from Memory Rewritten

Mariella Nigro

Meditations
I

The question goes round and round
and creates a dark thought, an idea
that doesn’t convince itself of its whiteness.

What, why, who, when, how, where,
fruits that hang from the tree of desire,
fallen flowers or seeds suspended in the air.

Later, the wind carries them away,
pollen fertilizes other questions
in barren land.

And nobody answers.
II

“. . . if thoughts formed
like flowers at your temple. . .”
—Marosa di Giorgio, De Misales


I return again and again to the same tree
under the new fruits, the high flowers,
the rhizomes and roots in sight,
the fallen branches.

All of them, thoughts from the same meadow
where ideas graze in solitude and grow
until they release their buds, infertile eggs.

I weed the ground day after day a task
at the whim of the weak grazing
of tangled ideas without harvest.

And I am left with a humble bouquet of flowers
bejeweling my head.




III

If you think about love and the order of things
like Delmira
if the first source is the last boundary
and the final drop has already flowed at the beginning,

back toward the radiance and the mute roar,
forward toward the dim light and the echo,
today: amazement, chance,
the waning moon
and the standing flower broken. Like Delmira.

So, what door of what house encloses me,
what wind from what street frees me,
on what white of what page do you write to me?




Unfinished Acts

While sleeping, I say a long prayer while I whirl in my dervish dance and fly; while awake, I am mute and pinned to the ground.
While sleeping, I encounter truth; while awake, I doubt.

I go driving in the rain; the windshield wipers dry the tears of that glass.
But all the water in my eyes is still there.

Today the Popocatépetl Volcano is spewing out smoke and embers.
It’s also catching fire inside of me, because I’m still seated on a strangely
leaning chair, and my jade earrings keep swinging as the volcano
of Montevideo’s Cerro roars. 
And I straighten my back royally.

(They say the Atacama Desert has filled with purple flowers
but I am here with my scythe in this sterile wasteland
where I destroy my tree’s tiny buds.)

I love the round, the gorgeous allure
of Parmenides’ silver-plated sphere.
But not this colorful sphere with its cilia,
with its crown of tin and pins
that stalks every day in the window.




Departures
To Agustin
I

There’s a circle of fire about to be run through
like a ship shot through space
and you will be stronger than in the forceps of childbirth
 
My thought will go far away
And I’ll be there without you knowing

and I’ll be here
little by little, sporadically
following the line from the brooding hive

Now the farewell comes like a rip
and the shreds go with you into the air
and they always will

While you keep looking to the sky
though you can’t see the Southern Cross
there will be a point when my light refracts toward you

and I’ll be there like an indelible mark on your map
drawing itself
between water and blood.
II

There’s a sighting not of birds
but of a distant child
it’s a divination of their flight
a root in air, a wind from the south
that makes the mother tongue fly
and leaves it lost at a brown river’s edge
that the canals’ water won’t reach.

I hope to come and see its flowers and dawn colors.
To remind him that I am the stem.
And the trunk of his tree.
And his deciduous leaves.

Five hours earlier the sun will rise.
Five hours later he will read my last poem.

translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval and Jeannine Marie Pitas

Read the original in Spanish

Listen to the original read by the poet:

For over a decade, Jeannine Pitas and I have been working hard, separately and together, to translate the poetry of Uruguay. This small country has an unbroken chain of women poets stretching over two centuries that is really without equal. Our shared goal is to make this tradition and these women poets known around the world.

Jeannine Pitas is the translator of the Uruguayan poets Marosa di Giorgio (1932–2004), Amanda Berenguer (1921–2010), and Selva Casal (1930–2020). The poets I have translated include Idea Vilariño (1920–2009), Circe Maia (1932–), and Tatiana Oroño (1947–). Jeannine and I first worked together to translate Silvia Guerra (1961–), whose book Sea at Dawn is forthcoming from Eulalia Books. When we talked about our next project, we agreed Mariella Nigro was the next female Uruguayan poet who just had to have a book in English. Together, we set out to translate her selected poems, Memoria y reescritura (Memory Rewritten). I had already included Nigro’s essays on the work of Circe Maia and Ida Vitale (1923–) in the anthology of essays by Uruguayan women poets Mis razones: mujeres poetas del Uruguay: Ensayos (Uruguayan National Library, Press, 2019), which I coedited with the Uruguayan poet Virginia Lucas.

In her essays, Nigro makes clear she is not only an Uruguayan woman working in this rich tradition but also one who is especially aware of and inspired by the work of other poets. In her own poetry, Nigro often uses epigraphs from Uruguayan women poets. In the work published here, she opens the second section of her poem “Meditations” with an epigraph from Marosa di Giorgio: “If thoughts formed / like flowers at your temple,” words that echo in Nigro’s first lines, “I return again and again to the same tree / under the new fruits, the high flowers.” In her book Memory Rewritten, Mariella Nigro pays similar homage to many of the poets I have mentioned above: Amanda Berenguer, Circe Maia, Tatiana Oroño, and Ida Vitale, as well as younger poets, such as Virginia Lucas. These epigraphs make their own profound argument for the continuing power of this amazing poetic tradition.
—Jesse Lee Kercheval

Mariella Nigro (Montevideo, Uruguay, 1957) is a lawyer, poet, and essayist. She has published eight books of poetry and two volumes of literary essays. Her works include Impresionante Frida: poemario al óleo (Biblioteca de Marcha, 1997), Mujer en construcción (Vintén, 2000), Umbral del cuerpo (Ediciones la Gotera, 2003), El río vertical (Artefato, 2005), El tiempo circular (Yaugurú, 2009), Después del nombre (Estuario, 2011), Orden del caos (Vitruvio, 2016), and Frida y México: de visiones y miradas (Yaugurú, 2017). She received the Bartolomé Hidalgo Prize in 2011 and the Morosoli Prize, awarded by the Lolita Rubial Foundation, in 2013.

Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, and translator, specializing in Uruguayan poetry. Her latest poetry collections are America that island off the coast of France (Tupelo Press, 2019), winner of the 2017 Dorset Prize, and La crisis es el cuerpo (The Crisis is The Body), published in 2020 in Argentina by Bajo la luna. Her translations include Love Poems by Idea Vilariño (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), which was long listed for the 2020 PEN Best Translated Poetry Book Award, and The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems Circe Maia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), for which she awarded an NEA in Translation. Her translation, with Jeannine Pitas, of Mariella Nigro’s selected poetry, Memory Rewritten, is forthcoming with White Pine Press.

Jeannine Marie Pitas is the author of the poetry collection Things Seen and Unseen. Her translations of the Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio include The History of Violets and I Remember Nightfall, both from Ugly Duckling Presse, and Carnation and Tenebrae Candle (Cardboard House Press, 2020). Her other translations include Echo of the Park by the Argentinian poet Romina Freschi (Eulalia Books, 2019) and We Do Not Live In Vain (Veliz Books, 2020) by Uruguayan poet Selva Casal. Her co-translation, with Jesse Lee Kercheval, of Sea at Dawn by the Uruguayan poet Silvia Guerra is forthcoming from Eulalia Books. She lives in Iowa and is a professor of Spanish at Dubuque University.