Elegy for Joseph Cornell

María Negroni (Rosario, Argentina) has published over 20 books including poetry, collected essays and novels. Islandia, Night Journey, Andanza (The Tango Lyrics), Mouth of Hell, and The Annunciation have appeared in English, and her work has also been translated into Swedish, Portuguese, Italian, and French. María Negroni received a Guggenheim fellowship for poetry in 1994, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship in 1998, the Fundación Octavio Paz fellowship for poetry in 2001, and The New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in 2005. She also received a National Book Award for her collection of poems El viaje de la noche, a PEN Award for Islandia as best book of poetry in translation (New York 2001), and the Premio Internacional de Ensayo y Narrativa de Siglo XXI for her book Galería Fantástica. She taught at Sarah Lawrence College from 1999 to 2014, and is now director of Argentina’s first creative writing program, at Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero. Allison deFreese has previously translated works by Luis Chitarroni, Carmen Irionda, Amado Nervo, and other Latin American writers. Her writing and literary translations have appeared in 60 magazines and journals, including: The New York Quarterly, The Indiana Review, Southwestern American Literature, Borderlands, Puerto del Sol, Many Mountains Moving, Southword (Munster Literary Centre) and Poetry Kanto (Japan).

"If there are traces of my long and secret conversations with Cornell’s boxes in my previous books, Dark Museum and Small, Illustrated World (and also in my translation of Dime Store Alchemy, a book Charles Simic wrote in honor of the artist), then the text that you, the reader, now have in your hands may serve as a record of my encounters with his films. Specifically, my new exploration begins with this film image: The little girl who passes by us, naked, atop a white steed, her hair covering her body as if she were a miniature, unsettling, version of Lady Godiva (this image appears in his film Children’s Trilogy)."—María Negroni, from the Prologue