Our Master

Cesare Pavese

     

Cesare Pavese was a well-know Italian Poet of the 19th century. He was born in 1908 on his parents’ farm just outside Santo Stefaco Belbo, a rural town in Langhe hills near the cosmopolitan city of Turin . Though he grew up mostly in Turin , he spent many summers, as well as his first elementary school in Santo Stefano and those hills and the people who lived in them and worked them marked him deeply. But Turin marked him too, and in his groundbreaking first collection on poems, Lavorare stanca (Work’s Tiring), the division within himself between city and country developed into a major theme, as described in his diary:

 

Chances made me begin and end Work’s Tiring with poems about Turin- more precisely, about Turin as a place from which one returns. You could the book the spreading into and conquering of Turin by Santo Stefano Belbo…The town becomes the city, nature becomes human life, boy becomes man. The theme has broad cultural as well as personal significance, cince Turin , like cuties elsewhere awas a center of gravity whose pull grew stronger as the econ1omy became increasingly industrialized. Many of Pavese’s earlier poems are inhabited by characters who seem to have varying degrees of disappointment and isolation.

 

The tension between city and country life is just one aspect of the social dimension of Pavese’s Poetry, a dimension that is striking enough in itself but positively extraordinary when viewed in the context of Hermeticism that dominated the Italian poetic landscape of the 1930s. Work’s Tiring, published in 1936, consisted of poems written in accessible, rhythmic language that told the stories of farmers and factory workers, thieves and drunks, lonely prostitues and lonelier men. This is a time when the work of many of the leading Italian poets including Ungaretti, Montale and Quasimodo, often dispensed with both the logical sequence of narrative and immediately apprehensive language. As Gian-Paolo Biasin wrote in The Smile of the Gods, his study of Pavese, Italian poetry had “rejected any contact with the political and social reality of his time (Fascism and the rise of the bourgeoisie), or else adopted only its most extreme and superficial aspects, such as nationalism of F.T.Marinetti or of countered Hermeticism’s deliberate obscurity (which to be fair may own deliberate demotic, derived in part from his intensive study of American writers. Much of Pavese’s life and death was a turning away, but his work, it bears repeating, is a turning toward. Here is a translation that runs us toward a new generation of writers and readers.

 

South Seas

 

To Monti

 

We’re walking one evening on the flank of a hill
In silence. In the shadows of dusk
My cousin’s a giant dressed all in white,
Moving serenely, face bronzed by the sun,
Not speaking. We have a talent for silence.
Some ancestor of ours must have been quite a loner –
A great man among fools or a crazy old bum –
To have taught his descendants such silence.

 

This evening he spoke. He asked if I’d join him to climb
To the top of the hill: from there you can see,
In the distance, on clear nights, the glow
Of Turin . “You, living in Turin ,” he said,
“you’ve got the right idea. Life should be lived
far from here: make some money, have fun,
and then, when you come back, like me,a t forty,
it all seems new. These hills will always be waiting.”
He told me all this, not in Italian,
But in the slow dialect of these parts, which, like the rocks
Right here on this hill, is so rugged and hard
That two decades of foreign tongues and oceans
Never scratched its surface. And he clibs the steep path
With that self-contained look I saw as a boy
On the faces of farmers when they were tired.

 

For twenty years he wandered the world.
He left home when I was still being carried by women
And everyone figured he died. They spoke of him sometimes,
those women, as if his life were some fable,
but the men, more serious, simply forgot him.
One winter a card came for my dead father,
With a big green stamp showing ships in a port
And best wishes for the harvest. It was a shock,
But the boy, who had grown, explained with excitement
That it came from a place called Tasmania ,
Surrounded by the bluest waters, swarming with sharks,
In the Pacific, south of Australia . The cousin, he added,
Was certainly fishing for pearls. And he peeled off the stamp.
Everyone had teir opinion, but all were agreed
That if the cousin hadn’t died yet, he would soon.
Then they forgot him again and many years passed.

 

Ah, so much time has gone by since we played
Malay pirates. And since the last time
I went down to swim in the dangerous waters
And followed a playmate up into a tree,
Splitting its beautiful branches, and since
I bashed the head of a rival and got punched –
So much life has gone by. Other days, other games,
Other spillings of blood in the conflicts with rivals
Of a moreelusive kind: thoughs and dreams.
The city taught me an infinite number of fears:
A crowd or street could make me afraid,
Or sometimes a thought, a glimpsed on a face.
I still see the light from the thousands of streetlamps
That mocked the great shuffling beneath them.

 

After the war, my cousin, larger than life, came home,
He was one of the few. And now he had money.
Our relatives muttered: “A year, at the most,
He’ll blow it all, and then take off again.
Bums live that way till the day tey die.”
My cousin’s hardheaded. He bought a ground-floor place
In town, turning it into a concrete garage
With a gleaming red gas-pump outfront
And over the bridge, at the curve,a big sign.
Then he hired a mechanic to handle the money
While he roamed the hills, smoking.

 

Meanwhile he got married. He picked a girl
Who was slender and blond like some of the women
He must have encountered during his travels.
But still he’d go out by himself. Dressed all in white,
Hands clasped behind him, face bronzed by the sun,
He’d frequent the fairs in the morning, looking shrewd
And haggling over horses. He later explained,
When his scheme had failed, that he wanted to buy
Every horse and ox in the valley, to force people
To replace them with things that had engines.
“but I was the real horse’s ass”, he said,
“to think it could ever have worked. I forgot
that folks around here are just like their oxen.”

 

We’ve been walking for nearly an hour. Close to the peak
The wind begins rustling and whistling around us,
My cousin stops suddenly and turns: “This year
I’m making flyers saying: Santo Stefano
Has always put on the ebst festivals
In the Belbo Valley – eve the guys in Canelli
Should have to admit it. “ then he keeps walking.
Around us in the dark the smell of earth and wind,
A few lights in the distance: farms, cars
You can barely hear. And I think of the strength
this man’s given me, how it was wrenched from the sea,
from foreign lands, from silence that endures.
My cousin won’t speak of the places he’s been.
He says dryly that he was once here, or once there,
Then he thinks of his engines.
Only one dream
Has stayed in his blood: once, when he worked
As a stoker on a Dutch fishing boat, the Cetacean,
He saw the heavy harpoons sail in the sun,
And saw the whales as they fled in frothing of blood
And the chase and the flukes lifting, fighting the launches.
Sometimes, he mentions it.

 

But whenever I tell him
That he’s one of the lucky ones to have seen the sun rise
Over the loveliest lands in the world,
He smiles at the memory, then says that the sun
Didn’t rise till the day for them was already old.

 

“Cesare Pavese – Disaffections – Translated by Geoffrey Brock”

BY Suma V S