The History of Violets

Born in Salto, Uruguay, in 1932, Marosa di Giorgio was one of the most prominent poets of her generation, and yet The History of Violets, originally published in 1965, is the first full-length work of her poetry to appear in English. One oft-cited statistic states that only 3% of the books published in the United States are in translation, but even so, it is surprising that a celebrated poet with nearly twenty published collections could remain unknown to Americans for so long.

The sequence of 35 prose poems that makes up The History of Violets teems with flowers, pearls, eggs, potatoes, onions, olives, and grapes, and the setting—which we can gather from the introduction is based on the farm where the author was raised—is as fertile a place for memory and imagination as it is for flora and verdure. The poems are filled with sensory descriptions; we don’t just see things, we feel and smell hear them:

That summer the grapes were blue—each one big, smooth, without facets—they were totally strange, fabulous, shining with an awful blue brilliance. On the paths through the vines you could hear them, growing with a deep, outrageous murmur.

And in the air there was always the perfume of violets.

Even the plants which were not grapevines bore fruit.

The similes Di Giorgio uses throughout this collection never stray from the sequence’s framework of vegetal and botanical growth: “the peaches are like sinister rosebuds,” the “tomato like a carnivalesque orange,” and the daisies “like golden rice.” While it can sometimes grow tiresome to read, it is impressive that Di Giorgio has come up with so many unique descriptions within this limited lexicon, and the incessant repetition and reorganization is effective in creating a feeling of overwhelming abundance.

Di Giorgio’s poems are replete with fairies, butterflies, and angels, but there is little whimsical or precious about them. What initially seems an idyllic garden becomes much more complex as the sequence moves forward; a darker presence is lurking in the vegetable patch, and even the mushrooms sprout from corpses (“I do not dare to eat them; that most tender meat is our relative”). Among the ominous adult figures of druids, ghosts, and thieves, not even the flowers are safe:

The gladiolus is a spear, its edge loaded with carnations, a knife of carnations. It jumps through the window, kneels on the table; it’s a vagrant flame, burning up our papers, our dresses... That crazy lily is going to kill us.

Death is continually present in these poems, but it is described from a child’s perspective and it is not always clear who has died or under what circumstances. In the first poem, the speaker remembers “your dazzling death,” but we do not know to whom she speaks. When, one night, a rabbit is shot in the potato patch, the poem’s speaker becomes the hare, experiences its pain, remembers its memories—as if the child’s imagining of the rabbit’s experience has become one of her own recollections. Nearer the end of the sequence, the speaker’s sister is taken away by “the god”—“with his long braids, his woolen cloak, his colossal wooden staff.” Here we also see the strange, childlike blending of pagan mythology and Catholic iconography, which occurs throughout the collection:

And the virgin is there, painted in the sky... And an angel—so tiny—appears beside her forehead, gleams for an instant, disappears, shines again. Suddenly, he hurls himself to the ground, runs through the grove of trees, steps into the house, leans over my apple pie, stares at me.

In her memory, it seems, she is unable to distinguish between imagination and reality, making her recollection of death bizarre and difficult to fully comprehend.

While other translations of Marosa di Giorgio’s poems have appeared in anthologies of Uruguayan poetry—and more will appear in a new anthology, Hotel Lautréamont, forthcoming from Shearsman in October—The History of Violets gives us a more extensive and seductive glimpse at her work than we have seen thus far. Jeannine Marie Pitas has done a commendable job of bringing these odd and sensual poems into English. Translation, of course, is subjective—there is never one definitive way of carrying a poem from one language to another. And while the original Spanish text is slightly weirder and more vague than its English counterpart, The History of Violets is a lovely collection of poems in English and a testament to the translator’s own strong, poetic voice.