“Her style is very particular; one can recognize it by reading a single line. It doesn’t resemble anyone else’s,” writes César Aira, describing Marosa di Giorgio’s work.1 Di Giorgio has one of the most distinct and recognizable voices in Latin American letters. Her surreal and fable-like prose poems invite comparison to the work of Kafka, Felisberto Hernández, Julio Cortázar, Alejandra Pizarnik, even Lewis Carroll or contemporary American poet Russell Edson, but di Giorgio’s voice, imagery, and themes—childhood, the Uruguayan countryside, a perception of the sacred—are her own.
The title of her ninth book, La liebre de marzo (The March Hare, 1981), is an homage to the inventive fiction of Lewis Carroll, but also to the wild hare that would “appear and disappear” in the fields of her childhood.2 Her entire work fuses the fictive and natural worlds. Di Giorgio (1932–2004) was raised outside of the city of Salto in northwestern Uruguay. Her family, immigrants descended from Italian peasants, owned two small farms, and her grandfather, Eugenio Medici, cultivated the land with the help of her father, planting orange and olive trees to recreate the Tuscan countryside. “A pioneer,” according to di Giorgio, he made his own wine and even raised silkworms.3 Her childhood in the countryside profoundly influenced her poems, which all take place in the same imaginary landscape—a farm enveloped by gardens and orchards. The poems revolve around the life of a young girl, similar to the protagonist in Alice in Wonderland, who escapes from her mother and family to interact with the surrounding flora and fauna. Throughout her prose fragments, all things—dolls, foxes, butterflies, grandparents—intermingle through endless exchanges that result in both eroticism and brutality.
Mesa de esmeralda (Emerald Tablet, 1985), her tenth book, is named after a text by the alchemist Hermes Trismegistus, an allusion that befits the endless transformations in di Giorgio’s poems. One of the tablet’s inscriptions states, “That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above,” merging the heavens and the earth. Similarly, di Giorgio’s poems shun hierarchy and hover at ground level, or slightly above the ground with the leaves and loquats, butterflies and branches. The poems span the whole of experience, fusing the angelic and diabolic, domestic and savage, masculine and feminine, biographic and mythic. Cows debate as if in parliament; beds sprout roots; a hermaphroditic snail (“man and maiden”) wanders through the garden; the birth of the speaker’s sister summons the three kings. According to Aira, “Marosa di Giorgio’s poetic world is made up of transformations, surprises, fluid conduits between the animal and human; it wavers between fairy tale and hallucination, and is ruled by a steadfast courtesy that does not exclude irony or cruelty. In her poems it’s not uncommon for the girl who narrates to make love to a horse, or a snail, or a witch, or suddenly lay a large green egg made of rubber, or a small red one of porcelain; to take flight, or die each and every night, or awaken as a spikenard, is perfectly commonplace.”4
Like Walt Whitman, di Giorgio expanded the same work throughout her career: Los papeles salvajes (The Wild Papers), her collected poetry, which unites fourteen books. The collection is comprised of a series of interrelated fragments, and, although many poems consist of narrative flashes, the book lacks a continuous arc. One unlikely event transpires after another. Even though it lacks a sustained storyline, the book is united by a sense of place, albeit imaginary—a house surrounded by violets and magnolia trees, orchards filled with orange blossoms, an elementary school. In addition, a recurring cast of characters, human and inhuman, shuffles in and out—a mother and father, grandparents, a sister named Nidia, cousins, the Virgin Mary, the Devil, butterflies, moles. Since her poems inhabit the same landscape, they can be read as one long meditation. In an interview, di Giorgio described the unity of her work: “It’s like a novel…. There isn’t a predominant, well-defined plot, like some novels, although nowadays they don’t always have one. I think of it as the recreation of a world, and for that reason it has one of the characteristics of a novel. At the same time, it’s a poem, since the language is eminently poetic. From one book to another there’s no separation. I’m still the same, telling tales, pressing on, steady, tenacious.” She described her work as a forest in which she plants more trees—or a fan that always has another fold.5
Di Giorgio titled her first book Poemas (Poems, 1953), and throughout her life insisted that she wrote poetry, not prose, although a glance at the works themselves, most of which lack lineation, would tempt one to call them prose poems. The expansiveness of prose accommodates her long catalogs of flowers and insects, and captures the lightning speed of the narratives. Russell Edson distinguishes between prose and poetry through their treatment of time: “Time flows through prose, and around poetry. Poetry is the sense of the permanent, of time held. Prose is the sense of normal time, time flowing.”6 If poetry is, in essence, a crystallization, then prose is a condensation, a falling rain. And so these poems present a tempest, not only of pebbles and locusts, but of memories, ghosts, faith, sadness, life, and death. Through prose, di Giorgio registers the erosions of time (“the flowers close forever behind me”), and the dawns within time (“sprouts of grass,” an egg hatching with “a rustling of ruffled paper”). The poems, however, are not without stays in the wreckage. New paragraphs designate changes in perspective or slow the poems to a meditative pace. One of the most innovative aspects of her work is how she slips seamlessly from prose into verse, often beginning a paragraph in the middle of a sentence, interrupting the syntax, like a line break. By mingling the fluidity of prose with the concision of verse, she creates a malleable form in which time contracts and expands. It seems fitting that the poem that begins “God’s here. / God speaks,” about God’s presence in the world, casts the domestic scene in prose and the description of God in lines, uniting the eternal and ephemeral.
