On Translating Marosa di Giorgio
Through surrealist imagery, Marosa di Giorgio simultaneously critiqued political regimes and bore witness to the world around her, a world she found to be in a constant state of transformation.
First published in 1987, two years after the civic-military dictatorship ended in Uruguay, La Falena (The Moth) is a collection of poems that function as allegories for specific acts of violence, both personal and communal, yet also extend beyond allegory, building an alternative historical narrative to the survival of a country of people. Within the context of ongoing violence, war, and genocide, di Giorgio’s poems offer a strong urge toward witness, creating vivid portraits of resilience.
The Uruguayan Dictatorship began in 1973, after the United States–backed coup d’état, and continued as an authoritarian military dictatorship until 1985. This was dangerous for writers and artists—many were tortured, censored and “disappeared.” During the dictatorship, and afterward, surrealism became not just an aesthetic form but also a strategy of resistance.
In La Falena, a strange and unpredictable sweetness counters the monotony of violence, and the suffering under persecution is often set within the natural world. Resilience surfaces: after the violence, the black butterfly remains, still present, although changed. The black moth in these poems is the erebid moth: the bruja negra, the black witch, or mictlanpapalotl in Nahuatl, which translates as mariposas del pais de los muertos, or butterflies from the country of the dead. In other poems in La Falena, the moth is absent, and the narrative focuses on the landscape of di Giorgio’s childhood.
In my translation, I’ve privileged sound and unusual syntax to respect the opacity of di Giorgio’s narratives. In my attention to the queerness of the text, I prioritize di Giorgio’s voice—“coats of calves, gazelles”— over the meaning of individual words when necessary, allowing sound to lead. For example, I choose “thicket” for “matorral,” a strategy of affect—Rosa is dressed in a rabbit fur coat to ward off all evil, but in the end, there’s a sacrifice in the thicket.
In the wild landscape, each scene is unpredictable, vibrant, alive.
Read the Spanish-language originals, “Mamá decía ‘coronas de novia,’” “Pasaban murciélagos,” and “Cuando tenía seis años,” and the English-language translations, “Mama said ‘wedding crowns,’” “The bats arrived,” and “When I was six years old,” that this note is about.
Sarah María Medina is a poet and a fiction/creative non-fiction writer from the American Northwest. Her writing has been published in Prelude, Black Warrior Review, Poetry magazine, Poetry Northwest, Split This Rock, Raspa Literary Journal, and elsewhere. Her work is also found in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books, 2018), and Bettering American Poetry Vol. 2...