Clara B. Jones
A Review of Marosa di Giorgio's I Remember Nightfall
Clara B. Jones is a knowledge worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other writings, she is author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal [GaussPDF, 2019]. Clara, also, conducts research on experimental literature, radical publishing, as well as, art & technology.
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A Review of Marosa di Giorgio's I Remember Nightfall
I Remember Nightfall
Marosa di Giorgio
Translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018
318 pp
$22 (paper)
Marosa di Giorgio
Translated by Jeannine Marie Pitas
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018
318 pp
$22 (paper)
"As a rule a father prefers his daughter and a mother her son; the child reacts to this by wishing, if he is a son, to take his father's place, and if she is a daughter, her mother's." Sigmund Freud
“The temporal is only a symbol.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Publication of I Remember Nightfall is part of a relatively recent “recovery project” highlighting unrecognized, or forgotten, female artists—including, the American “beat” poet, Elise Cowan (Ahsahta Press) and the Brazilian poet, Ana Cristina César (Parlor Press). Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004), Uruguayan lawyer, actress, and poet, was raised by her hard-working Italian immigrant family on a farm in rural Salto, a “readymade” world of flora and fauna—including, human fauna—for her vivid imagination and mental, if not physical, escape from loneliness, even, trauma. “Marosa” means “lover of freedom,” an apt description for her fluid transformations and configurations of words, images, Nature, music, and occasional soft rhyming. Jeannine Marie Pitas' stunning translations of di Giorgio's lyrical, narrative prose verses demonstrate a childlike wonderland inhabited by familiar, altered, and devised people, situations, memories, as well as, other animate and inanimate events, phenomena, and things—a conjured fantastical environment. The feminist prose poet, Holly Iglesias, has theorized that the prose poem symbolizes the “boxes” in which women have traditionally been confined—kitchens, bedrooms, nurseries, playrooms, convents—like di Giorgio, farms.
The bilingual I Remember Nightfall comprises four separate texts packaged as a single volume and paginated consecutively—a wise editorial decision since, in effect, the compositions may be viewed as a long-form poem that should not be read as discrete sections but as fluid elements, in some instances, interchangeable, using the same symbolism throughout, a feature that, in addition to, the poetic form, unifies the text—though the Uruguayan scholar, Carmen Boullosa, has commented that di Giorgio, “always wrote the same book.” Indeed, the author is reported to have characterized her complete oeuvre as a single project, and the reader might interpret the prose poem form as a malleable element for “collage” writing with the capacity for combinatorial play. Such a linguistic trait might be received as symbolic of a fragmented reality in the Postmodern sense—representing social and political chaos such as that experienced by di Giorgio in Uruguay, including a period of urban guerilla warfare and military dictatorship. War is referred to several times in the text; however, it may be a mistake to perceive di Giorgio as a “political” poet since, according to the Uruguayan scholar, María Carolina Blixen, the poet was primarily consumed by her writing throughout life.
Di Giorgio's poetic style has been labeled, variously, as “expressionism,” “magical realism,” “surrealism,” and “neo-gothic.” One might, also, argue that many of these verses are examples of “grotesque” literature in which empathy resides with cruelty—represented by other notable female writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Iris Murdoch. As several writers have pointed out, the “voice” of di Giorgio's poems is childlike, and, in her verses, the narrator is referred to as being, eight or nine years old [“I was only a little girl with a crown of braids.”, 259], “sixteen” [279], and “not yet twenty” [257]. This girl's persona should be read as Marosa herself, clearly indicated repetitively in the text [“Marosa,” “María,” “Rosa María,” “Marge,” “Virgin (María)” and, speculatively, “Mario,” “Maríano.”] Di Giorgio's persona is, as well, symbolized by iconography, possibly, alter egos or imaginary intimates—plants [roses, carnations, magnolias, violets, squash], animals [rodents, hares, birds, butterflies, bats]—each of these living entities having its own symbolic meaning in myth and literature, indicating multiple facets of personality, situation, locality, and space—differentiated and complex.
