For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you a poignant excerpt from HEART OF DAMAGE by the Argentine poet María Negroni, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero. In terse but vivid fragments, the narrator of this long poem recollects her childhood, drawing our attention first to the cavity between her memory of her childhood and her mother’s memory of the same. From there she spirals inward, boring into the center of a lifelong sense of inadequacy bred by her mother’s possessiveness—”my only possession that is truly mine” her mother calls her—before finally moving towards the present, in which her mother’s grievances are recompensed with her own. Read on!
In the house of Childhood, there are no books.
Roller skates, sure, bicycles, silkworms in cardboard boxes, but no books.
When I mention this to my mother, she’s furious.
Of course there were books, she says.
Who knows. Either way, there’s no vast library of English volumes, like Borges had as a child.
Of one thing, though, I’m certain: a beautiful, difficult woman is the center and circumference of that house. She has big eyes, red lips. Her name is Isabel, but everyone calls her Chiche: a toy, trinket, plaything for a child.
In one timeless scene, I watch her do her makeup in the bathroom.
A spell to behold that woman. Hunger and sugary bliss.
My fascination amuses her. Sometimes, she peers down at me. Just sometimes.
My mother: my life’s most desperate and damaging fixation.
I’ll never love anyone like her.
I’ll never fully comprehend why my life isn’t mine, just a reflection of hers, why nothing I do is ever good enough.
Questions I don’t formulate, not yet.
I’m too busy chasing the next bright thing.
My mother in the mirror, the spitting image of Joan Fontaine.
A diva to the end. Never seen without her red lipstick—not even with twenty-three fractures on her medical chart, when she’ll develop a new aesthetic of illness.
My mother insists that there were books in the house of Childhood.
Who knows.
Look how sleeky I am!
There are guests for dinner, and I’ve slathered myself in your French lotion.
Once upon a time, there was a before. It got lost.
Can you really lose that kind of thing?
Or do you just tuck it in your lap forever?
In that before, there are marks, thick as scars, begging to be read, over and over.
Lightning has just one function: to burn.
It burns enlightened, vehement.
The word yourfather.
The phrase Don’t talk back.
Uphill battles of this world.
I peered, bleary, straight through the night.
*
There’s no front door.
You write it in every direction, enter it through a thousand windows.
A book is, at first, something round.
Then it’s adjusted.
At some point, the sphere gets sliced, flattened, molded into rectangle or parallelepipid.
You carve the planet into the shape of a tomb.
You put it in a wooden overcoat.
The book is content to await resurrection.
*
The house of Childhood isn’t visible on maps.
In the vicinity: irrigation ditches, earthquakes, snow, a river of stones that spills over in summer and dries up in winter. Trees of paradise, and a dead-end street, where no cars pass: kids ride bikes or play tag, jacks, cops and robbers, hide-and-seek.
Even me, when I’m not too busy finishing my homework or copying the word necessity, first with a “c,” then a double “s,” in my punishment notebook.
There is also a quota of cheerful birds, perched on branches.
Vast and cold, the house of Childhood: my mother lights kerosene heaters that stink.
(This dining room, she says, is a tomb; when I’m dead, install some heat in my coffin.)
You had asthma. You never breathed easily, no relief.
A creeping desertification, climate of unassailable solitude.
Suddenly, a roar would surge through you, rattling you. I’d stare, to make sure it was really you, what big eyes you had.
A little voice inside me taunted: Are you hungry, Wolf?
As if ready to defend myself.
Yeah, right.
I did precisely as I was told, like I always had, and always would. Like the perfect little cripple, the daintiest darling in the world, I obeyed. I don’t know any other way.
I never did.
In the end, I’ll never know.
With the orphaned, laid open.
The word curlers. The phrase pissed off.
*
One writes in solitude.
Also, Proust added, one cries in solitude, reads in solitude, pleasures oneself sensually, all in solitude, safe from the eyes of others.
As Virginia Woolf pointed out, even folding the bed sheets (something mindless like that) can throw everything off, dispel the silent listening that leads to writing.
Isolation heightens the ear, and also, our demands of the text.
One day, we’re sick of the books that used to entertain us (Baudelaire warned us: Amusement is boring), and just like that, we develop a craving for unruly writing, the kind that accentuates its strangeness, that centers—not on anybody’s story, not on anybody’s problems—on the meaning of the world and eternity.
