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Introduction to and commentary on 10 translations of Pascoli by Allen Prowle.

 It should not be surprising that the tragedies that struck Pascoli and his family profoundly affected his perception of the world and how it found expression in his poetry. He was only 12 when his father, manager of a farm estate above whose chapel the family lived, was murdered when on the way back from a nearby town. No one was ever tried, but they were always convinced that the man who replaced him had been in fact his killer. They had to return to his mother’s ancestral village, where, in the very next year his sister, aged 18, died of typhus and his mother of heart failure. 3 years later, his brother, Luigi, died from meningitis. At the age of 18, his eldest brother, Giacomo, took his remaining 7 siblings to live in Rimini.  There, he ensured the high school education of the gifted Giovanni, seeing him secure a scholarship at the University of Bologna. However, he had missed classes to look after Giacomo who was suffering from typhus, and lost the scholarship. His brother was married, with one small son, and died at the age of 23. The scholarship was regained after 3 years and thus began an eminent academic career, which will run in parallel with that of the great poet.   I have translated ten of his poems, the earliest of which was written in 1886 and the latest in 1907.

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NB: By following the link you can read a review by the editor of The High Window on a recent selected edition of the poems of Giovanni Pascoli: Pascoli review

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The Poems

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THE TENTH OF AUGUST (X Agosto)

St. Lawrence, I know why, through the untroubled air
so many stars are falling, burning,
and why in the hollows of the sky
so many tears are glistening.

A swallow was flying back to the roof:
they killed it; it fell among thorns,
holding an insect in its beak,
the dinner for its young ones.

Now, there it is as if on the cross, holding
that worm out to that distant sky;
its nestlings in the shadow, waiting,
their cheeping becoming ever quieter.

A man too was returning to his nest:
they killed him. He said, ‘I forgive’,
and in his open eyes remained a scream.
He carried two dolls, his gifts…

There now, in the empty house
they are waiting for him, waiting in vain:
motionless, bewildered, he holds
the dolls towards the sky.

And you, Heaven, infinite, immortal,
from high above the tranquil worlds,
you flood with a grieving of stars
this unfathomable atom of evil.

FAR-OFF FESTIVAL l (Festa Lontana)

A short chime of bells, endless
rings out and echoes, as from a far-off
festival behind a veil of forgetfulness.

There, when the rippling waves peal out
the old in the street uncover their white hair,
stare at the ground and never look up.

But the little children open wide their round eyes,
their serene sky trembling around them.
They scream when the fireworks crackle,
and Mother draws them to her warm breast’s smell.

CARTER (Carrettiere)

You are coming now untroubled, carter,
away from dark mountains; in the night you passed
below towering crags and over bridges high in the air.

What was the querulous north wind saying
as it howled in gorges and through caves?
But you were on top of your charcoal, sleeping.

Little by little, along your way,
grew the whistling breath of a storm:
but you were dreaming of Christmas,
and what you heard was the bagpipes played.

WASHERWOMAN (Lavandare)

In the half-grey, half-black field,
with no team of oxen stands a plough,
through the faint mist looking forgotten.

Now can be heard from the stream by the mill
the washerwomen’s splashes then, louder, their thumps,
in time with long songs sung together:

The wind is blowing, the bough is snowing,
yet still you have not returned home.
You went away, while I have remained,
like the plough upon ground untilled.

IN A HUDDLE (In capanello)

The long, rickety gate at the crossing creaks
and blocks the way. Standing at the fence
some neighbours gossip in a huddle.

They chat about someone who is another’s double,
wine that costs the earth but isn’t worth it,
the government, this vile disease;

some little boy and the big one in his twenties,
the pig that eats but doesn’t fatten.
Black, past their indifferent eyes,
like thunder roars the train.

THE RAIL TRACK.  (La Via Ferrata)

Between the embankments on which cows
peacefully graze, the shadowy rail track
speeds on, to shine in the far distance;

and in the pearl sky, straight and evenly spaced,
the telegraph poles, with their parallel wires,
recede from view in an orderly fashion.

