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    Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli
    Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli
    Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli
    Ebook252 pages2 hours

    Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli

    By Giovanni Pascoli and Taije Silverman

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    The most comprehensive collection in English of the founder of modern Italian poetry

    Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912)—the founder of modern Italian poetry and one of Italy's most beloved poets—has been compared to Robert Frost for his evocation of natural speech, his bucolic settings, and the way he bridges poetic tradition and the beginnings of modernism. Featuring verse from throughout his career, and with the original Italian on facing pages, Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli is a comprehensive and authoritative collection of a fascinating and major literary figure.

    Reading this poet of nature, grief, and small-town life is like traveling through Italy's landscapes in his footsteps—from Romagna and Bologna to Rome, Sicily, and Tuscany—as the country transformed from an agrarian society into an industrial one. Mixing the elevated diction of Virgil with local slang and the sounds of the natural world, these poems capture sense-laden moments: a train's departure, a wren's winter foraging, and the lit windows of a town at dusk. Incorporating revolutionary language into classical scenes, Pascoli's poems describe ancient rural dramas—both large and small—that remain contemporary.

    Framed by an introduction, annotations, and a substantial chronology, Taije Silverman and Marina Della Putta Johnston's translations render the variety, precision, and beauty of Pascoli's poetry with a profoundly current vision.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateOct 15, 2019
    ISBN9780691194226
    Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli

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      Book preview

      Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli - Giovanni Pascoli

      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

      41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

      6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR

      press.princeton.edu

      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 devastation 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

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