Poetry: 'I forgive everyone and ask everyone's forgiveness. OK? Don't gossip too much," said the suicide note left by Cesare Pavese. Though he died in 1950, aged 42, Susan Sontag regarded him as one of the last century's "essential writers". An important writer's poetry is well served by this translation, writes Marco Sonzogni.
Perhaps people intent on suicide cannot always avoid notions of self-glorification. This applies to even a disillusioned man like Pavese. Though hitherto alien to his mentality, such a feeling may have gripped him as the night of August 26th, 1950 drew to a close.
A couple of months earlier, this multifaceted writer - translator, poet, novelist, essayist and editor - had received the Premio Strega, Italy's most prestigious literary award. The recognition, he wrote in his diary, had the "appearance" of being his "greatest triumph". Nonetheless it didn't prevent him swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills.
Literary history is interspersed with suicide. When it occurs, this act of self-extinction highlights the conflicts and complexes within all human minds. Pavese's suicide is no exception. On the contrary, his taking of his own life can be read as confirmation of his convictions. For someone who did not believe himself to be "a man of actions" such an irreversible act could enable him to transcend crippling "disaffections".
In the introduction to his translation of Pavese's collected poems, Geoffrey Brock points out that the author "had been profoundly drawn to suicide for most of his life, writing about it frequently in his diary, his letters, his fiction". Even before he was 30, Pavese admitted that the idea of taking his own life was "always" in his mind.
In one of his late and most famous poems, 'Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes', Pavese wrote that "death has a look for everyone". He finally saw it in the solitude of a hotel room in Turin, shortly after his last love - the young American actress Constance Dawling - had returned to America, leaving disappointed and disaffected once again.
Cesare Pavese was born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo, a small rural town in the Langhe - the Piedmontese hills near the "cosmopolitan city" of Turin, in north-western Italy. He spent his happiest summers there on the farm of his father, a clerk with Turin's court. Pavese "mythologised" the landscape of his childhood into symbols of "eternal memory" and these myths are threaded throughout his work.
After his father's death, the farm was sold, bringing to an end this joyful tranche de vie in Pavese's life. He would never re-experience such immaculate bliss. His entire literary output could in one sense be described as an attempt to resurrect the myths of his youth and reconcile them with the disillusions of his adult life.
This attempted reconciliation is evident from the dialectical dichotomies at the core of Pavese's poetry: country versus city life; innocence versus maturity; integration versus isolation; political versus religious convictions; passivity versus activity. The "epic" theme of homecoming, in all its modulations, can be singled out as the backbone of Pavese's narrative in verse and fiction. (Significantly, the protagonist of his last novel, The Moon and the Bonfire, is named "Anguilla": eel.) Pavese's poetry, as he put it himself, consists of "poem-stories". This was a striking innovation in the Italian tradition, and most critics failed to recognise it fully when Work's Tiring first appeared in 1936. A new and original voice had emerged from the continuing crisis of Modernism and the choking hand of Fascism.
Pavese's education "coincided" with the climax of Piedmont's cultural avant-garde, led by anti-Fascist intellectuals such as Gobetti, Gramsci and later Ginzburg. In 1930, he graduated from the University of Turin having completed a dissertation on the poetry of Walt Whitman. This marked the beginning of a prolific career as scholar and translator of American literature.
Augusto Monti, his influential schoolteacher and later colleague at Einaudi's publishing house, and Walt Whitman, the poet who celebrated both "labour" and "leisure", represented for Pavese existential and literary paradigms.
In terms of modus vivendi, as Calvino pointed out, this was the sansóssì, the Piedmontese version, as it were, of sans-souci: a seemingly irreconcilable combination of outgoing, carefree joie de vivre and laborious, taciturn stoicism. This "trait" - echoing sources as different as Virgil and Vico - underscores not only Pavese's début collection but also his later poetry.
In terms of literary "models", the fusion of "memories" from the autochthonous tradition with the "examples" from American literature - Whitman, Lewis, Anderson, Melville, Steinbeck, Faulkner and others - provided Pavese with a new medium of "realistic expression". What he was looking for was an effective answer to Italy's "official" culture, poised between the nationalisms of D'Annunzio and Marinetti and the "deliberate obscurity", as Brock has termed it, of Hermetic poets like Ungaretti, Montale and Quasimodo.
However, in spite of his intentions and the ground-breaking technique of narrative verse adopted to carry them out, the heartbeat of Pavese's poetry remains in the unresolved tensions of an "anxious lyricism".
Disaffections: Complete Poems (1930-1950) is the first complete collection of Pavese's poetry in English translation. The volume is divided into four parts. Carcanet is once again to be commended for believing in poetry in translation. Too often reviewers fail to comment on the quality of translation. Pavese would have disapproved of such neglect. His view of translation as an all-absorbing creative process was unequivocal and uncompromising, as his correspondence testifies.
In a letter to Enrico Bemporad in April, 1930, responding to the publisher's comments on his translation of Sinclair Lewis's Our Mr Wrenn, Pavese argues that translation should either be "precise, cold and impersonal" - and, were such rendition attainable, "readers would make little sense of it" - or else "a second writing, exposed to the dangers of any creative writing and, above all, aware of the readers it is intended for".
In a letter to Valentino Bompiani in January, 1940, discussing the translation of John Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle, Pavese points out that "to translate well, one must fall in love with the verbal material of the work and feel it being re-born into his native tongue with the urgency of a second creation. Otherwise it is a mechanical process, and anybody can do it".
Geoffrey Brock, an award-winning American translator and poet, has intelligently balanced those desiderata, doing justice to the syntactical and lexical texture of Pavese's verse as well as to its existential and lyrical intensity. Previous translators had failed to do so.
In one of his poems, 'Walking Around', the Chilean poet and Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda wrote: "I am tired of being a man". Pavese too felt, overwhelmingly, the tiring "trade of living". So we could speculate that this is what ultimately killed him; that this is the truest legacy of his genius. But he has asked us not to gossip too much about him. Let his poetry speak for him.
Marco Sonzogni is Faculty Fellow in Italian at University College Dublin and the editor of Translation Ireland