Revealing the core of his work led to María Negroni To publish “Permanent collection” (Random House), a set of texts that at times look like a literary or thinking workshop, a manifesto of resistance to banality, the bases of his poetics of uncertainty. After returning from Berlin, where the International Artists Program (DAAD) gave him for a year what he needed to write a new work (where they had previously been Gombrowicz, Tarkovski, Samanta Schweblinamong others), we dialogue with the consecrated poet, essayist and novelist about his new work.
Journalist: Is your new book an attempt to make the reader stop to think?
María Negroni: It is an attempt to gather what I thought, felt and read in a life dedicated to writing. I called it “permanent collection” because there is the core of what appears in my other books, as if it were a kind of poetics, all writers have a poetic, a system of ideas about what we understand that literature is, but many do not explain it, it is in their works. They are, at the same time, those who have written about their conception of writing, poetry, their interests. In my case, it seemed to me that it made sense to tell what this writer thinks about writing, how he sees it, what things happen to her. I have been exploring different forms of expression. Each book is a microuniverse with a specific aesthetic proposal. I sought now how to connect “The Annunciation” with “Oratory”, with “Archive Dickinson”, with “SATIE OBJECT”. And “permanent collection” came to say what is always in that personal museum.
Q.: In the book there are, among many other things, a literary workshop where he dialogues with a teacher. Does it refer to someone who formed it?
MN: I am always fan of Emiliy Dickinson. I have worked a lot, I have translated it, I have dedicated “Archive Dickinson”. When they opened their files in Harvard, their correspondence appeared, about three thousand letters. To premiums, to relatives, to a shepherd, but there are ten who begin “Dear Master”. He intrigued who that teacher was. Some say that he was a pastor who met in Philadelphia, others the philosopher Emerson, other Thomas Higginson, editor and critic who in an era proposed marriage, the truth is that it is not known. I loved the idea of having an imaginary teacher. Obviously the two parts are myself, and perhaps he has the atmosphere of a literary workshop. In the book there are other teachers, referred to by their books- who are also our teachers- or by the apocryphal interviews that I make to writers that I admire how Dickinson, Valery, Huidobro, Satie, Macedonio, Robert Walser …
MN: And someone less famous, Hilda Doolittle …
MN: It is very important for me. I wrote about her, I translated it. In the twenty years I lived in the United States I wrote a lot about poets. HD, as she signed her poems, is an extraordinary character. He was Ezra Pound’s girlfriend. One day he says I’m going to London and he didn’t come back. Pound, in addition to talented was very ambitious, married Yets’s daughter. When Doolittle is going to look for him, he is with another. The whole story of HD is an attempt to compete with him. He has a terrifying life, he leaves his daughter in a boarding school. There are things about her that resonate me: how does a woman do to integrate love with writing, to be located in a relevant place.
Q.: Did you also look for resonances in Alejandra Pizarnik?
MN: My doctoral thesis at Columbia University was “the lucid witness” about his prose work, his cursed texts, which appeared posthumously. I spent reading his work and everything about her. One of my breached wishes would have been to access Pizarnik’s library. When you access the library of a writer one realizes where her aesthetic, intellectual exploration is going, what is her project, what she looks for.
Q.: That is why in the book shows your library?
Mn: I propose to “do it yourself.” It is the list behind my desk. They are not the books that I read constantly, but they are the ones that cannot be missing behind mine. Not only is the bias of my readings but also the bias I choose to write.
Q.: Is your book of miscellaneous like some of Borges, Bioy, Cortázar, Piglia?
MN: It is an Argentine genre that takes marginality and mixes it with erudition and cosmopolitism. It is a way of positioning itself before the wealth of the culture of the world and from the margin appropriate it. When I settled in the United States, I sent him the “Iceland” manuscript to an editorial that publishes books in Spanish. They rejected it because it was not Latin American literature. Later I understood that “Iceland” did not meet the stereotype revolution, violence, strange flavors, rhythmic music, sex, an engendro that is attributed to us and that we must provide the market. Some time later the book was published. The translator presented him in Paris Review, and the editor called me and began to talk to me about Borges, the Icelandic Sagas and Buenos Aires. I told myself this man, where my book came from. It is very problematic as it is received in the central countries what we do.
Q.: Can your book be taken as a manifesto of resistance to banality?
MN: Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil”, and now we are suffering from the evil of banality. Banality is a dead end. What we have left is to stop in a place and say no, this game I do not play it. When Juan Gelman stayed at home until he got department, because he came to work at the United Nations. One day we talk about the banality of Argentine poetry of the nineties. I shared my unease. “Don’t be confused, they intend to be poetry books, and they are not.” “Cronos,” he repeated, “Cronos.” Anyway, the nineties are repeating themselves. Gelman is another teacher. I still dialogue with him.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
