in your dream to have opened your arms.
Waves. Waves arriving, sliding away . . .
from Poesie varie / Various Poems
L’amorosa giornata
Quando trovai ne’ miei pensier presente
il tuo viso e le lunghe fila bionde,
scoteva il vento l’ombre gemebonde:
or già tace la notte; e l’ombre intente
ansano appena, e l’ampia terra desta
di luce strana sembra che si vesta.
Roca la squilla odo sonare a festa;
e l’alba trema, mentre incerta sale
sul candido silenzio universale.
*
Tra i fior nascenti indugi il passo, quale
fata dopo l’incanto al sol s’appresta
spargere il raggio della bionda testa.
Un ronzìo d’api, lievi frulli d’ale
odo, e sussurro di ruscel corrente
nel meriggio tranquillo e rilucente.
Volge il mio cuore a te, fata piacente;
e so che un bel sorriso gli risponde
di là, tra il verde delle nuove fronde.
*
E le rondini zillano alle gronde
di qua, di là, vertiginosamente:
anche noi si cinguetta al sol cadente.
Al sol, che ne’ tuoi puri occhi s’infonde,
luce sottentra, che nel ciel d’opale
sparge un immenso biancheggiar nivale.
Chi nel cielo, cui corre il maestrale,
il lento oblìo, l’opaca notte arresta?
Canta l’inconsapevole foresta.
*
Or che notturna infuria la tempesta,
felice ascolto l’equinozïale
pioggia strosciare, assidua, lenta, eguale:
chè a fuggevoli baci il tuon ridesta
sovente le tue labbra fremebonde;
gli occhi no, che il guancial timidi asconde.
Muove il tuo cuore quasi in rapid’onde;
poi si appisola e dorme dolcemente,
sì che il mio che lo culla appena il sente.
The Loving Day
When your face and your long golden hair
came to mind, the wind shook and rattled
the shadows, and the shadows were groaning.
Now the night has gone quiet, the shadows
catch breath, and the wide, waking world
appears dressed in strange light.
I hear the hoarse bells announce Sunday;
the dawn trembles, nervously rising
to spread through the world’s pale silence.
*
Between nascent blooms you move
lightly, a sprite after casting her spell,
who would spread her gold hair in the sun.
A buzzing of bees, hazy flutter of wings,
and the gurgle and splash
of a stream in the afternoon’s glow.
So my heart, lovely sprite, turns
to you: and I know a smile
replies from between the new leaves.
*
And the swallows who chirr from the eaves,
here and there, sound dizzying, stunned;
we cheep at the setting sun, too—
at the sun, as it fills your pure eyes
and is turned into light that spreads
pale as snow through the opal of sky.
Who in the sky, where the north wind flies,
could stop night’s approach and the slow loss
of memory? The answerless forest keeps singing.
*
Now that night spurs the storm,
I listen with joy to the equinoctial rain:
slow, tireless, softly the same—
since with fugitive kisses, the thunder
keeps waking your quivering lips;
your eyes, no: they hide in the pillow.
As if on brief waves your heart beats;
then it sleeps, sleeping so sweetly
that mine, holding yours, barely hears it.
A una giovinetta (cartolina)
Non dire—Io lodo quel cantore–
dì piuttosto—Amo quel canto.—
Sì. Ama del rosaio il fiore:
non ti chiede il pruno tanto.
Ti dice:—Io son la trista cosa!
schiva il pruno, ama la rosa!–
To a Girl (Postcard )
Don’t say, I love that singer—
Say, I love that tune.
Love the bloom, not how it grows.
The hawthorn doesn’t ask as much,
admitting: I’m a sorry thing!
Scorn the thorn, love the rose.
Il poeta ozioso
L’arpa d’oro
pende ai salici:
il canoro
vento l’agita:
il poeta vede e ode,
ode e gode.
Non le dita
mie la tocchino!
L’infinita
anima l’animi!
Arpa, al vento, al sole, oscilla,
brilla, squilla!
Idle Poet
Harp of gold
the willow holds:
the whistle wind
thrums it.