What moans and wails so grow and fade,
just like the sound of a woman’s lament?
The metal wires fitfully ring out,
an enormous harp echoing in the wind.

THAT DAY (Quel giorno)

Having filled the air with their twittering squabbles,
the swallows are gone now from the roof of the Big House
standing alone among the elms.

That roseate tower, how many whispers
you heard that day, how many impatient swallows
screech to their restless brood!

Now, in the afternoon silence, I hear inside
a chair bumped, the sudden rustle
of a skirt: and then, at the window,
curious, is a kind, woman’s face.

FROGS (Le Rane)

I have seen the flowering of the clover
flood the land with its red;
I have seen the blackthorn in abundance
in the softness of hollows
and poplars gradually unfurl
a green fringe in midair
along the road that fades
into the distance.

What is this endless road
that quivers with wings at dawn?
Who are those melodious warblers calling
with their long repeated moan?
Among the yellow branches of mulberry,
who is ringing the tinkling bell of welcome,
who unwinding the skeins of gold
from the sky?

From the rainwater gullies
I can hear the frogs croak
in the wet tranquillity.
They make, in this serene light,
the black noise of a train
as it leaves…

A whistle sounds, a gentle, solitary
gurgle, with no echo.
I find myself between fields of red clover,
between yellow fields of fenugreek.
I find myself in a flat land
whose greenness churches whiten;
I find myself in my cherished home town
far away.

Through the air, voices reach me
with a tired resonance.
From hedges, long shadows of crosses
stretch out on the white road.
As I look into the rose-tinted sky
a ringing of bells reaches me.
They say: Come back! Stay!
Rest!

And I hear in the untroubled light
the black din of the train
that does not go away, that goes
searching, never searching always
for what never is, but for what always
will be…

NIGHT JASMINE (Il Gelsomino Notturno)

And the night flowers are starting to bloom,
a time when I see my dear ones as if still at home.
In among the leaves of viburnum
twilight butterflies flame.

A while ago, the shouts of day fell silent.
Over there, just one house whispers.
Nests are asleep under wings,
like eyes under closed lids.

Calyxes open and exhale
the ripeness of strawberries.
In a downstairs room a light shines.
Grass grows upon the graves.

A late bee murmurs
finding the cells it explores all taken.
Across the blue threshing floor Broody Hen
moves with its cheeping of stars.

Scents fill the air through the night,
passing away with each breeze.
Up the stairs goes the light,
on the upper floor stops, and goes out…

It is dawn now: petals, a little crumpled,
are closing; in its snug, secret urn
a new-born happiness is nursed
which I can only try to imagine.

THE TOWER OF SAN MAURO.  (Torre di San Mauro)

I slept above the chapel of the Tower.
In the night I heard singing, sweet and slow.

Throughout my sleep I heard voices and footsteps,
and the tinkling of the golden bell,
and a rustle of whispered devotions,
and a humming of loud prayers in chorus,
and a melodious organ’s Gloria,
which faded to sighs in the distance.

Such sweet, slow sighs!
It was a Mass. Holy! Holy! Holy!

But the voices I heard were dead,
singing all night until morning:
a dead priest bowed over the altar,
a dead little boy at its steps,
over his shoulders the linen sheet, the shroud
his weeping mother had wrapped him in.

It was the Mass. Holy! Holy! Holy!
But with morning, this is what the birds sang out:
No, the droning that you heard, that was the wind,
the hushed whispering was the rain.
High up, the old, sad spruce trees rustled,
sombre, the sad, old yews were humming.
Those footsteps, they were leaves, dry leaves
fallen from the old ash and the linden trees.

That is what the birds in chorus told me.
And this, the old trees: How time runs!

That bell was your old heart,
in which beat your old, cherished memories;
the other voices, faint or sonorous, are ours,
so you would not remember…
We are from after! In your day, it seems,
it was all grass beyond that Tower!

