Stefano Pietrosanti

on translating Giovanni Pascoli

“Pascoli counts on a reader that does not know all the words he uses. As …[Pascoli]… says … poetry, like religion, needs ‘words that veil and darken their meaning, words, I mean, foreign to present use (and which are nevertheless used to “give greater life to thought”).’” — Giorgio Agamben (1982)

“Life is cold and we need heat; life is dark and we need light; we shall not let fade what can give us light and heat; a single spark can awake flames and joy. We shall not let death take whatever has been beautiful and gay.” — Giovanni Pascoli (1898)

This piece by Giovanni Pascoli is meant as a statement of intent, a manifesto of the intimist universalism which is the hallmark of the poet from Emilia. The poem’s protagonist is poetry personified, presenting itself in the form of a lamp spreading a warm, soothing light. This light, over the five stanzas, portrays a series of seven canvasses; the first three in great detail, the second three with quicker brushstrokes, and the last with a more abstract, rarefied touch.

At first, the lamp hangs almost unseen in the living room of a smoky farm. In the dim circle of light, a mother and her daughters are spending the early night weaving. The daughters are talking about love. Then, the lamp spreads its light on a table set for dinner, where a kid, the elder daughter, and the mother stand in isolation against the merry background. The light, though still soft, is more vital: it points to the kid, who is focused on writing; it captures the eyes of the elder daughter, who is there daydreaming and ignoring her mother’s inquisitive stare. Then, it is a votive lamp inside a Marian shrine, burning peasants’ offers of olive oil and witnessing these people’s faith, private and public — the “poor single tear” and the “virgins’ choirs.” Then it gets quicker: it is the lamp on the bedside table of a pregnant woman; it is the headlight of a ship crossing “the wide stream of being”; it is dead candles in a graveyard. Finally, there is no lamp, only light. This light is free from its many possible sources, and it can reach and comfort a wanderer roaming in “the loneliest, latest of hours.”

The poem portrays a coming to life, an actualization of poetry. It does so through a succession of van Gogh-like pictures, which I feel is more significant to the understanding of the poem than the actual stanzas’ structure. Indeed, the narration evolves through changing tenses and adverbs, which always coincide with changes in the landscape in which the poetic light spreads. The narrating voice starts introducing the smoky room with a wishful and timid tone — “May the lamp of me shine,” which renders the Italian “Io sono la lampada ch’arda”; then, switching to the table scene, the voice switches to a present tense and an adverb of probability — “perhaps…gathers”; adverbs of probability are dropped when the Marian shrine is populated by the villagers — “I harvest this tribute of olive…at dusk my ray sets fire”; this pure present is kept and stressed at the beginning of each of the three successive scenes — “It shines, my lamp / it soothes!’’ which renders the Italian “Io sono la lampada ch’arde” with the woman, the boat, and the graveyard; finally, the first stroke of the last canvas exclaims — “It shines, my lamp / it soothes!’’ which renders the Italian “Io sono la lampada ch’arde / soave!”

The decision to focus on the flow of images informed my choices in translation. In order not to break this flow, I often either adopted non-literal solutions, or I chose options more prosaic than the original. For example, “la veglia che fila” in the fourth verse describes weavers who are awake (keeping vigil) at night and spinning. These are encompassed by the lamp’s light, and the lamp looks at them, not at the night; though, directly introducing night and weavers allowed me to synthetically fix the image of the half-shaded room. Or, at the beginning of the shrine’s canvas, I was more explicit than the original in describing the “tribute of olive,” since the idea of an olive-oil lamp is quite remote to our present experience and the original passing mention would have complicated a passage which, to the best of my understanding, was not meant to be obscure. On the other hand, I tried to stay as close as possible to the original in matters of sound and structure, and I thus preserved the rhyme scheme at the end of each stanza.

I have always been driven to Pascoli’s work by his struggle to remember what’s gone, to strengthen what’s close and frail, to fight a battle to save “temples that the Gods shall not save” (Borges). I’m happy to present to you “Poesia” as a sample of how Pascoli framed this effort as a hopeful and humble task. Before doing so, I want to thank Professor Taije Silverman, who reviewed my early drafts, and whose advice has been incredibly insightful and helpful in the process of translation.