Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli
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Selected Poems of
Giovanni Pascoli
The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation
Series Editors: Peter Cole, Richard Sieburth, and Rosanna Warren
Series Editor Emeritus (1991–2016): Richard Howard
For other titles in the Lockert Library, see the list at the end of this volume.
Selected Poems of
Giovanni Pascoli
Translated by
Taije Silverman with
Marina Della Putta Johnston
Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford
Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press
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All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019936641
ISBN: 978-0-691-19826-2
ISBN (pbk.): 978-0-691-19827-9
eISBN (e-book): 978-0-691-19422-6
Version 1.0
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Editorial: Anne Savarese and Jenny Tan
Production Editorial: Ellen Foos
Text and Cover Design: Leslie Flis
Production: Brigid Ackerman
Publicity: Keira Andrews and Jodi Price
Copyeditor: Anne Cherry
Jacket art: Shutterstock
The Lockert Library of Poetry in Translation is supported by a bequest from Charles Lacy Lockert (1888–1974)
Contents
Introduction ix
Chronology xxiii
from Myricae / Myricae
Patria / Birthplace 3
Alba festiva / Sunday Dawn 5
Allora / Back Then 7
Fides / Fides 9
I puffini dell’Adriatico / Puffins of the Adriatic 11
from L’ultima passeggiata / The Last Walk
Arano / They’re Plowing 13
Galline / Hens 13
Lavandare / Laundresses 15
La via ferrata / Track 15
Festa lontana / Faraway Festival 17
Quel giorno / That Day 17
Già dalla mattina / Since Morning 19
Carrettiere / Wagoner 19
In capannello / Huddle 21
Il cane / The Dog 21
O reginella / Little Queen 23
Ti chiama / She’s Calling You 23
from Finestra illuminata / Lit Window
Mezzanotte / Midnight 25
Un gatto nero / Black Cat 25
Dopo? / Then? 27
Un rondinotto / Baby Swallow 27
Sogno d’ombra / Dream of a Shadow 29
Il bove / The Ox 31
Vespro / Dusk 33
Canzone d’aprile / April Song 35
Alba / Dawn 37
Stoppia / Stubble 39
L’assiuolo / Owl 41
Temporale / Storm 43
Pioggia / Rain 45
Novembre / November 47
Il fiume / The River 49
In chiesa / At Church 51
Mare / Sea 53
Sogno / Dream 55
Il lampo / Lightning 57
Il tuono / Thunder 59
Dalla spiaggia / From the Shore 61
Notte di neve / Night Snow 63
I gigli / Lilies 65
from Primi poemetti / First Little Poems
La quercia caduta / Fallen Oak 69
L’aquilone / The Kite 71
Nella nebbia / In the Fog 75
Il libro / The Book 77
Il transito / The Stopover 81
from Canti di Castelvecchio / Canti of Castelvecchio
L’uccellino del freddo / The Winter Wren 85
Nebbia / Fog 89
L’or di notte / The Night Hour 91
Canzone di marzo / Song for March 93
Il gelsomino notturno / Night-Blooming Jasmine 95
La guazza / Dew 97
L’imbrunire / Nightfall 99
Temporale / Squall 101
La mia sera / My Evening 105
Le rane / Frogs 109
Casa mia / Home 113
Il bolide / The Meteor 119
from Diario autunnale / Autumn Diary
Bologna, 2 novembre / Bologna, November 2 123
Torre di San Mauro. Notte dal 9 al 10 novembre / San Mauro
Tower. Night between November 9 and 10 125
Bologna, 14 novembre / Bologna, November 14 127
Bologna, 12 dicembre. Narcissi / Bologna, December 12. Narcissi 129
from Odi e inni / Odes and Hymns
L’ultimo frutto / Last Fruit 133
Il cane notturno / The Night Dog 135
Crisantemi / Chrysanthemums 139
from Nuovi poemetti / New Little Poems
Il naufrago / The Drowned 143
from Poesie varie / Various Poems
L’amorosa giornata / The Loving Day 149
A una giovinetta (cartolina) / To a Girl (Postcard) 153
Il poeta ozioso / Idle Poet 155
Acknowledgments 157
Notes 159
Selected Bibliography 179
Introduction
Though Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) is known in Italy as a consummate poet of nature, his verse inhabited by trees, birds, streams, and fields, the most fitting image with which to open a book of his work might, in fact, be a train—not the elaborately tailored carriage that brought Pascoli back to Bologna during his final months of illness at the age of fifty-seven, but the trains of his youth. By the time of the poet’s birth in 1855, trains were everywhere in Italy’s consciousness. The first railways in the separate kingdoms of the South and the North had been running for a decade. Now tracks were being laid throughout the peninsula, creating essential infrastructure for the single government that would, in 1861, replace Italy’s discrete states. As distances between landscapes began to collapse, the regional cultures so vividly merged in these poems met one another with new intensity in the nation itself.
