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Theory Of A Good Death by Argentine Poet Maria Negroni

Theory of a Good Death (2002)

BY MARIA NEGRONI (1951- )

 

In the bluish climate of a stony city, they are

burying me. I watch and say:

Leave her alone. Can't you see she's alive? Don't

you see her face twitching?

"It's true," someone says. "It's not time for her to

die yet. She hasn't practiced enough. Love's

exactions have not been written on her soul; there

are still a few partitions between her and life.

Something must advance to its center like a

question. Must dare petition and surrender. Must

thrust a signpost into her sand image, to see what

the mouth makes of silence. She has to live."

So they let me live. The stranger is still talking but

I can't understand him. He says something about

the Good Death: a secret, an indispensable error,

loving face-to-face, something like that. Then he

evaporates into a stronghold of shadow and I, half-

troubled, half-content, board a train and abandon

the last city on earth.

 

                                                                     ***

 

Theory of a Good Death appears in Maria Negroni, Night Journey. Translated by Anne Twitty

 

                                                                     ***

 

Dreams. Writing dreams. Without inserting logic

 

                                                                     ***

 

‘Music of serene horror’ (Jorge Monteleone)

 

                                                                     ***

 

This interplay between subjugation and domination is one of the recurring themes in Night Journey; the subject / object’s resistance to helplessness is coupled with the rare understanding that this helplessness is a destiny that must be fulfilled

 

Only through surrender —can the poem be completed and the writer pass beyond the limits of the known, to the other side of the dream mirror

 

One of the virtues of María Negroni’s literary enterprise has been to accomplish this transformation without disrespecting the dream state or subjecting it to interpretation (Anne Twitty)

 

                                                                     ***

 

I have always thought that poetry is a kind of epistemology of unknowing. That is, for one to write, one has to venture into the unknown. Because as George Steiner says, beauty is connected to the idea of rupture, the rupture of the known, the conventional. If one was to repeat something they know already, no aesthetic effect is produced. This aesthetic effect arises from questions that have no answers. For this reason, writing comes from the place that remains unknown and, in any event, the work of the poet is delve into that unknown, because you can always explore further. One can always, as Beckett says, fail better (MN)      

 

***

 

María Negroni (born 1951 in Rosario, Argentina) is an Argentinian poet, essayist, novelist and translator

She graduated from Columbia University, with a PhD in Latin American Literature. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She was a visiting professor at New York University, in 2008

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