Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli

by Giovanni Pascol

  While his second collection, First Little Poems (1897), continues the themes of Myricae and was conceived in the same period, its form is quite different. Written exclusively in terza rima, these poems follow the narrative of one family through a year of farming, interspersing sections about the family’s tillage and harvest of crops with autobiographical poems such as “The Kite,” as well as broader meditations like “Fallen Oak” and “The Book.”

  When Pascoli’s sister Ida married in 1895, the poet and his youngest sister, Maria, moved to the tiny village of Castelvecchio in Tuscany’s Garfagnana region, just across the Apuan Alps from their birthplace in Romagna. Here Pascoli found a genuine refuge, and despite commuting to teach at universities in Sicily, Pisa, and finally Bologna, he would remain in Castelvecchio for seventeen years, until two months before his death in Bologna. In 1903, he published his third and perhaps most celebrated book, Canti of Castelvecchio. For a second edition of the book published that same year, Pascoli created a glossary of terms ranging from Romagnolo expressions he would have learned from his parents to the Garfagnino dialect of his new community, even citing a beloved local farmer called “Uncle Meo.” The richness of language in this third collection is due in part to Pascoli’s integration of different dialects—that of his birthplace and that of his adopted home—with classically derived Italian. The language of his past inhabits the present as inevitably as ghosts inhabit his landscape. Finding a new home in Castelvecchio, feeling at home now in a place where he expected to remain, Pascoli welcomed his past. Unlike poems in his earlier collections, the Canti address the trauma of his father’s murder and his mother’s death more directly, such as at the end of the poem “Home,” when the gate to his childhood house becomes the gate to the nearby cemetery, and his mother warns the poet against his longing to return there. As with Myricae, many poems in Canti of Castelvecchio begin with closely observed natural scenes, but in the Canti, the specificity of the past more readily overpowers the present landscape, as in “Frogs”:

  Between the high waves

  of red clover, I find myself here.

  Here, between fields of fenugreek,

  here—I find myself here, where churches

  gleam white between fields

  of green; I am here, in my town

  far away.5

  The repetition of “here” with the sudden distance of “far away” could serve as a leitmotif for the entire book. The poem continues, and Pascoli again turns to his favored emblem of the railway to depict this limbo of distance and intimacy, as the frogs’ croaking becomes

  the black screech

  of a train that still searches

  forever, to find

  what is never, and always

  will be . . .6

  Both “Frogs” and “Home” belong to a final section in the Canti entitled “Return to San Mauro.” Another poem in this section, “The Meteor,” functions as a kind of bridge in Pascoli’s work, holding to the same formal preoccupations of Myricae and First Little Poems while signaling the shift to come in Poemi conviviali [Convivial Poems (1904)], and Odes and Hymns (1906). “The Meteor” employs the kind of prismatic perspective that was already a hallmark in his poetry, but here the perspective on a local landscape leads to a meditation about the cosmos. The poem begins alongside the Salto River in San Mauro, but by the end its narrator

  . . . felt the earth inside the universe.

  Shaking, I felt earth as part of the sky. And saw

  myself down here, bewildered and small,

  wandering on a star among stars.7

  The scale is epic, yet the river of the opening stanza is given the same close attention as the meteor that crashes beside it, so the sounds of frogs on its banks seem to encompass a universe. This switch in scale is central to Pascoli’s poetics, as he explains in “Il fanciullino.” The poet’s mode is “the child’s mode,” he writes, “and we call it deep, because it instantly plunges us into the abyss of truth without making us climb down steps.”8

  The cosmic or epic scale that “The Meteor” suggests is embraced absolutely in his fourth book, Poemi conviviali, with a series of much longer poems about historical and mythic figures such as Solon, Alexander the Great, Psyche, and Odysseus.9 The “hymns” in Odes and Hymns, Pascoli’s fifth collection, present paeans to heroes of Italy’s past and present in a tone similar to the narratives in Poemi conviviali. The tone anticipates the overtly nationalistic, even jingoistic, poems of Pascoli’s last books of verse, Le canzoni di re Enzio [Canzoni of King Enzo (1909)], Poemi italici [Italian Poems (1911)], and the posthumous Poemi del Risorgimento [Poems of the Risorgimento (1913)], which emphasize the history and national identity of Italy.