Transporting Pascoli between his family’s tiny village in Romagna and the larger world, trains offer an emblem for the fundamental ambivalence in his life and in his verse. They brought him away from the setting of his childhood, but they never fully delivered him elsewhere. Poised between two centuries, his poems inhabit this limbo, as they straddle the natural landscape of the poet’s roots and an industrial revolution that undermined the very notion of roots. Pascoli’s refusal to choose any one location, tradition, or even time frame over another results in constant tension between the static past and a welcoming, continuous present.
Past riverbanks where cattle
calmly graze, the track unfurls
a dusky line that shines a long
way off . . .
he writes in “Track” from “The Last Walk” sequence in his first book, Myricae. The enjambments in this early poem suggest the bluntness of Pascoli’s departure from the riverbanks of his childhood and the tragedy that defined it. When the poet was eleven, his father was murdered—shot while returning to the farming estate he managed in the central region of Romagna. The widow and eight Pascoli children were forced to leave the farm without money and in a state of shocked grief. A year later and within weeks of each other, Pascoli’s mother and eldest sister died of sudden illness. Tragedy amplified into catastrophe when the younger of Pascoli’s two elder brothers died the following year. Five years later and after Giovanni had won a full scholarship to the University of Bologna, his eldest brother died too, leaving the poet as guardian of his four younger siblings. The deva
station of these early deaths remained vivid for Pascoli, whose grief continued to inspire his poems, even as he experienced it through the shifting perspective and sense of continuum that one might experience from the window of a train.
Two decades after he left his first job as a high school classics teacher in the southern town of Matera, Pascoli recalled the journey that brought him there, this time in a horse-drawn carriage, “cradled by the motion, and by the sweet and monotonous songs of the coachman.” Incorporated into the rhythms of his poetry, the cradling movement he describes becomes the backdrop for Pascoli’s principal subject: a yearning for childhood. This reverence for longing can be traced to classical figures from Homer to Horace, but it ties Pascoli especially to Dante, whose exile from his home in Florence inspired the linguistic revolution of La divina commedia. Dante’s Florence finds a counterpart in Pascoli’s Romagna, and Pascoli’s verse is motivated by the same aim of popularizing classical language (and elevating popular language) that compelled his predecessor. Lines move easily between archaic diction and vernacular speech, though always within the formal terms of poetry. In transferring longing for family and hometown onto the objects of the ordinary world (from grazing cows to train tracks), Pascoli’s poetry reiterates loss through a constant exploration of the poet’s local and present surroundings. One critic explains that Pascoli came to poetry “as to a reserve of objects that were once alive and to which life could be restored.”1
