Introduction

Though Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912) is known in 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 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

Pascoli.indb 9 7/18/2019 12:22:38 PM 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 , 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 child- hood. 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 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 graz- ing cows to train tracks), Pascoli’s poetry reiterates loss through a con- stant 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

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Pascoli.indb 10 7/18/2019 12:22:38 PM 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 , 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

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Pascoli.indb 11 7/18/2019 12:22:38 PM ­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 ’s distilled fragments about . 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 . 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

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Pascoli.indb 12 7/18/2019 12:22:38 PM 1982, Sanguineti wrote his own “Last Walk” sequence in homage to the sequence Pascoli had written a century earlier, translating the onomato- poeia 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 contem- porary 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 sub- stitute 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 ver- sion 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 speci- ficity 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 . These disparate elements already converge in Myricae, which although published in 1892, was (as with most of his books) re- peatedly 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 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 moth- er’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

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Pascoli.indb 13 7/18/2019 12:22:38 PM 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. 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, , 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

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Pascoli.indb 14 7/18/2019 12:22:38 PM 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 Myri- cae, 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 en- titled “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

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Pascoli.indb 15 7/18/2019 12:22:38 PM 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, Alex- ander 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 mod- els, and its “odes” share with Myricae and Canti both a minute attention to nature and linguistic collage. The grief, mystery, and botanical preci- sion 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 philoso- phy, 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

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Pascoli.indb 16 7/18/2019 12:22:39 PM with the whole.”10 His observation describes both “The Drowned” from Odes and Hymns and “The Meteor” fromCanti 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 “some- what 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, “Birth- place” seems the ideal opening poem, announcing the poet’s oeuvre with its fraught nostalgia and shifts 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 sug- gest an ample, moody simultaneity. His work seems to want to make an

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Pascoli.indb 17 7/18/2019 12:22:39 PM 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 ob- jects,” 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 . While I talked about tenets of modernism, under- graduate students worked in pairs on ancient wooden benches to trans- late 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 innova- tions of the twentieth, a facet of that “contradiction in terms” Pasolini describes: “There co-exist in Pascoli an obsession that keeps him patho- logically 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 bo- tanical terms inflects his grief with nuance and surprise. Instead of ac- tively trying to translate the experimentalism of this linguistic mixture, I tried to carry over its lightness of effect. His rhymed verse has a buoy- ancy of sound that finds a nearer English equivalent in the ease of as- sonance, 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

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Pascoli.indb 18 7/18/2019 12:22:39 PM 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, inter- rupted by parentheticals and dashes. My punctuation is, by and large,

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Pascoli.indb 19 7/18/2019 12:22:39 PM 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 Pas- coli’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 re- lied. While I am the primary translator and bear full and final respon- sibility 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 grand- parents’ 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 gor- geously 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. 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

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Pascoli.indb 20 7/18/2019 12:22:39 PM 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 estrange- ment; 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

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Pascoli.indb 21 7/18/2019 12:22:39 PM Pascoli.indb 22 7/18/2019 12:22:39 PM