Di Giorgio's poetry encompasses myth, fable, and unconscious processes; although, despite Pitas' report that the author was not prone to revision, the verses seem intentionally composed, not a product of automaticity [an ideal of the Surrealists]. Similarly, many of the poems are “indeterminate,” incomplete, and di Giorgio often leaves us hanging. This characteristic, also, seems, to me, a purposeful conceit. I do not “read” di Giorgio as a naif despite the childlike posture she adopts in her poems. The writer is aware of life's possibilities and contradictions—both pain and beauty, love and violence, acceptance and rage.
She displays a genuine fondness for her maternal grandparents [section two, Magnolia, is dedicated to her grandmother], but she has an ambivalent relationship to her mother who is foreboding and powerful:
But, I Remember Nightfall is not only about a girl's unhealthy, love-hate bond with her mother. Moreso, we are in the depths of a familial triangle—child, mother, father, and the book's conceptual framework is a classic, Freudian “Electra Complex” [see epigraph] involving Marosa's love for “Papa” [51] and the ultimate trauma—the betrayal of that love and trust by his emotional and physical violations [257]. In several places throughout the text, the child-woman portrays herself as a victim of men, a possible source of her conflicted rage directed toward her mother's failure to protect her. Perhaps the female iconography mentioned above represents a “doubling” [“mirroring” in Lacanian psychoanalysis] of Marosa and her mother, a possibility that the poet may have been aware of—possibly, as a result of some intimate knowledge with psychoanalytical treatment so pervasive among the privileged classes in Uruguay, as reported by the Uruguayan psychoanalyst, Ricardo Bernardi. On the other hand, Marosa's primal instincts may, simply, be releasing her covert psychological motivations.
Clearly, it is a straightforward exercise to interpret di Giorgio's work in terms of Freudian theory, investigating the interaction of conscious, subconscious [e.g., dreams], and unconscious processes. In psychoanalysis, the patient undergoes “talking therapy” [“free-association” and dream interpretation] to access latent mental content negatively influencing current behavior, including, language [e.g., “Freudian” slips] and other creative, generative acts. If we follow Freud's paradigm to consider erotic and morbid features of thoughts and actions, we can identify these elements in di Giorgio's writing that include overtly sexual allusions, e.g., “corrola” representing female genitalia; “mushrooms” representing “phallus” or nipples; autoeroticism; orgasm; homoeroticism, as well as, numerous examples of her ambiguous, conflicted relation to sex, including, her knowledge that sex is considered a sin in her Catholic tradition [though she, or her persona, pursues it, anyway].
Though di Giorgio''s poetry lends itself to interpretations of hallucination and pathology [“crazy” occurs several times in I Remember Nightfall], Pitas and Blixen have communicated to me via e-mail that there is no evidence that the author underwent analysis. In fact, according to Pitas, her family vigorously denies it. On the other hand, even if these demurrals are accurate, an article by the Uruguayan psychoanalyst, Denise Defey, reports that Uruguay has high rates of depression and suicide and there has been a tradition of untrained analysts and networks of informal therapy groups in the country; thus, it cannot be excluded that di Giorgio had intimate knowledge of and with “talking” therapies in one way or another. The translator, Jessica Sequeira provided two articles, one describing di Giorgio as “the madwoman of Uruguayan letters,” the other as, “la rara.” Via e-mail, Blixen stated that di Giorgio was called, by some, “'rara' o 'extravagante'” On the other hand, in a book chapter, Teresa Porzecanski depicts di Giorgio as a retiring, rather parochial, old maid; however, since di Giorgio traveled extensively abroad and received at least one international prize, she may have been more sophisticated and worldly than she appeared to many. We know that the poet was perceived as strange, eccentric, and flamboyant, but, whatever the facts may be, many details of her biography are lacking or unclear, requiring systematic research by scholars and critics.