The poet looks
and listens in,
and listens in,
and loves it.
Let my fingers
never strain
to wring the tune.
Let the boundless
soul unburden
sound. Strings
sun and wind surround:
Swing and flicker! Sing!
Acknowledgments
This book is a many-faceted collaboration. I dedicate it to my father, Gabriel Silverman, who edited its earliest drafts, and whose loyalty, breadth of knowledge, and unpretentious curiosity were something like Pascoli’s.
When I first decided to translate Pascoli, Rosita Copioli brought me to his childhood homes and to the nearby family cemetery where, at sunset, a caretaker almost locked us in with the graves by an accident the poet might have appreciated. Her introduction to the fields of Ro-magna has remained vivid during my years with these poems.
Kate O’Neill’s early encouragement was important, as was Eleanor Wilner’s encouragement throughout. Eleanor Wilner’s perspective on matters of translation and beyond has been invaluable.
Stefania Benini read the manuscript with terrific care, commenting meticulously on vocabulary while always considering the larger aims and tone of the book.
Piero Capelli, Alessandra Di Sante, and Stefano Scagliola provided nuanced interpretations of original texts.
Lesley Dormen, Constance Merritt, and Sarah Stickney chose between hundreds of slightly different versions of poems, taking each of my questions about the placement of a comma seriously.
Lee Yew Leong’s journal Asymptote brought the first of these translations to the attention of Eliot Weinberger, who urged me to develop them into a book and expertly advised me toward publishing it.
Other journals also printed versions of these poems: Sven Birkerts and Bill Pierce at Agni; Helen and David Constantine at Modern Poetry in Translation; Ange Mlinko at The Nation; Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller at Pleiades, Beth Gylys at Five Points, Rick Barot at New England Review, and David Baker at The Kenyon Review.
The MacDowell Colony granted me the time and space to finish a first draft of the manuscript.
With characteristic generosity, Edward Hirsch brought the project to the attention of the Lockert Series editors; that attention was extraordinary. The editorial guidance of Peter Cole, Richard Sieburth, and Rosanna Warren has been a principal blessing of this project.
At every stage, Zachary Lesser offered insight, humor, childcare, and countless other forms of sustainment.
Raphael Lesser-Silverman, with his “dreams of gold / branches, trees made of gold, golden forests,” has been my essential source of delight.
Notes
Introduction
1. Gianfranco Contini, “Il linguaggio di Pascoli” in Studi pascoliani (ed. Antonio Baldini. Faenza: Lega, 1958), 27–52; quoted by Giorgio Agamben, “Pascoli e il pensiero della voce,” published as the introduction to his edition of Pascoli’s Il fanciullino (Milan: Feltrinelli 1982) and later in Agamben’s Categorie Italiane (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1996), available in English as “Pascoli and the Thought of the Voice.” The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, 62–75.
2. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Pascoli,” published in the inaugural issue of Officina, the literary magazine Pasolini founded with fellow critics and writers Francesco Leonetti and Roberto Roversi, in May 1955. It is cited here from the appendix of Pasolini’s 1945 thesis, published almost fifty years later as Antologia della lirica pascoliana (Torino: Einaudi, 1993), 234. Translation by Taije Silverman and Marina Della Putta Johnston.
3. “The Night Dog” was included in the first edition of Odes and Hymns (1906). Translation of all poems cited in this introduction by Taije Silverman and Marina Della Putta Johnston.
4. Pasolini, “Pascoli,” 236.
5. “Frogs” was included in the first edition of Canti of Castelvecchio (1903).
6. Ibid.
7. “The Meteor” was included in the first edition of Canti of Castelvecchio (1903).
8. “Il fanciullino” was published in Miei pensieri di varia umanità (Messina: Muglia, 1903), 1–66, and then in Pensieri e discorsi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1907), 1–66. It was first published alone as Il fanciullino, ed. Giorgio Agamben (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1982).
9. Poemi conviviali differs from the other five titles that, together with this one, Pascoli considered a single work—revising and completing all six (from Myricae to New Little Poems) in the three years he taught at the University of Pisa. While the five of those six books represented in our selection contain mostly shorter, pastoral lyrics, the Poemi conviviali contain longer narratives about historical and mythical figures.