  Though this nationalistic strain is less evident in Odes and Hymns, the language of the book often derives from Virgilian and Homeric models, and its “odes” share with Myricae and Canti both a minute attention to nature and linguistic collage. The grief, mystery, and botanical precision of “Chrysanthemums” from Odes and Hymns are everywhere present in Canti of Castelvecchio, and “The Night Dog” recalls the shifting aural perspectives of “Rain” and the constantly changing focus in “The River,” both from Myricae. First describing the sounds of the Serchio River near Castelvecchio, “The Night Dog” soon turns to the bark of a dog, then to footsteps the dog hears, then to the source of the footsteps. But the poem shifts focus to that sleeping figure whose “limbs dream” of his children, and the image of the children leads to a meditation on how each child’s breath searches to find the souls of its siblings before returning to the child’s sleeping body.

  After Odes and Hymns, Pascoli returned even more directly to his earlier work with New Little Poems (1909). This sixth collection mirrors First Little Poems in form and content. Alternating sections of terza rima about the same family of farmers with poems about nature and philosophy, New Little Poems explicitly explores those traces of the cosmic in Pascoli’s earlier books. In “The Drowned,” waves interrogate the figure of a drowned body, their dialogue exploring the essence of individual identity and its place in the universe. “Pascoli taught us abandonment into the universal,” writes Ungaretti, “as well as a confusion of personality with the whole.”10 His observation describes both “The Drowned” from Odes and Hymns and “The Meteor” from Canti of Castelvecchio, but it likewise applies to Pascoli’s careful attention to a dog, an ox, or a ray of sunlight in other poems: here, too, the poet dissolves his own personality into the world around him, slipping through shifting perspectives.

  The trajectory of Pascoli’s career is partly suggested by the Virgilian epigraphs he chose for five of these six books, from the “shrubs and humble tamarisks” of Myricae and Canti of Castelvecchio to the “somewhat grander things” of First and New Little Poems.11 But this arc should not be overstated. Throughout his career, Pascoli worked simultaneously on poems from different books, reordering and adding to almost all the titles this selection represents. The tangle of initial publication dates listed in the notes will caution readers to take the table of contents lightly. “Chrysanthemums,” for example, was written in 1896 before First Little Poems had been published, but it wasn’t collected in a book until the fifth edition of Odes and Hymns. Many poems were first published in one section of a book and later moved by the poet to another. Section titles are not included here, except in cases where Pascoli originally conceived of the poems in a sequence, as with “The Last Walk” and “Lit Window” series in Myricae, and with the “Autumn Diary” appendix he added to the 1910 edition of Canti of Castelvecchio.

  While we have mostly honored the order of poems published in the final editions of each of the books represented here, several exceptions should be mentioned. In the original contents of Myricae, the poem “Birthplace” comes after instead of before “Sunday Dawn,” but for this introduction of Pascoli’s work to an English-language audience, “Birthplace” seems the ideal opening poem, announcing the poet’s oeuvre with its fraught nostalgia and shif
ts between lyric and narrative impulses. Similarly, I chose the voice of “Idle Poet” to conclude our selection, despite its preceding “To a Girl (Postcard)” in Various Poems, which Pascoli’s sister Maria collected after his death. My decision was bolstered by the fact that the original version of “Idle Poet” is undated, and it remained unpublished during Pascoli’s lifetime; we don’t know when Pascoli composed it. In a 1955 essay, Eugenio Montale wrote, “It has been said that Pascoli proceeded in parallel and entirely simultaneously in his various styles. One desk (or drawer?) for the Myricae, another for the short poems in terza rima, another for the Conviviali, another for the odes, and so on for the carmina, and the rest. When the drawer was full, the new book was ready.”12 Pascoli’s publishing trajectory does suggest an ample, moody simultaneity. His work seems to want to make an accordion of time, opening to include more pages and changed orders, and closing on the same repeated images of childhood, dogs, rivers, farms, bells, death.

