Journal of Italian Translation

thus remain condemned to their purgatory—which is to say, to this world:
unlike Dante, and like us.
Giovanni Pascoli was born in 1855 in San Mauro di Romagna (a town
later renamed San Mauro Pascoli in his honor) and died in Bologna, where
he had followed Carducci as professor of Italian literature, in 1912. His
personal life was famously full of tragedy: his father was shot to death when
he was 11, his mother and oldest sister died the following year, and two of
his brothers were dead by the time he was 20. In 1891 he published his first
collection of poems in Italian and also won the first of thirteen gold medals
for his Latin poetry from the Royal Dutch Academy. At his best, his quiet,
plain-spoken style provides what Joseph Cary calls “a rough antithesis or
even antidote” to the grandeur, or grandiosity, of Carducci and D’Annunzio
(the other two members of the great triad that shadows the threshold of
twentieth-century Italian poetry). He is known for his poetics of the
“fanciullino,” his term for the innocent, non-rational intuition possessed by
children and poets and associated with lyricism and creativity, and for his
focus on “piccole cose,” small, humble objects, which constitute the essence
of Pascoli’s world and which are named with a precision new to Italian
poetry. Where Leopardi, a notoriously inexact naturalist, refers generically
to “the songs of birds,” Pascoli names the exact species and sometimes, like
Audubon, even transcribes its call phonetically. The title of his first book,
Myricae, is neatly emblematic of this aspect of his poetics: taken from a reference
by Virgil to “humilesque myricae” (humble tamarisks), it emphasizes
the humble object, properly named. Subsequent books include Poemetti (Shorter
poems, 1897), Canti di Castelvecchio (Songs from Castelvecchio, 1903), Poemi
conviviali (Convivial Poems, 1904), and several others.
“La cavalla storna” may be Pascoli’s most famous poem, which is not
to say his best. Though the poem is built around a central mystery—the
identity of his father’s murderer—the poem itself is not, I think, as mysterious
as his best poems are. It is not without fascination, but part of its fascination
surely lies in our knowledge that it is based on actual events. It may
overstate the case to say that it stands in relation to his oeuvre as “O Captain!
My Captain!” does to Whitman’s (Pascoli’s is a better poem), but they have
much in common: both are about father figures who were shot to death in the
mid-1860s, both moistened the eyes of generations of schoolchildren, and, if
we read them generously, both are indeed moving, in their fashion. But both
also suffer from melodrama that verges on mawkishness. Translation can’t
remedy such faults; it can only avoid exacerbating them while trying to do
justice to the virtues. In Pascoli’s case (unlike Whitman’s), the poem’s form
and tone are virtues: the finely balanced, end-stopped heroic couplets and
the gothic air have the effect of distancing the poem’s events, of making them
seem the stuff of ancient legend rather than autobiography. It was such
qualities that I tried hardest to convey.