The influence of more modern poets is likewise apparent. English-language poets Shelley and Poe were significant for their incantatory rhythms and playful rhymes. The synesthesia of French symbolist poetry is pervasive in Pascoli’s verse, though always integrated into his broader linguistic vision. The title of Pascoli’s third book, Canti of Castelvecchio, recalls Giacomo Leopardi’s 1835 Canti, and much of the work in Pascoli’s second and fourth books, First Little Poems and New Little Poems, follows Leopardi’s structure of elaborating on one metaphor throughout a poem. Giosuè Carducci, Pascoli’s mentor (and the first Italian to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature) inspired Pascoli’s investment in the classics as well as his interest in the Italian middle ages. It would be as misleading to link Pascoli to a single predecessor, however, as it would be difficult to find a modern Italian poet not indebted to him. “Ultimately,” claims Pier Paolo Pasolini, who wrote his thesis on Pascoli fifty years after Pascoli had written his thesis on the ancient Greek poet Alcaeus for the same department at the University of Bologna, “ultimately, the poetic language of this century is derived entirely from the work of Giovanni Pascoli, contradictory and intricate as it was.”2
The claim is striking—all the more so from someone as ahead of his time as the radical filmmaker-poet-journalist. It’s also improbable, given that the person whom Pasolini credits with such innovation was born in the middle of the nineteenth century and wrote sonnets in hendecasyllables about farm life. And while the prophetic Pasolini remains a darling of dissertations, Pascoli’s name draws a blank among most native English speakers, and contemporary poets in Italy aren’t likely to cite him as a favorite.
Which is not to say he isn’t famous. Every Italian I know can recite a verse from Pascoli. My co-translator Marina was made to memorize “Fallen Oak” in grammar school, and “Night-Blooming Jasmine” in middle school. A dear friend chose the last stanza from “My Evening” for his brother’s gravestone. A mechanic in Bologna once recited “Fog” to me in its entirety, intensifying the refrain until it seemed to wrap a net of n and l sounds around the entire poem. When I mentioned this project to a grandmother on a playground, she recalled “Owl” as if it were her first love, reciting its rhythm in time with the seesaw between us. Last summer, after two nine-year-old boys on a beach demanded to know why I spoke Italian, one launched into the poem “Laundresses” with a tenderness as genuine as his pride:
Il vento soffia e nevica la frasca,
e tu non torni ancora al tuo paese!
quando partisti, come son rimasta!
come l’aratro in mezzo alla maggese . . .
Strong winds rain the petals down
and still you won’t come home.
You left! And left me alone—
a plow on untilled ground.
That Giovanni Pascoli has long been memorized in grade schools throughout Italy indicates not just his institutional stature but what Pasolini calls his “apparent contradiction in terms”—an integration of classical and vernacular traditions that crosses divides of education and continues to make his poems meaningful to nine-year-olds and grandmothers alike. The “strong winds” in this last stanza of “Laundresses” belong to a folk song Pascoli adapted from a dialect of the Marche region below Romagna, along Italy’s eastern coast. The stanza’s sentimental twang contrasts with the spare, elegant diction of the poem’s opening where a “plow without oxen or strap / sits in a field half gray, half black” “Laundresses” combines the registers seamlessly.
