A flower from Uruguay: Crossings and the poetry of Nidia María di Giorgio Médici
Book Cover: Flores Raras
Crossing borders has many forms –physical, psychological, spiritual, linguistic and more.
Translation of poetry can be understood as a crossing. A fragile and sometimes magical conveying of meanings and aural experience, it is a unique way to understand and share the human experience across time, place and culture. One language becomes another, albeit imperfectly, and over time the practice changes the translator too—enriching the practice of reading, listening, speaking, and thinking. One develops a habit of noticing unrealized possibilities in the space between intended and received spoken expressions. These expansive habits begin in literary reading, and later become a reflex, changing how we hear ordinary conversations and silences, and how we perceive crossings of every kind.
The work of poets Silvia Guerra and Jesse Lee Kercheval, who gather and translate the poetry of Uruguayan women, is a rich example of crossing borders through poetry and translation. Their recently published anthology, Flores Raras: Poesía de Mujeres Uruguayas (March 2023, Montevideo) raises the voices of Uruguayan women poets from 1797 to 1939, and their bilingual anthology now in progress will bring excerpts from that work to an English-speaking audience. Women’s voices are preserved, life as they knew it becomes part of history, and many unplanned crossings occur, as readers from Uruguay and the world come to understand different times and places and recognize ways in which they are both unique and universal.
Invited to contribute to this work as a translator, I was asked to choose a poet whose work resonated with me. I was drawn to Nidia di Giorgio Médici, a living writer and accomplished poet who also spends time preserving the legacy of her sister, poet Marosa di Girgio Médici, who also appears in the collection. I chose Nidia because of her lyric voice, her inventive layered natural metaphors, and the way she writes about life from the places of her childhood. I thought our shared Italian heritage might help me in some way, and the way she had shared life and art with her sister echoed sisterhood, feminist scholarship, and approaches to shared reading that are important to me. And she was one of the living authors from the collection, so I hoped that I would be able to talk to her someday.
Here I share translations and reflections about two of her poems from the anthology, along with some of her own reflections about her writing. I was fortunate to be able to record a bilingual reading and interview with the author.
In the first selection, “Todo era Confuso,” or “Everything was Confusing,” di Giorgio evokes love and loss of many kinds, expected and unexpected. It moves across the human life course and overcomes our haggard flesh, and takes on other forms, from the light of the moon to an orange tree to a germinated seed tossed by the wind.
Todo era confuso
Misteriosamente
pudimos abandonar
los esqueletos
las viejas pieles
la carne macilenta.
La luna cómplice
llegó hasta nosotros
nos dio transparencia
nos prestó luz.
Entonces deseé
desandar el tiempo
volver a la tierra
cálida a la época
de los naranjos
del surco abierto.
Busqué, busqué mucho.
Las semillas germinadas
también habían
seguido el viento.
Todo era confuso.
No sabía dónde
encontrar el amor.
Everything was confusing
Mysteriously
we were able to abandon
the skeletons
the old skins
the haggard flesh.
The complicit moon
touched us
gave us transparency
lent us light.
Then I longed
to retrace time
to return to earth
warm, in the time
of the orange trees
of the open furrow.
I searched and searched.
The germinated seeds
had also
followed the winds.
Everything was confusing.
I didn't know where
to find love.
Another poem from the collection, entitled “Ventanitas por el Cielo” or “Little Windows in the Sky” takes the question of where to find love, or at least where to look for it, in another direction. We might be looking out from Nidia’s girlhood garden, or the larger landscape of Uruguay, or perhaps even the vast expanse of poetry. In any case, di Giorgio directs us to an eye in the sky, a place of seeing that we can all see. This skyscape is both particular and universal, making borders irrelevant, and opening beyond.
Ventanitas por el cielo
El cielo es un pergamino con un ojo pintado en amarillo.
Cae el sol como lluvia dorada transparente.
Las mariposas pliegan las alas en los escondites de las flores.
Los pájaros danzarines de plumas dibujan el nido, rehacen el breve lapso del amor.
Tomados de la mano cruzamos la inmensidad.
Y se abren ventanitas por el cielo.
Little windows in the sky
The sky is parchment with an eye painted in yellow.
The sun sets like transparent golden rain.
Butterflies fold their wings in hiding places among the flowers.
The dancing feathered birds outline a nest, recreate the brief moment of love.
Hand in hand we cross the immensity.
And little windows open in the sky.
Every poem stands alone–an invitation to feel and make meaning with words, sounds and spirit. At the same time, it is a conversation with the poet about poetry itself. I was fortunate to be able to talk with DiGiorgio about these matters–What is poetry? What is a garden? What does it mean to cross borders, of place, time and language?
Nidia takes her definition of poetry from Venezuelan poet Jean Aristeguieta, “Poetry is the essence of everything.” Her sister, Marosa di Girgio, a renown Uruguayan poet as well, adopted that definition which they shared. Gardens? “They are wonderful,” she says, “visited by butterflies and hummingbirds. Our garden is fixed in my memory as the beauty of my childhood, with the many colors of the flowers. I am honored that you chose to translate my work, and it delights me that we have some shared ancestry, and especially that we had sisters with whom we could share all that is real, and all that is spiritual in our lives.”
About the Author
Lori DiPrete Brown teaches in the UW-Madison School of Human Ecology and directs the 4W Women and Wellbeing Initiative, which is the home of the Women in Translation Project. She holds degrees from Yale College, the Harvard School of Public Health and the Harvard Divinity School, and has worked throughout Latin America in Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras. Her novel, Caminata: A Journey, is based on her Peace Corps service in Honduras, where worked in a youth development program and first came to know and love the Spanish language.