Words

Maria Negroni joined the Spanish faculty in 1999. A poet writing in Spanish, as well as a translator, Negroni says, “Poems don’t have nationalities. If a poem works in its language, it is translatable.”

After coming to the United States from her native Argentina, Negroni began translating in order to better comprehend American poetry. “I wasn’t sure I was aware of all that was happening in these poems. If I tried to render them in Spanish, I’d be able to fully grasp what they are doing and how they are doing it.”

For her, translation became a form of close reading. “A literal translation is a contradiction in terms,” she says. “Content in a poem is inseparable from form: ideas do not exist independently of syntax, rhythms, prosody. Therefore, a good translation requires a new creation.”

But, Negroni notes, “there’s always a gap, a divorce, between word and world. This alienation becomes even more apparent in literary translation, since translation, as we know, duplicates the process, possibly taking the equation to a more puzzling degree. The word aspires to be as complete as its object (be it another word or a primal reality) but is always, to greater or lesser extent, only a fragment, an approximation.”

“No need to worry; what is lost in the process (from reality to original, from original to new version), may turn out to be an escape from the ‘prison of language,’ opening up new possibilities of meaning.”

Negroni’s own work has been translated into English by Anne Twitty. “When I hear my translator read my poems,” says Negroni, “it is as if I was listening to it for the first time. It’s wonderful—she gives my work back to me.”