Wonderlust in Motion
from Elegy for Joseph Cornell by María Negroni
Translated by Allison A. deFreese
the map
[hand-drawn map of the world]
When I return to my castle of origin, I will write a nocturne with a clair de
lune and call it My Poetic Astronomy. I will imbue it with the excitement of
the night, as it has been recorded over centuries--with its priestesses, its
crimes, its waters that cross the borders of the world and disappear into
nothing. This has been my life. An excursion into untraveled terrain in
order to hide myself, at last, in the music of words, and to remain
unreachable to myself. I never managed to cry, or to love, or to plunder
the facts. All I did was cross the sky in my imagination, like a tremor,
leaving behind traces of the vivacious universe.
Notes for a Short Biography
I.
The man loved getting lost in the city in which he lived. He was born at 1:13p.m.
from a blue heart inside a seashell that someone left in a hotel room. We know
that his mother loved playing the piano and that his father sold fabric, that
several children lived in the house--including one who was paralytic—and that
they all played together on Utopia Parkway. These were earthly games with the
semblance of prayers—as are all games—and the children threw themselves into
their play as if they were magicians or trapeze artists or flea trainers in the
mythical circus of their youth. The children had grown up now, and the man
worked alone in the basement. He had surrounded himself with metonymies of
his own body and with them assembled small boxes that contained the world
that, as you know, contains everything, even children with disabilities.
Meanwhile, the city outside continued to exist--no more, no less that he did.
Sometimes, his fever rose and these were wonderful days because the streets
filled with increasingly ephemeral (that is, more indispensible) objects, and the
man went out, cloaked in his own amazement, as if this were any moon or any
ordinary language. In his mind, however, nothing had changed. The garden was
crowded with teddy bears, his mother continued baking cakes, and the basement
burned like a wheelchair each time his brother asked for a star—or for any other
equally impossible and wonderful object.
[Translator’s note: The following translations of prose poems by María Negroni (Spanish
language, Argentina) are excerpts from Elegía Joseph Cornell/Elegy for Joseph Cornell, a
book about the experimental New York Artist Joseph Cornell and his subjects (including
poems written from the perspective of actors in Cornell’s revisionist fairytale film
Children’s Party). María Negroni’s work often tackles feminist themes (for instance,
recasting Cornell’s Godiva as “Good Eve”), and constantly tests the boundaries of genre
classification, gender, and form.
Originally published in Spanish as a book of poetry, Elegy for Joseph Cornell is at
once a monologue, a collection of metafictional microfictions; a series of poems; an
artist’s quest; the hero’s journey; a filmography, biography, bibliography and inventory;
a travel scrapbook and a guidebook for creativity. In short, neither Joseph Cornell’s
work nor María Negroni’s words fit, quite literally, into predictable “boxes.”
Photo cover by Julia Dragan