  It was the quiet, stubborn insistence on this repetition that first moved me when I discovered Pascoli. He doesn’t want to let anything go. And his need to hold on bewilders his experience of what’s held. Often the narrator can’t locate himself among surrounding sounds; the barking and birdsong create an aural blur as encompassing as the visual one. Disorientation, intensified through synesthesia, is as much a character as is the landscape. A scene may be fully inhabited by a speaker at one point, and at another become a tableau, seen from a distance. Instead of locking perspective into stasis, the recurrence in these poems pushes it forward and changes it.

  If the insistent quality of Pascoli’s grief first caught my attention, his linguistic originality and investment in small things, his “poetics of objects,” have held it. This project began while I was living in Bologna on a Fulbright Fellowship, teaching American poetry in the same lecture hall where first Carducci and then Pascoli both held the prestigious Chair of Italian Literature. While I talked about tenets of modernism, undergraduate students worked in pairs on ancient wooden benches to translate into their choice of hendecasyllables or free verse the iambic blueprint of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”

  For English-language readers, the terse, tactile quality of Pascoli’s imagery inevitably recalls American and British modernists. But his language is at once rooted in the late nineteenth century and the innovations of the twentieth, a facet of that “contradiction in terms” Pasolini describes: “There co-exist in Pascoli an obsession that keeps him pathologically always the same . . . and an experimentalism that, almost to compensate for that psychological encumbrance, incessantly changes and renews him.” Pascoli’s virtuosic use of dialect, classicisms, and botanical terms inflects his grief with nuance and surprise. Instead of actively trying to translate the experimentalism of this linguistic mixture, I tried to carry over its lightness of effect. His rhymed verse has a buoyancy of sound that finds a nearer English equivalent in the ease of assonance, and in an intimation rather than rule of meter. To this end, I have suggested an iambic pattern without adhering strictly to it. When a foot thudded too predictably, I altered the meter to bring a line’s pulse closer to the original’s flexibility. Frost was a useful model here, with what he called the “loose iambic” creating a tension between traditional meter and the rhythms of natural speech in a way quite similar to what I hear in Pascoli. Frost and Pascoli also share a certain guise of simplicity, with their best-known poems concealing a sophisticated (and dark) oeuvre.

  The long sighs of Italian end rhyme can easily become the click of a punch card in English, so I often used internal slant rhyme to suggest elongation and more subtly distribute weight across the line. Sound reverberates slowly in Pascoli—as if language were heard in an echo chamber. Thomas Hardy’s stretched vowels were another model, with the sinewy assonance of poems like “During Wind and Rain” providing correlation for Pascoli’s suppleness. A certain plain-spoken strangeness in Pascoli finds an analog in poets like Hardy and even D. H. Lawrence, though at his best Pascoli tends more toward Hardy’s skepticism, with that harder tone grounding a conflation of nature and grief in both poets.

  Pascoli himself cited an interest in several American and English poets—chiefly Tennyson, Poe, and Wordsworth—but I wanted sparer aural models to bring his verse away from the patina of the eighteenth century and into an understated, contemporary sound. Pascoli’s unconventional caesuras create a tugging, erratic beat that doesn’t so much stop a line as trip it into a brief lift before it again finds its footing, its base cadence. Often his poems remind me of a bird surveying a scene, attending absolutely and momentarily to what it sees before suddenly and just as absolutely looking elsewhere. “Now you see the light, now the flare,” Pascoli writes in “Winter Wren” from Canti of Castelvecchio: “You flit from the glass / to a thicket of twigs . . .”

