Journal of Italian Translation

English Translations of Poems by Guido Gozzano and
Giovanni Pascoli
by Geoffrey Brock
Geoffrey Brock is the author of Weighing Light, and his poems and
translations have appeared in magazines including Poetry, Paris Review,
and The New Yorker. His translation of Cesare Pavese’s Disaffections was
named one of the “Best Books of 2003” by the Los Angeles Times and received
both the PEN Center USA Translation Award and the MLA’s Lois Roth
Translation Award. He’s also the translator of books by Roberto Calasso
and Umberto Eco. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow and the recipient of
recent fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches
creative writing and translation at the University of Arkansas. His website is
www.geoffreybrock.com.
Guido Gozzano was born in Turin in 1883 and died there in 1916,
after a long battle with tuberculosis. He was a poet of substantial accomplishment
and enormous promise, easily the best of the so-called “Crepuscular”
poets. That label, coined by a critic as a slight, suggests a particular
attitude toward the past, as if the long day of Italian culture were winding
down and nothing remained but dim and fading traces, twilight pieces. In a
land that had produced Rome and the Renaissance, Dante and Leopardi,
such an attitude was perhaps inevitable and was, in any case, pervasive; it
was precisely this sort of passatismo against which the futuristi would shortly
rebel. But Gozzano’s poetry also contains the seeds of something much more
modern. Like Eliot, he had read his Laforgue, and his monologue “Totò
Merúmeni,” one of the centerpieces of his second and most important volume,
I colloqui (1911), anticipates by several years elements of Eliot’s
“Prufrock.” It is tantalizing (and, of course, fruitless) to imagine what the
landscape of Italian poetry in the first half of the last century might have
looked like had Gozzano not died nel mezzo del cammin.
The poem presented here first appeared in a journal in 1913 and was
not collected during Gozzano’s brief lifetime. Though not typical of his bestknown
work, it is profoundly beguiling. The “unfound isle,” with its “blessed
shore” (Purg. XXXI 97) and “sacred forest” (Purg. XXVIII 2), alludes to the
earthly paradise described in the final cantos of Purgatorio. (The final line
also suggests parallels with another famous journey: it is lifted from Pascoli’s
long poem about Ulysses, L’ultimo viaggio.) If the Purgatorio seems today the
most modern and human of Dante’s canticles, it is partly because it is the
only one that, as W.S. Merwin has remarked, takes place “on the earth, as our
lives do.” For Dante, of course, purgatory is something to transcend, whereas
Gozzano, in this poem, seems to deny the possibility of such transcendence.
His paradise remains unattainable, a “vain semblance,” and his sailors