María Negroni describes di Giorgio’s voice as “a language of leaps, which deploys irresolvable phrases, sudden commas, and unexpected shifts in tense.”7 Di Giorgio’s punctuation is idiosyncratic, and commas and semicolons pepper her poems. Like Virginia Woolf, she often separates independent clauses with semicolons, which resemble a series of doors flung open by an incessant flow of thought, and her frequent commas, which disregard grammar and jostle the syntax, create a jolting rhythm. For the sake of clarity, I have removed some commas from the translations; however, in replicating her peculiar idiom, in many cases I have retained the original punctuation and run-on sentences. Interestingly, di Giorgio often employs commas to create a double resonance: “I searched for the book, in secret, I leafed through page after page.” Does the speaker search for the book in secret? Or leaf through it in secret? The ambiguous punctuation allows for multiple readings, blurring one event with the next and veiling the scene in mystery. Like Lewis Carroll, she is also fond of wordplay, and often disrupts her descriptions with alliteration, neologisms, and near homophones. These slight shifts in sound create a sense of improvisation and draw attention to the words as signifiers, the poem as act. Roberto Echavarren notes, “Due to similar sounds, words sprout one out of the other, like homophonic alternatives, to break or confound the established train of thought.”8 Echavarren cites two examples (“huesos, huevos”; “comedores, corredores”), both of which occur in my translation. It’s as if one word morphs into another. Here’s my attempt at the latter: “We walked through the dark kitchen doors / corridors.” As a translator, I have replicated these verbal effects cautiously, echoing the whimsy of the originals only when it felt natural in English. In the case of “huesos, huevos,” my translation—“bones, eggs”—ignores sound altogether, since I felt it was important to balance an image of death with one of birth.
Although di Giorgio never used the title Diadem for any of her books, it is the title she chose for a theatrical recital of her poems, which was first performed in the theater La Máscara in Montevideo in 1986. During these performances, di Giorgio, drawing on her background in theater, would recite a selection of poems, which lasted about fifty minutes, from memory. She would enter with a bouquet of carnations, and eventually scatter them across the stage, walking over the flowers in her bare feet. Teresa Porzecanski describes attending one of these recitals: “On the dimly lit stage, and seemingly without feet, as if it had flown there, a figure appears wrapped in a long, black garment, above which glows a mass of red hair, almost the color of carrots. It is a woman…. Her voice is serious, deep, and has what can be called a silky quality.”9 Di Giorgio performed recitals across the globe, including performances in Argentina, Venezuela, Mexico, the United States, Spain, and France. A version of the show was recorded in 1994 and included as a compact disk with the title Diadema inside her last book. She explained the origin of the title: “The word diadem occurs within the recital, but it’s also a garland of poems selected from different books. Therefore it’s a kind of diadem.”10 Since she used the title herself for a small selection of her poems, it seems like an appropriate title for this selection.
The title also alludes to the diadem that crowns the Virgin Mary, a recurring image in her poems. Di Giorgio was raised as a Catholic, and the traditions of the Church influence her poetry as much as the rural countryside. Her first poem, she insists, was inspired by an image of the Virgin: “My fascination with the Church arose from cloudy reveries incited by the prayer cards, and through them the Virgin Mary cast a veritable spell over me. I wrote my first poem to her beneath a lemon tree, mixing the fruits, the flowers, the open air and sun, with the white and blue prayer card of the Virgin.”11 The Virgin continually appears throughout her poems, and the diadem serves as an image of authority and femininity. A full circle, it is also a symbol of plenitude, and of eternity.
