abstraction in Action. His work has been shown several times with Galería Jorge Mara – La Ruche and he has participated in many international Art Fairs, including ArteBa, Buenos Aires; ARCO, Madrid; Este Arte, Punta del Este, Pinta Art Fair, New York; and Art Basel Miami Beach. He lives in Buenos Aires.