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    Diadem: Selected Poems
    Diadem: Selected Poems
    Diadem: Selected Poems
    Ebook174 pages1 hour

    Diadem: Selected Poems

    By Marosa di Giorgio

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    Marosa di Giorgio has one of the most distinct and recognizable voices in Latin American poetry. Her surreal and fable-like prose poems invite comparison to Franz Kafka, Julio Cortázar, or even contemporary American poets Russell Edson and Charles Simic. But di Giorgio's voice, imagery, and themes—childhood, the Uruguayan countryside, a perception of the sacred—are her own. Previously written off as "the mad woman of Uruguayan letters," di Giorgio's reputation has blossomed in recent years. Translator Adam Giannelli's careful selection of poems spans the enormous output of di Giorgio's career to help further introduce English-language readers to this vibrant and original voice.

    Marosa di Giorgio was born in Salto, Uruguay, in 1932. Her first book Poemas was published in 1953. Also a theater actress, she moved to Montevideo in 1978, where she lived until her death in 2004.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateOct 16, 2012
    ISBN9781934414989
    Diadem: Selected Poems

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      Diadem - Marosa di Giorgio

      Introduction

      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

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