Located in rural spaces at the limit of the polis, the pastoral has traditionally used contrast to critique the corruption of political centers. It is a genre rooted in the edges of the home—between the tended and the untamed—and those oppositions encircle Carnation and Tenebrae Candle. Both terror and awe fill the opulent narration from a child’s perspective, one derived from the poet’s own upbringing on a farm outside Salto, Uruguay. In a translator’s note, Pitas observes that the Spanish volume was published during Uruguay’s military dictatorship in the 1970s, and di Giorgio was “conscious of the insidious ways in which tyrannical forces wield language in order to maintain their power.” Other tyrannical forces occur now in our age of the “Anthropocene,” where human interventions mean that no natural space escapes human impacts and where the pastoral’s dichotomies are upended. Joyelle McSweeney has described di Giorgio’s work as “necropastoral,” “a place where the farcical and outrageous horrors of Anthropocenic “life” are made visible as Death.”
This feeling of impending demise is already evident in the collection’s opening poem, where we encounter the line “It seemed as if everything was coming to an end.” The rural garden is quickly occupied by violent storms and perishing bird species. The sensation is one of saturation, the impossibility of absorbing neither vivid delight nor constant destruction in real time, which is a tension that often surfaces in the literature of the sublime. Pitas notes di Giorgio’s influence from writers like Blake, the Brontë sisters, Poe, and Dickinson, all of whom grappled with articulating a natural world amidst nineteenth-century industrial capitalism and incipient conditions of global climate change.
Of the many boundaries of the pastoral, in this collection the temporal is the most prominent, and it unfolds as a grappling with how to be amid continuing environmental change. “The land was teeming with animals” di Giorgio writes, “Tiny glyptodonts, and bigger ones, enormous ones . . . They didn’t brush against anything or even move, afraid of a calamity, of driving themselves to extinction.” Time is vividly simultaneous, with each event leaching into others and precluding any mechanistic understanding of cause and effect. “I looked all around me (even though by then it was absurd to speak of space and time),” di Giorgio writes, “and a pure light was burning; I saw others who had come before me (still, that idea of time).” This multiplicity of overlayed temporal perspectives indicates the baroque in di Giorgio’s work, the ornate operating alongside the organic. In this spirit, Pitas’s translation does not stand in a mechanistic relationship to a prior “original,” but rather uses a host of tools to cultivate in English the sensation of time in di Giorgio’s verse. For example, “A la medianoche, llegó el vendaval” is translated with a gerund rather than past preterit, giving an appropriately evocative gesture: “At midnight, the gale came rushing in.”
Boundaries are transgressed in this collection through rich imagery which dissolves binaries between “human” and “nature.” Formally, sentences sprawl and seep through punctuation, often with various levels of nested meaning. There are no hard breaks, and the numbered poems are beaded together. A fractal linkage emerges between the household, the garden, and the rural region, with each scale not only serving as metaphor and stage set but also alerting us to each boundary crossed. The gate is the site of arrival of the stranger who often remains strange, frequently only called “visitor”/visitante or “thief”/ladrón. They enter a space between the politics and materiality of the adult world and the fantasy and abundance of the child’s spiritual world. The garden, on the other hand, comes climbing into the home; potatoes and onions “went walking up the paths,” “eggs, jasmines, lilies were climbing out from their vases,” and “day and night, always at night, there were little animals in my room.” Parallel actions and descriptions unfurl for characters, creatures, weather, and plants, all of whom seem to become each other: “the ghosts pressed forward, the animals, the hail, sometimes running to hide themselves among wide vines.”
Reading di Giorgio recalls the dense, tentacular, interspecies connections of Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, which frames our epoch as an era of kinship between species “living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth” in a “thick, ongoing presence, with hyphae infusing all sorts of temporalities and materialities.” Aware of such entanglements, the poetic voice in Carnation and Tenebrae Candle communes with plants, and returns home to incomprehension— “Do they look like cancer, honeycombs, dentures? / I can’t explain it, I can’t tell anyone anything; no one else sees this, and they wouldn’t understand.” The child’s sensual outdoor experiences are defined by multiplicity, set against the empirical, patriarchal figure described as “an Oak Tree of Final Understanding.”
The pastoral has long stood in contrast to the empiricism of industrializing cities. The pull is not between what is true and untrue, as it was in the nascent urban centers of the Enlightenment, but rather between the comprehensible and incomprehensible. This theme is particularly potent amid contemporary political debates over truthfulness, and in di Giorgio’s Spanish this entwining and tension recurs in the verb entender or “to understand”: “vi el idioma, y lo entendí, enseguida, como si siempre, hubiera sido el mío” (“I saw the language, and I immediately understood it, as if it had always been my own”). We discern both a commentary and an interplay between the Spanish and English on the links between tending, understanding, and attending to all the particularities of a place. Often, the child engages with a pastoral space erased of the labor of tending. This position of not tending is also a humbled position of not understanding: at one point, the child recalls that “yo tenía miedo y no entendía de qué” (“I was afraid and couldn’t understand why”). Meanwhile, the child pre-tends within the adult world by feigning sleep or affecting an insincere happiness. This presentation of landscape in which tending is obfuscated, goes hand-in-hand with the obfuscation of understanding dialogues with Classical and European iterations of the pastoral that projected an idyllic Golden Age—erasing land disputes, genocide, colonization, or violent extraction.
Tending and comprehending in the pastoral setting also point to what happens when the bounds of the household, or even the polis, are tested. Di Giorgio’s language speaks to the now well-known wilds of virus, storm, and fire coming into contact with homes in 2020. What begins as the animated vegetable and flower leaving the garden becomes violent swarms of locusts and mysterious lurking beasts. “From the dark trunks of the orange trees fall mushrooms, sugar, orange blossoms,” di Giorgio writes, “I stretch out my hand and devour them, even though Mamá has forbidden me to take anything more than what she gives me at home.” Di Giorgio brings in the Catholic symbolism of Edenic transgression and the Fall, the Biblical fruits of olive, fig, and pomegranate, and a Plague of Locusts which descends toward the end. But these religious spurts unfurl within a landscape imbued with surrealism and sensuality, and there is never a direct relationship between materialism and faithfulness. Disaster, then, is not direct retribution. In fact, in the Anthropocene, nature-culture dichotomies dissolve as disasters are not natural but rather the result of human activity in the fault line of an ecosystem imbalanced by that same activity.
The pastoral space of liminality between the city and the forest—a boundary-crossing dissolved in the Anthropocene—is also the space of translation. Walter Benjamin, in his well-known essay “The Task of the Translator,” observed that “translation finds itself not in the center of the language forest but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering.” In translation as in pastoral tropes, transgression too far into the depths of the language forest may lead to disaster. Avoiding any such possible pitfall, Pitas’s translation preserves spaciousness to become its own poetry. In the opening lines of the collection, di Giorgio describes a cloud: “llena de granizos y silbidos, daba a ratos, su terrible uva.” Pitas’s translation links this line through rhythmic phrasing, pulling in vivid imagery, so that in English the cloud came “filled with hail and whistling, and every few minutes it sprouted its terrible grape.”
The pastoral genre is always political insofar as it concerns the scope of the city as well as the ways that people tend to the edges of the polis. This act of tending is performed again and again in Carnation and Tenebrae Candle, and these habits of interaction between humans and the natural become ways of world-making, which is a prominent impulse of di Giorgio’s. In this collection, translation is another tending—the world-making of repeated care—and Pitas’s translation is best described by a line from the collection: “everything there, meticulous, tender and nearly trembling.”