10. Daniela Baroncini, “Pascoli e Ungaretti: La poesia dell’innocenza,” was published in Pascoli e la cultura del novecento (eds. Andrea Battistini, Gianfranco Miro Gori, Clemente Mazzotta. Venice: Marsillio, 2007), 231–55. Translation by Taije Silverman and Marina Della Putta Johnston.
11. Pascoli’s fourth book, Poemi conviviali, uses this same line from Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, Non omnes arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae [“Shrubs and humble tamarisks do not delight everyone”], as its epigraph, but cites a different part—non omnes arbusta iuvant—so the line reads “Shrubs don’t delight everyone” instead of “Shrubs and humble tamarisks delight,” which is the epigraph for both Myricae and Canti of Castelvecchio.
12. Eugenio Montale, “The Fortunes of Pascoli,” in The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays (ed. and trans. Jonathan Galassi. Hopewell, NJ: The Ecco Press, 1982), 82–87.
13. Pascoli, “L’enfant du siècle,” in Giovanni Pascoli: Poesie e prose scelte (ed. Cesare Garboli, Milan: Mondadori, 2002), 1:312. The text is part of the Carte Schinetti, an archive of notes from Pascoli’s youth (1877–79) that was never published by the author and has been preserved in the Archivio Pascoli in Castelvecchio.
Notes on the Poems
First book editions for each poem are listed parenthetically after poem titles, according to the abbreviations Myr for Myricae, FP for First Little Poems, CC for Canti of Castelvecchio, OH for Odes and Hymns, NP for New Little Poems, and VP for Various Poems.
(MYRICAE)
From 1891 to 1911, Pascoli published nine versions of this book. Starting with the fourth edition (1897), he divided the collection into fifteen sections for its total of 156 poems. No poems were added to Myricae after 1900, but Pascoli made stylistic and structural revisions in four more editions until 1911. He dedicated Myricae to his father. Quoting Virgil’s fourth Eclogue as epigraph, he omits Non omnes from Virgil’s claim that Non omnes arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae [“Shrubs and humble tamarisks do not delight everyone”]. While Virgil opens the eclogue with an invocation to the muses that he might sing of subjects worthier than the shrubs, Pascoli’s epigraph reads only arbusta iuvant humilesque myricae: “Shrubs and humble tamarisks delight.” The hearty tamarisk’s dust-pink bloom is common in the coastal area of Romagna, where Pascoli grew up.
Patria / Birthplace (Myr 1894)
This heptasyllabic meter, or settenario, is one of the most established in the Italian tradition, and it imitates the classical models of Horace and Anacreon, whom Pascoli translated.
This poem was first included in the third edition of Myricae (1894), with the title “Estate” [“Summer”]. Pascoli retitled it “Patria” for the fourth edition of the book in 1897, while living between his home in Castelvecchio and Bologna, where he commuted to teach. “Patria,” literally, “land of the fathers,” could mean “country,” as in the official country of Italy, but also a region, such as Romagna. This choice was particularly relevant when Pascoli was writing, not long after the different regions of Italy first united into a single country with the 1871 Risorgimento. The title’s ambiguity presages a tension between individual and landscape that remains one of the most prevalent themes in twentieth-century Italian poetry. Translating it was complicated, with “Fatherland” too gendered and “Homeland” now strangely loaded. “Country” doesn’t suggest the ambiva lence between local and national identities that “Patria” must have implied for Pascoli, a poet who urged Italy’s invasion into Libya as a means to solidify its national strength but retained his persona of the boy from rural Romagna. In a 1911 letter, Pascoli wrote: “Often I am appreciated beyond my merits, which really don’t consist in more than a deeply ardent love for my country—love for my great Patria, for my little Patria, for my adopted Patria, which is this beloved land.”
l. 1 Sogno: In Italian “sogno” is both verb and noun. The poem opens with a double meaning, suggesting both the dream as subject but also the first-person voice as subject: “I dream of a summer day.”
l. 14 tamerice: The Latin name for the tamarisk shrub is myrica, from which Pascoli’s first collection takes its title. He often referred to an individual poem as a “myrica.”
l. 17 l’angelus: the angelus, or evening call to prayer, is meant for recitation at dawn, midday, and evening. It follows the marking of the hour. Bells also announced all notable events in the community, such as baptisms, weddings, and deaths.
