{"id":173,"date":"2026-08-13T18:43:22","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T23:43:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/?p=173"},"modified":"2026-08-20T16:56:32","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T21:56:32","slug":"a-flower-from-uruguay-crossings-and-the-poetry-of-nidia-maria-di-giorgio-medici","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lacisreview.lacis.wisc.edu\/?p=173","title":{"rendered":"A flower from Uruguay: Crossings and the poetry of Nidia Mar\u00eda di Giorgio M\u00e9dici"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A flower from Uruguay: Crossings and the poetry of Nidia Mar\u00eda di Giorgio M\u00e9dici<\/h1>\n\n\n

Lori DiPrete Brown<\/h3>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"Book<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Book cover of Flores Raras: [escondido pa\u00eds] poes\u00eda de mujeres uruguayas<\/em>, featuring a light gray upper section with the title and a bright red lower section with an illustration of tree roots, resting on a wood surface.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Crossing borders has many forms \u2013physical, psychological, spiritual, linguistic and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translation of poetry can be understood as a crossing. A fragile and sometimes magical conveying of meanings and aural experience, it is a unique way to understand and share the human experience across time, place and culture.  One language becomes another, albeit imperfectly, and over time the practice changes the translator too\u2014enriching the practice of reading, listening, speaking, and thinking. One develops a habit of noticing unrealized possibilities in the space between intended and received spoken expressions. These expansive habits begin in literary reading, and later become a reflex, changing how we hear ordinary conversations and silences, and how we perceive crossings of every kind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work of poets Silvia Guerra and Jesse Lee Kercheval, who gather and translate the poetry of Uruguayan women, is a rich example of crossing borders through poetry and translation. Their recently published anthology, Flores Raras: Poes\u00eda de Mujeres Uruguayas<\/em> (March 2023, Montevideo) raises the voices of Uruguayan women poets from 1797 to 1939, and their bilingual anthology now in progress will bring excerpts from that work to an English-speaking audience. Women\u2019s voices are preserved, life as they knew it becomes part of history, and many unplanned crossings occur, as readers from Uruguay and the world come to understand different times and places and recognize ways in which they are both unique and universal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Invited to contribute to this work as a translator, I was asked to choose a poet whose work resonated with me. I was drawn to Nidia di Giorgio M\u00e9dici, a living writer and accomplished poet who also spends time preserving the legacy of her sister, poet Marosa di Girgio M\u00e9dici, who also appears in the collection. I chose Nidia because of her lyric voice, her inventive layered natural metaphors, and the way she writes about life from the places of her childhood. I thought our shared Italian heritage might help me in some way, and the way she had shared life and art with her sister echoed sisterhood, feminist scholarship, and approaches to shared reading that are important to me. And she was one of the living authors from the collection, so I hoped that I would be able to talk to her someday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here I share translations and reflections about two of her poems from the anthology, along with some of her own reflections about her writing. I was fortunate to be able to record a bilingual reading and interview with the author.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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