The psychological and linguistic are not the only levels at which a reader can consider the complexity of di Giorgio's collection. Her themes resonate with her documented knowledge of myths, perhaps, the stories of Demeter [agriculture and fertility] and Persephone [underworld]. Further, considering the poet's use of Christian symbolism mentioned above, religious motivation should not be taken literally since Uruguay is said to be the most secular of Latin American countries. Indeed, none of the writing in I Remember Nightfall should be taken at “face value,” particularly, since the author clouds so much in mystery. Di Giorgio was, also, no doubt, familiar with European fairy tales with their idealized and romanticized themes of good and evil—“surrealist dreamscapes” lending themselves to Freudian dream analysis. Consider, for example, the German fairy tale, “Snow White and Rose Red,”—“Rosy-Red / Will you beat your lover dead?” Again, the grotesque is apparent in this tale as well as in di Giorgio's compositions [“We devoured her and it was like she was alive. / The ring I now wear was once hers.”: 49].
Comte de Lautréamont was the nom de plume of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, a French poet born in Uruguay whose writing di Giorgio must have been familiar with. Lautréamont's only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on 20th Century arts and letters in Europe, particularly on the Surrealists who championed interpretation of unconscious motivation, especially, dreams, and who strove to practice “automatic writing.” According to Bernardi, and other direct and online sources available to me, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan are major figures in psychoanalytic traditions and practice in Uruguay—Klein's program advanced ideas about how the child's “existential anxiety” manifests in the unconscious [71: “...he / searched the wardrobe, drawer by drawer; he looked into the album; he / asked which one was Celia. We showed him my little sister. / He chose her.”], and Lacan's project addressed the notion of “desire” to be recognized by the “other” [253: “There / were only two dwellings in that vast region. 'Ours' and 'the other.' Our / family and 'the other;' that was how we referred to each other.”]. The scholar, Bruce Dean Willis, has pointed out that a theme of South American poetry is “recognizing one's self in one's other.”
In conclusion, di Giorgio's writing expands our understanding of Latin American literature at a time when women in the arts are receiving well-earned, though delayed, recognition. Consistent with this project, it is important to determine the extent to which she was engaged with feminism—intellectually and/or actively. Who, for example, were her friends? Did she live a “liberated,” “bohemian” lifestyle like many other female artists of her generation? The poet, Cristina Peri Rossi, has stated that “feminism began very early in Uruguay,” women enjoyed working—preferring to be single mothers, and they “detested” marriage and domesticity. Was di Giorgio a woman who broke traditional rules? Did she participate in the sexual freedom associated with a “unisex culture,” as Rossi describes the 1960s and 1970s in Uruguay among artists and intellectuals? The feminist scholar, Soledad Montañez, analyzing di Giorgio's “erotic prose,” claims that the poet “constructs gender narratives in order to undermine the patriarchal system from within.” At this point, many issues regarding di Giorgio—her work and her life—must remain indeterminate—like so many of her poems. Perhaps, she has written her verses and her biography to be intentionally ambiguous with regard to meaning and interpretation. Whatever the case, I highly recommend I Remember Nightfall to any reader who appreciates noteworthy innovative writing. Marosa di Giorgio deserves a wide audience and international recognition.
“The temporal is only a symbol.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Publication of I Remember Nightfall is part of a relatively recent “recovery project” highlighting unrecognized, or forgotten, female artists—including, the American “beat” poet, Elise Cowan (Ahsahta Press) and the Brazilian poet, Ana Cristina César (Parlor Press). Marosa di Giorgio (1932-2004), Uruguayan lawyer, actress, and poet, was raised by her hard-working Italian immigrant family on a farm in rural Salto, a “readymade” world of flora and fauna—including, human fauna—for her vivid imagination and mental, if not physical, escape from loneliness, even, trauma. “Marosa” means “lover of freedom,” an apt description for her fluid transformations and configurations of words, images, Nature, music, and occasional soft rhyming. Jeannine Marie Pitas' stunning translations of di Giorgio's lyrical, narrative prose verses demonstrate a childlike wonderland inhabited by familiar, altered, and devised people, situations, memories, as well as, other animate and inanimate events, phenomena, and things—a conjured fantastical environment. The feminist prose poet, Holly Iglesias, has theorized that the prose poem symbolizes the “boxes” in which women have traditionally been confined—kitchens, bedrooms, nurseries, playrooms, convents—like di Giorgio, farms.