*****

The first of the ten poems in my selection, The Tenth of August (X Agosto), was written to commemorate the 30^th anniversary of his father’s murder. It is an allegorical enactment of the murder of his father on the feast day of Saint Lawrence. It is at first a swallow that is killed when flying back to its nest, but it is described ‘as if on the cross’, introducing the imagery of martyrdom.  The swallow dies still holding an insect it would have fed to its brood.  The man is killed before he can reach his home, uttering the dying Christ’s words of forgiveness, and still carrying two gifts for his own children.  The image of an empty or abandoned house will be a recurring one in his poetry.

The next six poems are madrigals from a sequence, ‘The Last Walk’ (L’Ultima Passegiata), written in 1886 and which Pascoli included in his first complete published work, ’Myricae’, in 1891.  Although drawing on Renaissance forms, these poems are rather more sombre than their pastoral predecessors. Seamus Heaney had a great admiration for Pascoli’s work, and felt a strong affinity between the Romagnan countryside of these poems and that of Co. Derry where he was born. His last   work (2013), published posthumously, was his translation of ‘The Last Walk’.

In the first of this group, the Far-off festival (Festa lontana), seems to be happening in the present, but the bells chime ‘as from a far-off festival’ , one that is somehow ‘seen’, in that the sound is passed through ‘a veil’ of forgetfulness, a synesthesia which deliberately  conveys a sense of uncertainty over time and place. Is it ‘far-off’ because it is somewhere else or because it is in the past?  We are arrested by the first word of the second stanza, ‘there’ suggesting somewhere else, but the poem continues throughout in the present, as if it is all happening then. The shift of perspective is unsettling. The bells that ring out from the far-off festival are not those whose ‘rippling waves’ peal out ‘there’ and yet he is seeing how the old used to observe the feast day reverentially as if it is happening now, just as he sees the children’s frightened reaction to the noise of the fireworks, and the protective, tender hugs of the mothers with their ‘warm breast’s smell’. The poem ends with another, very powerful shift of senses, from sight to touch and to smell.

   The landscape of Carter (Carrettiere) is a long way from Arcadia. The figure of the man who is delivering charcoal is dwarfed by the inhospitable countryside and its appalling weather. He escapes from it through sleep and a dream of the convivial warmth of Christmas, far-off physically but ‘present’ through memory. Human togetherness is an enduring response to the challenges of the naturally hostile environment, and the load will be delivered to ensure the warmth of families. For Pascoli too, family gatherings of celebration could only be imagined or dreamt of as a retreat from isolation and solitude.

In Washerwomen (Lavandare), the challenge is posed not so much by nature as by the vagaries of agriculture. It opens with the image of a plough standing idle in an untilled field.  In a nearby mill, a group of women sing songs together as they wash the clothes in the millstream.  The poem ends with the words of a well known Tuscan strombotto, a Renaissance form of what was conventionally a love song. However, whereas the original of this one expressed the pining of a man for his lost love, the singer here is a woman whose loved one has left her. Pascoli was writing at a time in the late nineteenth century when Italy was suffering mass emigration from its impoverished rural areas.

In a huddle (In Capanello) continues the key theme of community togetherness.  The neighbours stand at the railway crossing gate, waiting for the train to go through: they gossip mainly about locals they all know, the unwarranted price of wine, the worries of raising their cattle, the scourge of what is most likely syphilis, a major public health concern of the newly-formed national government They barely notice the passing of the ‘black’ train. The adjective is emphasised by being the first word of its line, thus sparking its various connotations, from the literal to the figurative. Is it ‘actually’ black, or is it sinister, or just featureless?  In other poems here, the train seems to become synonymous with the future, but an aimless future whose destination is in no way connected with any intention at the point of departure.