The writer goes quiet.
The reader never breaks the silence.
Anything else is just indulgence.
Anything but the willingness to face what we are; what, maybe, we could be.
*
She wrote:
Dearest daughter, my greatest wish come true,
my only possession that is truly mine.
My father, on the other hand, took me to the zoo, saved me from the bogeyman. He held raffles, soccer games, Carnaval murgas with all the neighborhood kids. One New Year’s Eve at midnight, we raided abuela Tarsila’s kitchen and then stormed the street banging our pots and ladles, under a shower of firecrackers, sparklers, bottle rockets.
Love of my love.
Cerro de la Gloria.
Forever reciting that poem about David Garrick, the English actor.
Best of all, he tells me bedtime stories.
El Rey Narigón is a lush invention. After the handsome King’s nose grows to enormous proportions, thanks to the Windbreaking Witch, he addresses his subjects from the balcony (like Perón?), and they pelt him with tomatoes, carrots, onions, and turnips, which the Queen gathers for that night’s stew. In another chapter, the young doctor, who hopes to win the hand of the princess by curing the king’s malady, scales the Aconcagua, plucks out an eagle’s tailfeather, gallops all the way to Paraná, dives into the river, stabs the belly of a crocodile dozing in the water, and reaches into his mouth to retrieve a magic potion sealed in a bottle of Seven-Up.
He takes me to the racetrack, where he has a horse, Yugo, and to visit Juan Gómez, his richest client, who drives a yellow Cadillac and owns the city’s first TV channel.
Funny, he even takes me to the movies.
He teases:
Why, it’s the middle of the night, and you’re still roaming the streets, aren’t you ashamed of yourself?
We see The Man with the Golden Arm and Let’s Make Love, in which Marilyn Monroe, his favorite actress, sings “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.”
*
A book is a perplexity of clarity, noted Edmond Jabès.
Writing, then, is like gazing at a face that never comes to light. Or, to put it another way: pushing language to the point of exhaustion, racing to attain silence.
Knowing or not knowing. Knowing and not knowing.
On this paradox and its implications, Juan Gelman wrote:
Can anything be seen in the poem? Nothing. It extends one / hand to grasp / the ripples of time moving / through the voice of a goldfinch. What / did it catch? Nothing. The / bird hurried off to the undreamed of / in a room that turns without / remembering or awaiting. / There are many names in the rain. / What does the poem know? Nothing.
At night, in bed, I hear my mother pacing the hallway.
From the freezing cold dining room to my bedroom door, miles.
Out back, the garden: a green square with one vine and vibrant pansies.
I knew those walks, long, relentless.
I hear her gasp, pause, and start again.
One night she wakes me up at the crack of dawn.
She helps me into my coat, right over my pajamas, and drags me along to find my father at the poker club.
I was, at most, six years old.
Wild, disheveled, dragging me by the hand, she maneuvers through tables clouded in alcohol and smoke.
I can’t believe they even let us in.
A man betting at my father’s table stops her cold: Ma’am, no self-respecting gentleman ever abandons a gaming table.
I don’t see any self-respecting gentlemen here, my mother replies.
*
If that were my only childhood memory, it would be enough.
The whole reality is there, as a trace, a pure distillation, with my fantasy of being invincible.
Is sadness news?
No siree.
It’s more like a galloping tune.
A flat expanse flooded with event, quiet novelty.
That’s the matter of my writing.
Matted thicket of the soul.
It’s also the matter of my life: ransacking worlds, recombining them.
I isolate the intrigue, add the paranoid angle, subtract the error of comprehension. The result is a Gothic tale, a cross between a cemetery and a stream of consciousness.
A passion complete with deviations, disorders, distortions.
Where did you come up with that? My mother would ask.
Take a good look at the photos, would you?
(She always refers to the evidence.)
There’s a little girl.
A well-nourished, neatly groomed little girl—a delight.
Her mother cares for her, protects her from the mumps, chicken pox, rubella, measels.
She puts her in a white smock and sends her off to school.
She helps her blow out her candles.
The little girl is wearing a Plumeti dress, with mother-of-pearl buttons and a pink silk ribbon. She’s fiddling with the bow in her hair.
Oh Mother: nothing can convince me.