This mixture of classical formalism and country ballad is part of the reason why most major Italian poets of the last century—from Umberto Saba in the teens to Edoardo Sanguineti in the 1980s—viewed Pascoli as the founder of modern verse. Five years before his 1909 “Manifesto del Futurismo,” F. T. Marinetti called Pascoli “the first poet of contemporary Italy.” Thirty years before William Carlos Williams urged “no ideas but in things,” Pascoli wrote about the “poetics of objects,” and how something as simple as a plow or railroad track contains enough meaning and mystery to sustain a poem. “Poetry,” he explained in “Il fanciullino” [“The Child”] his long essay about the poet’s childlike sense of wonder and imaginative intelligence, “is finding within things—how can I say it?—their smile and their tears.” Before modernists made imagism one of their central tenets, Pascoli’s instinct for the melancholy inherent in objects was picked up by Italy’s Crepuscular poets of the 1910s. The unconventional caesuras with which Pascoli altered the rhythm of the standard hendecasyllabic line led to Giuseppe Ungaretti’s distilled fragments about World War I. A generation later, Cesare Pavese’s dignified narratives about ordinary people owe a debt to Pascoli’s glimpses of simple country folk, as in “Night Dog” from his fifth book, Odes and Hymns:
Someone’s sleeping. On a bed
made of leaves, his limbs dream of his wife,
and a baby asleep
in a crib made of twigs,
and the other small children curled near her.3
The revolutionary nature of Pascoli’s impact becomes even clearer in the work of later experimental poets such as Sanguineti and Andrea Zanzotto. The sound-play of the neo-avant-garde movement and the much earlier innovations of Futurist poets would not have been possible without the birdcalls and bell chimes that dominate Pascoli’s refrains. In 1982, Sanguineti wrote his own “Last Walk” sequence in homage to the sequence Pascoli had written a century earlier, translating the onomatopoeia and diction from Pascoli’s scenes of farm life into a free-verse love poem for his wife. Though the terza rima of Pasolini’s 1957 “Le ceneri di Gramsci” [“Gramsci’s Ashes”] is indebted to Dante, it owes as much to Pascoli’s shorter terza rima lyrics, which recast Dante’s human comedy in a contemporary world.
Unlike his mentor Carducci, whose traditional verse was the ideal of late-nineteenth-century Italy, and unlike his more extravagant contemporary Gabriele D’Annunzio, whose explicit intention was to become the voice of his era, Pascoli was too idiosyncratic to yield imitators. His “expansion of language,” as Pasolini wrote, “means always to express the intimate and poetic life of the I.”4 Pascoli’s interest in both the recent and ancient past was entirely personal. Though he translated from a range of poets and time periods, the narratives he chose invariably reflected his own. The refrains in his translation of Poe’s “The Raven” could substitute for any number of Pascoli’s refrains, while Pascoli’s “Sunday Dawn” reflects the synesthetic soundscape of Poe’s “The Bells.” In translating “We Are Seven” by Wordsworth, Pascoli cut
the introductory stanza altogether in order to begin with the orphaned speaker’s story. His version of Victor Hugo’s “Petit Paul” (about an orphan who falls asleep on his grandfather’s grave) could have been pulled from a page of Pascoli’s own biography.
Pascoli’s lifelong commitment to his grief was sustained, and vivified, through the landscapes around him. His poems emerge from the specificity of the natural world and from the cultures of his rural surroundings. Their language derives not only from the classical authors whom Pascoli translated and taught all his life but also from the regional dialects and vernacular patterns of his neighbors in Romagna and, later, in rural northern Tuscany. These disparate elements already converge in Myricae, which although published in 1892, was (as with most of his books) repeatedly revised and reordered over the course of his life. Along with several of his other most famous collections, Pascoli conceived of Myricae during the decade he lived in the Tuscan city of Livorno with his two younger sisters. Financially stable at last, the poet brought them to live with him from the convent school where they were sent after their mother’s death; this re-creation of the family unit led to Pascoli’s most prolific years, as well as his happiest.
Myricae collects brief and highly imagistic scenes of country life: “Dusk,” “Dawn,” “Stubble,” “At Church,” and his often-quoted “The Last Walk.” Sometimes the scenes remain neutrally observed. Other times, they slip through the precision of the present tense into the disorientation of the past. In “Birthplace,” the sound of someone threshing a field distracts the narrator from his surroundings, so in the final stanza, the bell tolls “in tears,” and the image of a bent stranger seems to mirror the narrator’s own posture. Light reflecting on the surface of the sea in the poem “From the Shore” resembles chainmail in the opening image, but toward the end of the poem, two boats on the water “seem two coffins.” Much of the verse in Myricae insists on a moment but reveals the complete sensory experience of that moment from myriad perspectives. The downpour that moves through “Rain” is heard, seen, or felt by a rook, frogs, a ray of sunlight, and baby swallows. By imagining a sunset through the bovine eyes of its protagonist, “The Ox” defamiliarizes the landscape that Pascoli knew as home.