  My goal in this process was always to create an independent poem in English, one that presents itself whole and apart from the original. Such a goal demands consistency on many levels, a demand challenged by Pascoli’s constant shifts in register and diction. Translating these shifts in a literal fashion would have left readers with a registry of parts rather than the discovery of a whole. Certain technical terms that would be unfamiliar even to most Italians (the cassetta and tramoggia of the flour mill in “Since Morning,” for example, or the ancient Egyptian sistri in the final stanza of “Owl”) are replaced here by more generalized language. Some of the ambiguity in Pascoli’s punctuation, too, has been sacrificed for clarity. A glance at the clusters of commas, colons, and semicolons in the originals will reveal how intentionally Pascoli complicates his syntax to suggest the fragmented structure of interior thought. Sentences break off. Ellipses jolt poems forward or stand in place of a last period; poems often begin with “and.” Narrators remain mid-thought, interrupted by parentheticals and dashes. My punctuation is, by and large, less striking. And again, focusing on the effect of a poem rather than its literal rendering, I tried to convey the sensation of interiority that Pascoli’s syntax engenders, sometimes replacing a comma with a period so that a long rambling sentence is followed by a short one, to evoke the way rhythms in speech (and internal monologue) vary.

  Edith Grossman was once asked if her Spanish was good enough to translate Don Quixote. She replied that it was the wrong question: one should ask if her English was good enough. Grossman is right, and yet, translation depends every bit as much on one’s absorption of the original. In that absorption I have been fortunate to collaborate with Marina Della Putta Johnston, on whose linguistic and cultural expertise I have relied. While I am the primary translator and bear full and final responsibility for these poems in English, the entanglement of authorial agency is one of the pleasures of translation. Marina and I have discussed almost every line of verse printed here, continuously debating contexts and tone during the eight years in which we have worked on this project. Some conversations brought us into questions of dialect, custom, and farming practice. Others involved Marina’s recollections of her own rural Italian childhood and informal interviews with older family members. Her memories of sleeping on mattresses stuffed with corn husks at her grandparents’ farm brought life to the image of the sleeping figure’s “bed made of leaves” as “his limbs dream” in “Night Dog.” She grounded the gorgeously weird notion of dreaming limbs with what was in fact a practical, common, and surprisingly comfortable bed used by farmers. That her father, a country doctor, also referred to the Pleiades as “little hens” when Marina was young gave me a sense of the metaphor’s matter-of-fact tone in the poems “Night-Blooming Jasmine” and “My Evening.” An Italian native speaker fluent in English, Marina often resisted the countless small (and not-so-small) liberties I took as an English native speaker fluent in Italian. Similarly fruitful tension arose from her background as an academic invested in philology and my background as a poet, ready to invent for the sake of sound. Not only a poet but also a classics scholar, Pascoli embodied this tension.
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  While I’m intrigued that interest in Pascoli’s linguistic intricacies seems only keener in 2019 than in the eras of modernism and the neo-avant-garde, I am less interested in the question of his fluctuating stature than in offering a glimpse of Pascoli’s greatness, a greatness that belongs to the interstitial rather than lapidary aims of poetry. It’s as if he wanted to employ a single sui generis tense to write toward the past, present, and future at once. “All poems share a bond,” Pascoli wrote in a mixture of purple, blue, and brown ink on an undated sheet of paper found in his archives: “That bond is the enfant du siècle who got lost in the night of the centuries.”13 Certainly, the subjects here are no less relevant today than they were in 1912: land as a means of identity; the fraught nature of geographical borders; language as an experience of home or estrangement; the lure of nostalgia; and (most especially perhaps) the cost of not being skeptical about that lure. Ultimately, Pascoli’s nostalgia takes a radical form, as if the poet had written “I wish I were there” over and over, and then very lightly crossed out every word but there. “The poet doesn’t affirm,” he continued, on that same undated, ink-laden sheet: “He doesn’t discover, doesn’t prove anything. He simply renders the sensation that overcame him, exactly as it overcame him . . . what he saw, what he wept for, and delighted in.” Pascoli was describing the act of writing poems, but his description holds, too, for the act of translation. And that is what these versions are: renderings—made through years of trying, though also for the moment—of sensations that overcame me on hearing Pascoli’s poems . . . what I saw and what I wept for, and, above all, what I delighted in.

  —Taije Silverman, Bologna, 2019

  Chronology