Islandia: Maria Negroni’s Prose Poem

Islandia is a masterful, mixed-genre (prose-poetry and verse) literary work, alternating passages that tell of an island race of exiled, conquering, Nordic heroes, who have landed on and settled an island (presumably Iceland) and remained there for generations, self-enthralled by their own identities as sung in their own Sagas; and the sophisticated and complexly ironical, lyrical verses of the author’s own persona, herself isolated, self-reflective, and exiled – in present-day New York City. Themes from the two aspects of the work seem to approach each other without ever quite touching, across a chasm of mutually re-enforcing but sharply distinct senses of absence. The work is brilliantly translated from the Spanish by Anne Twitty and is presented here in a bi-lingual edition….an extraordinary cycle of poems written in two very different and contrasting forms-the Nordic, masculine, epic style of the prose poems, and the Mediterranean, feminine, mannered, lyric style, of the others. Anne Twitty’s translation of this masterful cycle has itself been carried out with great mastery.-Esther Allen