The bilingual I Remember Nightfall comprises four separate texts packaged as a single volume and paginated consecutively—a wise editorial decision since, in effect, the compositions may be viewed as a long-form poem that should not be read as discrete sections but as fluid elements, in some instances, interchangeable, using the same symbolism throughout, a feature that, in addition to, the poetic form, unifies the text—though the Uruguayan scholar, Carmen Boullosa, has commented that di Giorgio, “always wrote the same book.” Indeed, the author is reported to have characterized her complete oeuvre as a single project, and the reader might interpret the prose poem form as a malleable element for “collage” writing with the capacity for combinatorial play. Such a linguistic trait might be received as symbolic of a fragmented reality in the Postmodern sense—representing social and political chaos such as that experienced by di Giorgio in Uruguay, including a period of urban guerilla warfare and military dictatorship. War is referred to several times in the text; however, it may be a mistake to perceive di Giorgio as a “political” poet since, according to the Uruguayan scholar, María Carolina Blixen, the poet was primarily consumed by her writing throughout life.
Di Giorgio's poetic style has been labeled, variously, as “expressionism,” “magical realism,” “surrealism,” and “neo-gothic.” One might, also, argue that many of these verses are examples of “grotesque” literature in which empathy resides with cruelty—represented by other notable female writers such as Flannery O'Connor and Iris Murdoch. As several writers have pointed out, the “voice” of di Giorgio's poems is childlike, and, in her verses, the narrator is referred to as being, eight or nine years old [“I was only a little girl with a crown of braids.”, 259], “sixteen” [279], and “not yet twenty” [257]. This girl's persona should be read as Marosa herself, clearly indicated repetitively in the text [“Marosa,” “María,” “Rosa María,” “Marge,” “Virgin (María)” and, speculatively, “Mario,” “Maríano.”] Di Giorgio's persona is, as well, symbolized by iconography, possibly, alter egos or imaginary intimates—plants [roses, carnations, magnolias, violets, squash], animals [rodents, hares, birds, butterflies, bats]—each of these living entities having its own symbolic meaning in myth and literature, indicating multiple facets of personality, situation, locality, and space—differentiated and complex.
And my heart remained like winter oranges, curdled and frozen; I
became delirious; they put me in the big bed and watched over me.
At times, I got up, paced through the rooms, fell back into bed. And I
always dreamed of that Rose, now a giant, who drank all the herbs, the
mushrooms, the hens, and above all, who had some other scheme fixed
in his mind...until at last the harvest was measured; the carts went out to
the village, filled with jewels, those gems thrown out by the plants. And
the old man left.
Through my fever I heard my mother tell me: “The old man Rose
has gone.” (155)
*
Her father came, having crossed all the land, all the fields; he knelt
down and nearly kissed her. She could still run away, once and for all;
the boundaries were clear, and beyond them lay other fields and other
kings, who perhaps would take her in sweetly, shelter her for life. But she
was sure of one thing: she was never going to take a single step beyond
the family property. Her father embraced her; he remembered the night
when he had conceived her, the tiny, the cry from the gut as she began
to be born; he looked at the stars that had sent the order; he kissed her
almost as if she were his bride, on her lips, on her breast that was naked
like a mushroom, and he killed her. (257)
Di Giorgio's poetry encompasses myth, fable, and unconscious processes; although, despite Pitas' report that the author was not prone to revision, the verses seem intentionally composed, not a product of automaticity [an ideal of the Surrealists]. Similarly, many of the poems are “indeterminate,” incomplete, and di Giorgio often leaves us hanging. This characteristic, also, seems, to me, a purposeful conceit. I do not “read” di Giorgio as a naif despite the childlike posture she adopts in her poems. The writer is aware of life's possibilities and contradictions—both pain and beauty, love and violence, acceptance and rage.
