Jasmine for Clementina Medici

by Marosa di Giorgio

Translated from the Spanish by Peter Boyle, with an introduction by Roberto Echavarren. In this extraordinary last book by Uruguayan poet Marosa di Giorgio poetic fragmentation, memories, nightmares and brief surreal sequences create a portrait of a mother, her daughter and the relationship between them stretching over a lifetime. Simultaneously evoking childhood and old age, tenderness and horror, di Giorgio gathers the sense of an entire life in its sadness and dignity. One of the great renovators of Uruguayan literature, through her bold experimentalism di Giorgio blurs lines between genres to deliver the raw immediacy of experience. Jasmine for Clementina MEdici is the final book-length installment of Di Giorgio's opus, The Savage Papers. As such it is the culmination of a magnificent oeuvre. Long have we known of the great men of Latin American poetry, but this book is a powerful reminder that this vast, poetic landscape is populated by many great women as well: from Mistral to Bracho, from Pizarnik to Di Giorgio. This is a translation of major proportions. Indeed, Boyle could be Di Giorgio's ideal translator: like the Uruguayan's, so much of Boyle's own poetry is becoming increasingly marked by the trespass of generic boundaries, and the entwining of the living and the dreamed, of microscopic observation with philosophical enquiry, of syntactical play with a commitment to patient witness. -- Stuart Cooke