Introduction

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 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 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 graz- ing 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 x Introduction 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 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 Introduction xi 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 Giuseppe Ungaretti’s distilled fragments about World War I. 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 Andrea Zanzotto.

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