Alba festiva / Sunday Dawn (Myr 1894)
The poem follows the rhyme scheme of Dante’s terza rima, though the heptasyllabic instead of hendecasyllabic meter distances it from the tradition of Dantean tercets.
First published in the Florence-based La Nazione letteraria in 1893. This poem recalls “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe, a noted influence on Pascoli. With the guidance of Gabriele Briganti, an English teacher in Lucca, and British writer Isabella Anderton, Pascoli translated a number of poems from English.
ll. 12–13 Adoro / adoro—Dilla, dilla: “I love, / I love” and “oh, sing, / sing” are the words of the bells, which Pascoli personifies. The alliterative “o” and “i” sounds characterize the difference between the lower-pitched gold and higher-pitched silver bells.
Allora / Back Then (Myr 1897)
The novenario or nine-syllable (enneasyllabic) line was rarely used in the Italian tradition before the eighteenth century when it was popularized in Carducci’s “barbaric meter” (so called because anything other than Latin and Greek was allegedly barbaric; “barbaric meter” imitates Latin poetry in languages that, like Italian, are not quantitative but accentual) and then adopted and altered by Pascoli. Adapted from the classical Greek poetry of Alcaeus (on whose prosody Pascoli wrote his thesis), Pascoli’s variations on the traditional novenario led a number of twentieth-century poets to adopt it.
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Time Long Past,” which Pascoli translated as “Il tempo fu,” is sharply similar to “Back Then.”
l. 1 Allora [Then]: In the context of this poem, t
he word refers to the past, but allora is also used in conversational Italian as filler at the start of a sentence, the way one might say, “well, then . . .” in English. The use of allora as filler signifies the present tense (and can point to a sequence of events) as much as allora in the poem signifies the past. Pascoli emphasizes the relationship between ora (“now”) and allora (“then”) through end rhymes.
Fides / Fides (Myr 1891)
The meter here follows the Tuscan rispetto or strambotto, a popular form often set to music, with six or eight hendecasyllabic lines in a rhyme scheme of one quatrain before one or two couplets. Fides (Latin for “faith”) was originally published on the anniversary of August 10, twenty-three years after Ruggero Pascoli’s murder. Grouped with eight other poems under the title Myricae, it first appeared in 1890 in the Florentine journal Vita nuova, with a dedication to Pascoli’s university friend Severino Ferrari. Fides was then dedicated to another university friend, Raffaello Marcovigi, on the occasion of his wedding. The short-run printing of poems to celebrate weddings was an Italian custom with ancient roots that Pascoli followed on many occasions. Cf. “The Last Walk,” “Lit Window,” “At Church,” “Night-Blooming Jasmine,” “Frogs,” and “Home.”
I puffini dell’Adriatico / Puffins of the Adriatic (Myr 1892)
This traditional sonnet in hendecasyllabic verse was inspired by an 1883 article about birdsong by Italian biologist Luigi Paolucci, who wrote about puffins, “Their calls are long, and relatively low, like those of sailors who talk between boats to pass the time in bad weather: otherwise they sing in quick, broken bursts that sound like idle laughter.” The poem first appeared in Vita nuova in 1890, a few months before Fides.
L’ultima passeggiata / The Last Walk
In 1883, during his first year after university and three years before he began this sequence, Pascoli wrote to his friend Severino Ferrari: “I’ve gotten a glimpse of certain poems! A series of letters, and little notes; the notes in four stanzas each, with various small scenes from nature, voices of the woods and roads; the letters in quatrains, with a style neither lowbrow nor grandiloquent; tender flights of fancy without affectation, a sort of giggling throughout. . . .”
Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli Page 11