As its title suggests, nothing human or communal is involved in The Rail Track (La Via Ferrata). Apart for that single line describing cattle peacefully grazing along the embankments, the poem is purely imagistic, focused on the rectilinear uniformity of a whole dynamic aimed at just getting somewhere else, while the telegraph poles and their wires enable communication with people who are already ‘there’, wherever that might be. The dis-order of the natural scene simply points up the functional rationality of a network which had been in operation for at least a decade since Pascoli’s birth. Ironically, it is the sound ringing occasionally from the wires that is figuratively given a human connection. The lament of a grieving woman is a recurring trope of abandonment and solitude. The working women of ‘Washerwomen’ did have the consolation of traditional songs sung together to fill the emptiness which here is merely enhanced by the monotone hollowness of those whining wires.

There is a connection between the woman’s wail of the train and the enigmatic presence of the woman at the window in the image which closes That Day (Quel Giorno).  One is immediately intrigued by the specificity of the title, giving rise to an expectation of the poet’s personal familiarity with the poem’s subject. ‘The swallows have left the roof’ (and not ‘left the roof’) indicates that they have been observed for some time and that the observer is still there in the actual present. Then, with that unsettling shift of perspective both of time and place of ‘Far-Off Festival’, the ‘tower’ of ‘the big house’ is directly addressed, sharing with it the knowledge of a troubled disturbance of a brood of swallows on an earlier day, the ‘that’ day of the title. Perhaps the feast day of San Lorenzo in a familiarly named tower.  The closing quatrain is in the actual present. He hears or is still hearing the chair bumped, the skirt rustle and sees or is still seeing the puzzled ‘kind, woman’s face’.

Frogs (Le Rane) was written on his return to San Mauro for the wedding of the daughter of its mayor. In the first five stanzas he captures the immediacy of the sensuous joy of return. The repetition of ‘I have seen’ and not ‘I saw’ in the first stanza is suggestive of wonder, emphasising colour (the red clover, the blackthorn, the ‘green fringe’ of the poplars), and the tactile softness of the ditch. Colour continues with the yellow branches of the mulberry in the second stanza, and a not unfamiliar boldness of synesthesia when he hears ‘the tinkling bell of welcome’ unwind ‘skeins of gold’ as it rings.  There is a stark contrast here with the colourless landscapes of ‘Carter’, ‘Washerwomen’, and ‘The Rail Track’ with its impersonal lifelessness.

An immediacy of hearing is added to that of sight and touch with the croaking of frogs in ‘the wet tranquillity’. There is further emphasis on colour, and again excited repetition, three times here, of ‘I find myself’, with its added sense of rediscovery. He finds himself, however, in his ‘sweet home town’ which is described as ‘far away’, words isolated in that single line, to convey, as he did in ‘Far-off Festival’, the sense of a past that still exists as though it were the present, or at least a desired present, not the one from which he had been unnaturally torn. The bells, perhaps of that wedding for which he had returned, call him back where he belongs, or, rather, belonged. He now hears, interrupting the bells heralding their welcome, the ‘black’ train of ‘In a huddle’. Ironically, he has earlier heard something that sounded like ‘the black noise of a train/as it leaves’, but it had been the croaking of the frogs.  The real train is on its way ….into some future, which will always be its aimless direction.

Night Jasmine (Il gelsomino notturno) was written in 1901, also for a wedding, that of Gabriele  Briganti, who is directly addressed in the note for its publication in Canti of Castelvecchio (1903). The poet hopes that ‘he will think of me whenever he inhales the scent of that flower.’   The night brings out the fragrance of the flower’s ‘ripeness of strawberries’ at the time of day when he always sees his ‘dear ones as if still at home.’ The tone of the poem is quietly intimate, in keeping with that time of day, and of ‘that’ day, which is slowly revealed as that of the wedding itself. Pascoli’s own memories do not intrude. Rather, they are expressed almost as an aside or afterthought to the main ‘statement’ of the first line, itself conversationally informal, ‘And the night flowers are beginning to bloom. ’ The descriptive scene-setting continues seamlessly with the description of the ‘twilight butterflies’ that seem to flame in the viburnum. And yet, the un-intrusive memory is not totally obscured, returning at the end of the stanza in which the scent of the jasmine is compared to that of strawberries and in which the candle light is first observed in the house ‘over there’. However, ‘the grass that grows upon the graves’ does, in this case, switch the perspective away from what would seem to be the real subject of the epithalamium.  It occurs before the final images of the night giving way to the dawn and an imagined moment of conception, in a house ‘over there’.  Pascoli’s regret at this being a happiness which he cannot share does ‘intrude’ here, in so far as those tragedies that blighted his life in 1867 continued to direct his life and his way of seeing the world.