She displays a genuine fondness for her maternal grandparents [section two, Magnolia, is dedicated to her grandmother], but she has an ambivalent relationship to her mother who is foreboding and powerful:
Then, my mother appeared with her box of letters;
I could see her slim form, her well-hidden shoulders. I had to close
my eyes and dig my nails into the grass in order to contain myself, but
I followed her cautiously until she crossed the threshold and sat down
on the bed and started to sort through some recently arrived postcards;
then, I attacked her; I scratched at her clothes; her breasts popped out,
big, fat, smooth, with pink tips, like two gorgeous fungi, two singular
mushrooms...[S]he recognized me, she stared at me straight in the
eyes, but I tore at her violently, and then almost immediately, she died. (119)
But, I Remember Nightfall is not only about a girl's unhealthy, love-hate bond with her mother. Moreso, we are in the depths of a familial triangle—child, mother, father, and the book's conceptual framework is a classic, Freudian “Electra Complex” [see epigraph] involving Marosa's love for “Papa” [51] and the ultimate trauma—the betrayal of that love and trust by his emotional and physical violations [257]. In several places throughout the text, the child-woman portrays herself as a victim of men, a possible source of her conflicted rage directed toward her mother's failure to protect her. Perhaps the female iconography mentioned above represents a “doubling” [“mirroring” in Lacanian psychoanalysis] of Marosa and her mother, a possibility that the poet may have been aware of—possibly, as a result of some intimate knowledge with psychoanalytical treatment so pervasive among the privileged classes in Uruguay, as reported by the Uruguayan psychoanalyst, Ricardo Bernardi. On the other hand, Marosa's primal instincts may, simply, be releasing her covert psychological motivations.
Clearly, it is a straightforward exercise to interpret di Giorgio's work in terms of Freudian theory, investigating the interaction of conscious, subconscious [e.g., dreams], and unconscious processes. In psychoanalysis, the patient undergoes “talking therapy” [“free-association” and dream interpretation] to access latent mental content negatively influencing current behavior, including, language [e.g., “Freudian” slips] and other creative, generative acts. If we follow Freud's paradigm to consider erotic and morbid features of thoughts and actions, we can identify these elements in di Giorgio's writing that include overtly sexual allusions, e.g., “corrola” representing female genitalia; “mushrooms” representing “phallus” or nipples; autoeroticism; orgasm; homoeroticism, as well as, numerous examples of her ambiguous, conflicted relation to sex, including, her knowledge that sex is considered a sin in her Catholic tradition [though she, or her persona, pursues it, anyway].
Though di Giorgio''s poetry lends itself to interpretations of hallucination and pathology [“crazy” occurs several times in I Remember Nightfall], Pitas and Blixen have communicated to me via e-mail that there is no evidence that the author underwent analysis. In fact, according to Pitas, her family vigorously denies it. On the other hand, even if these demurrals are accurate, an article by the Uruguayan psychoanalyst, Denise Defey, reports that Uruguay has high rates of depression and suicide and there has been a tradition of untrained analysts and networks of informal therapy groups in the country; thus, it cannot be excluded that di Giorgio had intimate knowledge of and with “talking” therapies in one way or another. The translator, Jessica Sequeira provided two articles, one describing di Giorgio as “the madwoman of Uruguayan letters,” the other as, “la rara.” Via e-mail, Blixen stated that di Giorgio was called, by some, “'rara' o 'extravagante'” On the other hand, in a book chapter, Teresa Porzecanski depicts di Giorgio as a retiring, rather parochial, old maid; however, since di Giorgio traveled extensively abroad and received at least one international prize, she may have been more sophisticated and worldly than she appeared to many. We know that the poet was perceived as strange, eccentric, and flamboyant, but, whatever the facts may be, many details of her biography are lacking or unclear, requiring systematic research by scholars and critics.