I stick to lived experience (supposedly); I tweak its relationship to language.
Rage saves me from life.
*
I slept, then, habituated to fear.
As if not a child at all.
Was I really there, back then? Suddenly, mustering myself?
In the reaches of my sleep, did I compute a future?
into certain kisses
into the upwind of winter
better not enter
you see too much
or too little
do you know who I am?
yes an idea a tree-lined prison
what kind of wolf?
my little distant sun
these mists
I wrote those lines in Arte y Fuga.
No calm, ever. No quickening.
The time to speak was never nigh.
Then came the jolts. I’d choke down my fear, always bracing for your outbursts, your voracious whims.
In other words: a girl shut down, face twisted in pain.
Who knows what to expect from a thing in flames.
The words rat’s nest, the phrase You’re turning my gray hairs purple!
I swear, Mother, you were unappeasable, insuppressible, with your nameless obsession, buried rage.
And manipulations: you distort facts, you storm off, fuming, into bouts of seclusion.
As for me, you left me stranded in the writ of life.
An author staring down her dear, disastrous childhood.
Hunting, you forfeit what can’t be found.
You get rich off all that loss.
*
Writing is a serious task.
It’s more than sifting through the wreckage.
You have to etch your obsession in those ruins.
And then submerge, eluding the tedium of any present.
All it asks of you: be the storm.
Pull a thread from the spool of uncertainty and spin a blind idea.
Sometimes, along those twists and turns, you go far.
You quit being stupid.
You learn to carry the weight of scarcity.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you even manage to explain: what is a mad queen; how was it that she had sex with her mother, her father, her son, and her horse; when does Death barge in and spit out a flower petal; and why does the doll, opening her eyes, with nobody even noticing, cry out “This is the Live!” like she can’t speak without screwing up the spelling.
*
Her Asmopul.
A breathing apparatus that my mother named, musically, her chufi-chufi. A little tube leading to a rubber bulb, which she squeezes to dispense her soothing remedy.
Asthma—I later understood—is an erosion of the faculties, a torture that fogs your senses, plunges you into a dark cave where sorrow reigns in all its sameness, until you can’t perceive another soul.
Let alone tuck anyone in.
And so, I was the girl who waited up for a lullaby, or at least for her to exit the hallway and sit by my bed, even in her dreadful affliction.
Pointless.
By the end of her rounds, the night took me, alone, to the unknown. Not to know it, but to love it.
I clung to the dark.
To some end the world contained.
In that wasteland, back then, feelings dissolved faster than snow, and a shell grew over my heart.
It’s strange, growing up.
You take cover where you can. If not in tenderness, then something else.
Sometimes, I’d fake intelligence. Other times, I’d hone the art of deciphering the sounds in my
mother’s chest. Whatever might lend delicacy to my suffering.
(My favorite doll, the prettiest, was named Isabel.)
I would have preferred to disappear. Stamp out my thoughts, those balls of light that, when you hurl them at your problems, just bounce against the walls of your skull. Really, I just wanted a little grace, for my measly existence to, in some way, be enough.
I wanted it right now, constantly.
Consciously.
I often thought of the hallway—the perpetual withdrawal of love it represented—as a blessing.
It forced me to make peace with not knowing, to take what comes, calmly and sensibly, like a meal with mysterious ingredients.
Could that be a way to get by?
By clinging to less?
You might say that I, guided by the asthmatic angel, traveled through a single night that was every night of my life, my one and only hallway.
It traveled through me, too.
*
Is it possible to write what you live?
To start at a tiny footprint and write everything down, with no quotation marks, as if stitching together every miniscule, indecipherable letter?
Is it possible to compile an encyclopedia for a nonexistent world?
To replicate a rejection with rhythm?
Poetry, wrote Henri Meschonnic, is rhythm’s critique of the sign, and affect’s critique of the conceptual.
He meant, maybe, that schizophrenia can be helpful. You need to resist what you know, because all knowledge produces its own ignorance.
Apart from that, it’s all the body.
Thoughts that form in your mouth.
What the ear picks up, between a hush and a hiss.
There’s no greater subjectification.
I sign my work with my mother’s maiden name when I start to write.
*
I was the older daughter.
I had the privilege of garnering every bit of her attention.
My mother and her tablets of stone.
Her Life and Genius, crashing into my rising sign, my dominant moon.
