I Remember Nightfall

by Marosa Di Giorgio, Marosa Di Giorgio

Poetry. Translated from the Spanish by Jeannine Pitas in a bilingual edition. Cover art by Basil King. This new translation of Marosa di Giorgio, one of Uruguay's most famous poets, includes four book-length poems from the middle of her career: The History of Violets (1965); Magnolia (1968); The War of the Orchards (1971); and The Native Garden is in Flames (1975). Occupying the same childhood landscapes that may be familiar to English-language readers from the previously published volume The History of Violets (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), these serial prose poems explore memory, familial relationships, erotic desire, and war. Marosa di Giorgio uses the recurring setting of a garden as a stage for the ongoing encounter of nature and the supernatural.

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

320 pages, Paperback

Published August 1, 2017

About the author

Marosa di Giorgio (1932–2004) was a Uruguayan poet and novelist.

Marosa di Giorgio is considered one of the most singular voices in Latin America. Critics tend to agree that her writing is greatly influenced by European surrealism, although her vocabulary, style, and imagery are uniquely her own. Her work deals predominately with the imaginary world of childhood and nature.

In the past few years, Latin American critics such as Hugo Achugar, Luis Bravo, Leonardo Garet, Sylvia Guerra, María Alejandra Minelli, and María Rosa Olivera-Williams have explored Marosa Di Giorgio's writing. Uruguayan poet Roberto Echavarren published in 1991 "Transplatinos", which offers an excellent introduction to Di Giorgio's writing. Selected poems from The March Hare have been translated into English by K.A. Kopple and published in the 1995 by Exact Change Yearbook. An article discussing gender politics, parody, and desire (as elaborated by Gilles Deleuze) also written by K.A. Kopple appeared in March 2000 in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. In'Identity, Nation, Discourse: Latin American Women Writers and Artists, edited by Claire Taylor (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), Soledad Montañez opens up a new discussion of Di Giorgio's erotic writing. Montañez shows how "Di Giorgio's erotic prose illustrates the representation and performance of patriarchal hierarchy as a perverse comedy, creating a genre that constructs gender narratives in order to undermine the patriarchal system from within."Montañez also affirms that "The effect achieved in Marosa's radicalised narrative is ultimately a mocking performance, a burlesque discourse that reveals and denounces domination and power. Through a perverse representation Marosa exposes the complicated matter of culturally constructed sexual norms and develops a writing that is at the same time disturbing and astonishing" (2009: 158).

In 1982 she received the Fraternity Award for literature

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

When it rained heavily, in buckets, that river formed under that bridge, and in the distance, the mail truck passed. And my grandmother made us come close to the hearth, the burning firewood; there the three of us stood, or sat, with our striped aprons, our lukewarm slippers, and she served us sweets, honey, and spoke to us with great joy, as if we were old ladies like her, or else small children, younger than our actual age. And the cats like great owls, the tiniest house. And water, water fell from the bright clouds. And some neighbor—one of those who dwell in the pasture, in the grove—was hurrying toward the house, under the olives, the crazy magnolias, until she reached us, bearing a basket of eggs, mushrooms, recently boiled potatoes. Then, we all laughed together. And water kept streaming down from the white clouds.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mama swears that a dead man has risen; she mentions her father and mother and starts to cry. /The pink gladiolus opened up in our house/. But scare it off, tell it to go./ That crazy lily is going to kill us." In Marosa di Giorgio's poems, events unfold in a phantasmagorical universe full of talking plants and mushrooms, in which all times of the narrator's life seem superimposed upon one another in a manner similar to Proust's.

[Katie Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lush language, vivid images Giorgio explores the familiar made fantastical, a Home and garden landscape imbued with the dream and nightmares of fairytales.


The language can feel repetitive, especially if you read quickly. Still, her language is lush and beautiful and full of amazing phrases


Your dazzling death
The night fell like a century

[Sarah · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a three-for-one, collected works type of deal. But every poem, across at least the first two books, does basically the same thing. Lots of very cool nature imagery and surrealism--or magic realism? hard to say, precisely--but all operating on dream logic. The end result being that when my library loan was up, I was OK just saying I was done.

[Leia Penina · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVE.

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bilingual Spanish/English. Glorious. Worth owning and worth gifting.

[Greg Bem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ah di Giorgio! To be read before sleep and to be invited into a world of many surprises!

[Ruth Martinez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gorgeous writing, surreal.

[Cody Stetzel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Di Giorgio is a master of the prose poem. Endlessly inventive and evocative, I want to transform within her poesis.

[Madeline · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 stars to do Giorgios original poems. 4 stars to Pitas’s translations.

[Brian Brogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

She creates strange magic, a luminous world with dark fringes. Brilliant imagination.

[Isir Eline Braathen · Rating 5 out of 5]

uvirkelig, vanvittig

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore fragmented prose poems, especially if there's a touch of surrealism underneath a woodland and/or folkloric setting. Uruguayan author Marosa di Giorgio’s I Remember Nightfall fits all of that criteria. A few years ago, I read her other prose poetry collection, The History of Violets (which is also worth your while), but this particular collection caught my attention thanks to Jose Hernandez Diaz, who taught some of Giorgio’s work in one of his recent prose poetry courses. The whole class agreed: Marosa Di Giorgio is a treasure.

[Hawke Trumbo · Rating 5 out of 5]

“That girl wrote poems that were frenzied and sweet, with a taste of peaches and bones and birds’ blood” (81).

If you’re searching for a book in which you can lose yourself, in which you can be swept away by language and butterfly wings, please consider Marosa di Giorgio’s I REMEMBER NIGHTFALL!

Each page is a portrait of childhood dreamscape, rooted in the flowering family tree.

[Ryan Bollenbach]

Four different collection of prose poems from Di Giorgio depicting childhoods in haunted gardens, family houses, and what figures visit from the surrounding forests. Beauty, ghostly, flower and food-obsessed. Everything is alive and most things are as gossamer as they are haunting. Magnolia and the War of the Violets were my favorite collections, but all of them are worth it.