My short passegiata with Giovanni Pascoli ends where it began, at The Tower at San Mauro. (Torre di San Mauro).  In 1907, he was elected an honorary member of San Mauro’s town council.  Returning for the ceremony, he spent the night at the farm which his father had nicknamed ‘the Tower’. They lived above the farm’s chapel. This poem was one of an eight-poem sequence dedicated to his sister, Maria, and included as an appendix,‘ Autumn Diary’ (Diario autunnale), to the fifth edition of the ‘Canti’ in 1910. As in ‘Night Jasmine’ the tone is one of quiet introspection. After the first two lines of exposition, set apart from the main body of the poem, he recounts only what he heard while asleep. It begins with singing which is ‘sweet and slow’. Then follow the sound of a bell, then prayers and an organ’s ‘Gloria’, a picture slowly emerging of a church service. He then hears sighs which are, as was the singing, ‘sweet’ and ‘slow’. Thanks to the slow, controlled pace of its quiet, gentle melody the poem moves seamlessly to a further realisation, that it is in fact a requiem, and that the celebrants are themselves dead people, whose voices he had heard singing. Now, however, they are seen.  The mourned one is the dead child at the altar steps, his shoulders covered by his ‘weeping mother’ with a shroud. Perhaps it is he himself for whom she grieves, his childhood having died after the martyrdom as it was described in the first poem, ‘The Tenth of August’.  In the morning he hears the singing of birds and the rustling of trees in the wind.  They ‘tell’ him what he had actually heard, that they were all natural sounds belong to the place.  As the trees put it, the farm is no longer as it was in his day.

The imperceptible movement from hearing to seeing and to hearing again, from present to past and to present again, should now be familiar shifts of perspective and sense in the work of a poet for whom such deliberate disorientation, demanding greater thoughtfulness from the reader, is a conscious rejection of the classical adherence to the unities of place and time, of confident and constant affirmation. He summed up his poetics in his 1897 essay, ‘Il fanciullino’ (the little child), stating that poetry must be spontaneous and observe as a child does, with a pure eye, as if for the first time.  This is what he himself does in his own poetry , where he conveys his own sense of wonder and, crucially, of wondering. In common with all the other poems in this selection, in ‘The Tower at San Mauro’, Pascoli has crafted its reading to ensure a slow pace of reading. The end-stopping of consecutive lines is very rare.  We see and reflect with the same precision with which he has himself observed, and feel as if he is in control both of the writing and its reading. We read essentially with his voice. The experience is often disquieting, as the images of his world and his life slowly reveal what he called “their smile and their tears”. For me, he is unquestionably the godfather of the modernism of Italian poetry, as Hardy was of that of English poetry.

Allen Prowle was born in Aberdare in 1940. Education took him to England where he has lived ever since, without losing his ‘Cymreictod’. He began writing poetry at Sheffield University where he graduated in French. His poems have appeared in many journals, his first collection, Landmarks was published in 1973. His Europeanism explains his interest in translation; he has translated French Italian and Spanish poems, for Magma, MPT and The High Window. In 2009, MPT published his translations of Rocco Scotellaro in its first-ever single author collection. He was awarded the Stephen Spender prize for translations of Attilio Bertolucci.

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