The Wild Papers, di Giorgio’s collected poetry, has been published four times, expanding over the years. The most recent version appeared in 2008, and gathered in a single volume nearly seven hundred pages of poetry. Diadem selects from poems over the course of this career, and offers a mere glimpse of her enormous productivity. This selection spans twenty-two years, showcasing poems from her fourth to her eleventh book. Her earliest efforts are comprised of longer narratives, so her fourth book, Historial de las violetas (The History of Violets, 1965), serves as an appropriate starting point, marking a shift to more concise and lyric forms. Since The History of Violets has already been translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas,12 I’ve only included one poem from that collection. The rest of the book continues where The History of Violets leaves off, from her fifth book, Magnolia (1965), to the last volume of poetry that di Giorgio published as its own book, La falena (The Moth, 1987). In 1993 she published Misales (Missals), a collection of erotic stories, which began a shift in her career toward longer narratives and more pronounced eroticism. It was followed by two more collections of erotic tales and a novel. Completed shortly before her death, her final book, La flor de lis (Fleur de Lis, 2004), culminated her life’s work, intermingling narrative, lyricism, and eroticism. During her later years, The Wild Papers continued to expand, but less steadily. She produced three more volumes of poetry, which were included at the end of subsequent editions of The Wild Papers but weren’t published as individual books. The final sequence, an elegy for her grandfather, consists of less than twenty poems. While these final three volumes merit attention, I have not selected from them, focusing instead on the middle of her career.
When asked which was her favorite book, di Giorgio responded, “It’s all the same book. I’m writing one book with many sections. Perhaps, The March Hare.”13 Because of the cohesion of her work, I did not feel obligated to represent each book equally, and have selected most amply from di Giorgio’s confessed favorite. In a career that begins and ends with longer narratives, The March Hare, at the midpoint, represents the pinnacle of her lyricism. The poems tend to be more compressed, and I feel that a generous sampling from this book balances the narrative strains that come before and after it. It should also be noted that di Giorgio wrote longer books as her career progressed. The History of Violets contains thirty-five poems, while The March Hare has approximately one hundred forty, and The Moth, two hundred fifty across five sections. The first section of Diadem, which groups four books together, reflects this difference. Finally, some of her early books, such as The History of Violets, devote a single page to each poem, but as her books grew in length she placed more than one poem on a page, and separated them with numbers or asterisks. The switch was probably a practical one, but the difference in form also slightly alters how one reads the work. Placing each fragment on a page presents them as poems, while the uninterrupted flow of fragment after fragment, especially with the omission of titles, looks more like a work of fiction. Since this is a short selection, I have bestowed on each fragment the dignity of its own page, but the book can also be read from cover to cover as an interrelated series.
When I traveled to Uruguay in August 2011, the poets Leonardo Garet and Myriam Albisu took me to what was left of the di Giorgio family farm. The house that had belonged to her grandfather had been torn down, and there remained only a crumbling pink wall beside a towering palm tree. The other house, which had belonged to her parents, was still standing—white with wood blinds. Since it was still occupied, we never went inside, but walked around and chatted with a blind woman who lived there. It was winter in Uruguay, and half the trees were leafless. A single white horse grazed in the pasture. It was difficult to imagine that this landscape had inspired the fecundity in di Giorgio’s poems, but I saw some flowerpots, growing herbs and cacti, beside the house—one in the shape of a swan. And in front grew a garden with bromeliads. A ladder led into a tree, and I could make out a few unripe lemons, hanging, green among the green leaves. A table with four chairs stood in the grass, where a girl might share tea with a doll or hare, or drink a glass of ochre wine and watch a butterfly, or a fairy with crimson dahlia in its hand, flutter through the air. I looked for the Devil tied to a jasmine with a bowl of milk. Even though I knew I wouldn’t find him, it was hard not to relate the farm to the poems. As di Giorgio notes, one thing blurs into another: “The five white tips of a lily are the same as the five silver points of a star. It’s like a reflection. So the star and lily transform, while remaining a star and a lily…”14
NOTES
All English translations are by Adam Giannelli, unless otherwise noted.
1. César Aira, Diccionario de autores latinoamericanos (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2001), 173.
2. Marosa di Giorgio, No develarás el misterio, ed. Nidia di Giorgio and Edgardo Russo (Buenos Aires: El Cuenco de Plata, 2010), 40.
3. Ibid., 72.
4. César Aira, Diccionario de autores latinoamericanos, 174.
5. Marosa di Giorgio, No develarás el misterio, 41, 76.
6. Russell Edson, “The Prose Poem in America,” Parnassus 5 (1976/77): 322.
7. María Negroni, Galería fantástica (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 2009), 90.
8. Roberto Echavarren, Marosa di Giorgio: devenir intenso (Montevideo: Lapzus, 2005), 9.
9. Teresa Porzecanski, “Marosa di Giorgio: Uruguay’s Sacred Poet of the Garden,” trans. Nancy Abraham Hall, in A Dream of Light and Shadow: Portraits of Latin American Women, ed. Marjorie Agosín (Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1995), 303–04.
10. Quoted in Leonardo Garet, El milagro incesante (Montevideo, Aldebarán, 2006), 60.
11. Marosa di Giorgio, No develarás el misterio, 43.
12. Marosa di Giorgio, The History of Violets, trans. Jeannine Marie Pitas (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling, 2010).
13. Marosa di Giorgio, No develarás el misterio, 147.
14. Ibid., 98.