The psychological and linguistic are not the only levels at which a reader can consider the complexity of di Giorgio's collection. Her themes resonate with her documented knowledge of myths, perhaps, the stories of Demeter [agriculture and fertility] and Persephone [underworld]. Further, considering the poet's use of Christian symbolism mentioned above, religious motivation should not be taken literally since Uruguay is said to be the most secular of Latin American countries. Indeed, none of the writing in I Remember Nightfall should be taken at “face value,” particularly, since the author clouds so much in mystery. Di Giorgio was, also, no doubt, familiar with European fairy tales with their idealized and romanticized themes of good and evil—“surrealist dreamscapes” lending themselves to Freudian dream analysis. Consider, for example, the German fairy tale, “Snow White and Rose Red,”—“Rosy-Red / Will you beat your lover dead?” Again, the grotesque is apparent in this tale as well as in di Giorgio's compositions [“We devoured her and it was like she was alive. / The ring I now wear was once hers.”: 49].
Comte de Lautréamont was the nom de plume of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, a French poet born in Uruguay whose writing di Giorgio must have been familiar with. Lautréamont's only works, Les Chants de Maldoror and Poésies, had a major influence on 20th Century arts and letters in Europe, particularly on the Surrealists who championed interpretation of unconscious motivation, especially, dreams, and who strove to practice “automatic writing.” According to Bernardi, and other direct and online sources available to me, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan are major figures in psychoanalytic traditions and practice in Uruguay—Klein's program advanced ideas about how the child's “existential anxiety” manifests in the unconscious [71: “...he / searched the wardrobe, drawer by drawer; he looked into the album; he / asked which one was Celia. We showed him my little sister. / He chose her.”], and Lacan's project addressed the notion of “desire” to be recognized by the “other” [253: “There / were only two dwellings in that vast region. 'Ours' and 'the other.' Our / family and 'the other;' that was how we referred to each other.”]. The scholar, Bruce Dean Willis, has pointed out that a theme of South American poetry is “recognizing one's self in one's other.”
In conclusion, di Giorgio's writing expands our understanding of Latin American literature at a time when women in the arts are receiving well-earned, though delayed, recognition. Consistent with this project, it is important to determine the extent to which she was engaged with feminism—intellectually and/or actively. Who, for example, were her friends? Did she live a “liberated,” “bohemian” lifestyle like many other female artists of her generation? The poet, Cristina Peri Rossi, has stated that “feminism began very early in Uruguay,” women enjoyed working—preferring to be single mothers, and they “detested” marriage and domesticity. Was di Giorgio a woman who broke traditional rules? Did she participate in the sexual freedom associated with a “unisex culture,” as Rossi describes the 1960s and 1970s in Uruguay among artists and intellectuals? The feminist scholar, Soledad Montañez, analyzing di Giorgio's “erotic prose,” claims that the poet “constructs gender narratives in order to undermine the patriarchal system from within.” At this point, many issues regarding di Giorgio—her work and her life—must remain indeterminate—like so many of her poems. Perhaps, she has written her verses and her biography to be intentionally ambiguous with regard to meaning and interpretation. Whatever the case, I highly recommend I Remember Nightfall to any reader who appreciates noteworthy innovative writing. Marosa di Giorgio deserves a wide audience and international recognition.
Clara B. Jones is a knowledge worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other writings, she is author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal [GaussPDF, 2019]. Clara, also, conducts research on experimental literature, radical publishing, as well as, art & technology.
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