Her endless list of scarce supplies. So much scarcity, it becomes abundant, and above all, useful.
Sadness can move mountains, turn a den of lions into a red carpet, ready to celebrate the hour of the star.
She glanced down at me. Her digging eyes. Buried in me.
Marina Tsvetaeva: “Inexhaustible maternal source! With the haughty perseverance of a martyr, she demanded of me—let it be her!”
I was also, to paraphrase Arreola, the site of her apparitions.
I swear it, Mother.
I never made it out of your frozen field, that whirl of terrors. And the sadness never left my voice.
Sleepless doe behind a dark secret.
Things you can’t squeeze into ideas.
At some point, I started writing.
First, a personal diary.
Later, attempts at poetry.
I said:
Give birth or bust.
If I find the music, if I suffer rhythmically, if I refuse to give up, then maybe, I’ll reach such a level of desperation that my anxiety will transform into an engine of resilience.
Before long, I acquired skills, techniques, methods for embalming the dead.
All that effort for nothing more than a language of consonants and no bird.
*
Edmond Jabès was once asked:
How many pages are in your book?
Exactly eighty-four smooth surfaces of loneliness.
Tell me what those pages contain.
I ignore that.
If even you don’t know, how could anyone else?
The book.
*
I tell myself: people die sometimes.
If my memory serves me correctly, I’ll die, too.
I’ll die a lot. And not in the languages I learned later in life, but in the one I learned at the outset, effortlessly, back when they had to cauterize my nose because I was literally bleeding out.
I was a diligent student. Sometimes I got a B+.
And why not an A+? you ask.
That day, no affection.
Your sentences sliced by a knife.
With time, things got no better.
(Things never get better.)
Something was always missing.
Token praise and half-hearted attention don’t amount to much.
Mother, crypt, niche, altar.
A sad woman, in sum, who raved inside the girl I was.
Won’t I get sick of all this longing?
I’m asking you, dead as you please.
Lupus in Fabula.
In a footnote: explanations, echoes, paragraphs that are all teeth, all hunger, all lack, all slaughter, and all pleasure.
*
“An artist,” wrote Flaubert, “must convince posterity that he never existed. Does God, omnipresent, nowhere evident, ever let himself be known?”
Djuna Barnes agreed: “You have to be a little abridged of life to know life.”
Pessoa, too: “Life is detrimental to its own expression. If one lives a great love, he can’t utter a word about it.”
Dismal, to put it mildly.
I didn’t buy it.
I didn’t want to be a butterfly that an etymologist couldn’t stab with a pin.
I preferred to keep bleeding. With no dubitation.
With no peace in my heart.
I let the breath leave my body and threw myself to the fire.
I did great, Mother.
Never giving up, never giving an inch, I had you marked, surrounded.
The result: a list of grievances, a letter dressed up as an act of heroism.
I wrote:
In mounting tributes, echoes, stupor,
hope, I tithe you, I plunder you. cummerbunds, harnesses,
bridles, squad formation, foam at the mouth, ambushes. Gloomy air like a sound during war. With such perfect fervor the bellicose…
Literature is an elegant form of rancor.
(What a scandalous sentence.)
Translated from the Spanish by Michelle Gil-Montero
María Negroni (b. Argentina, 1951) is a poet, essayist, and novelist, considered one of the great literary figures of contemporary Latin America. Her numerous books include Islandia, Museo negro, Archivo Dickinson, El sueño de Úrsula, and El corazón del daño. She has received the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Siglo XXI International Essay Prize, among other honors, and her work has been translated into multiple languages. She lives in Buenos Aires and teaches creative writing in Argentina and abroad.
Michelle Gil-Montero is an Argentine-American translator, poet, and editor of the small press Eulalia Books. She has translated several contemporary Latin American authors, including María Negroni, Andrés Ajens, and Valerie Mejer Caso. She has received fellowships from the PEN/Heim, NEA, Howard Foundation, and Vermont Studio Center, and her translations have been longlisted for the PEN Poetry in Translation and National Translation Awards. Her recent translations include María Negroni’s Exilium (Ugly Duckling Press) and Berlin Interlude (Black Square Editions), and Valerie Mejer Caso’s Edinburgh Notebook (Action Books). She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Vincent College and lives in Pittsburgh.
*****
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