Comments on: Smokers of Paper/Workers of the World

By: Daisy

Daisy — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 17:15:28 +0000

Dear Geoffrey–
Thanks so much for these clarifications. It’s only just now, in July, that I noticed that you commented back in May, when I was away from a computer altogether. Anyway, it’s clear to me (and no doubt to you!) that my Italian is so poor that I have no idea of nuances, shades of meaning, etc., in the language.
Disaffections is extraordinary, and necessary. Thanks for it!
Daisy
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By: Geoffrey Brock

Geoffrey Brock — Fri, 16 May 2008 03:56:33 +0000

I just came across this post — great to find that these poems and translations are being read and talked about. Couple of comments: I’m sorry that Levertov recommended the Crosland translations, because they are in my judgment not very good at all. Crosland translated primarily from French, and judging by her Pavese versions, she simply didn’t know Italian very well — they are full of errors, some trivial, some decidedly not.
I share Daisy’s preference for the early poems over the later “vaguer” poems. But I don’t share her reading of the ending of “Fumatori di carta,” at least not completely. I agree that it refuses to sentimentalize. But I’m afraid that the note of hope she finds in Arrowsmith’s version is (alas!) Arrowsmith’s, not Pavese’s. The Italian ending seems pretty hopeless to me: “Almeno potercene andare” clearly implies (though there is a kind of elision there) that one is unable to leave, that the ability to leave is a counterfactual one. (For the record, I almost called the “Fumatori” poem “Pipe Dreamers” in English. But this was one of the cases, like the title “Work’s Tiring,” where a literal rendering seemed to me fresher and more interesting — and less interpretive.)
One final note that IS hopeful: since I wrote the intro that Don kindly quoted above, several of Pavese’s novels have been brought back into print by New York Review Books. Now if only someone would bring Pavese’s diaries (published in English in the sixties as “The Burning Brand” and “This Business of Living”) back, too…
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By: bill knott

bill knott — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:49:52 +0000

from abebooks:
Selected Poems (ISBN: 0140421351)
Pavese, Cesare; Crosland, Margaret; edited by
Bookseller: C. P. Books
(Edenbridge, KEN, United Kingdom)
Bookseller Rating: 4-star rating
Price: US$ 6.59
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Book Description: Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1971. Paperback. Book Condition: Fair. First Edition Thus. Creases and rubbing to spine and book edges, 1cm x 0.5cm paint stain to lower fore-edge, pages beginning to age-tan. ; Text clean and readable, binding tight. ; Penguin Modern European Poets; 12mo 7″ – 7½” tall; 144pp. pages; Poems first published in English by Peter Owen 1969. Translated and foreword by Margaret Crosland. Cover drawing by Lucia Severino. Bookseller Inventory # 521
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:41:36 +0000

Great point, Bill – thank you for mentioning the Crosland translations!
Well worth a look; here, I believe, is a link to one of them.
BTW, has anyone here read Pavese’s doctoral dissertation on Whitman? I’ve got to track that down…
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By: bill knott

bill knott — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 18:08:51 +0000

Denise Levertov wrote about Pavese’s poetry
and said she preferred the translations
by Margaret Crosland to those of Arrowsmith—,
the Crosland versions were published
in the Penguin Modern European Poets series . . .
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By: Don Share

Don Share — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:24:54 +0000

Thank you for this terrific post, Daisy! I was lucky enough to have been a student of Arrowsmith’s many moons ago…
Anyway, folks might be interested to see Geoffrey Brock’s generous acknowledgment of Arrowsmith’s Pavese in the introduction (“Walking with Pavese”) to Disaffections:
“Most Americans who know Pavese’s poetry at all know it primarily through Hard Labor, William Arrowsmith’s 1976 translation of the 1943 edition of Lavorare stanca, and this translation is (like translations of his diary and novels) now unfortunately out of print. One of the strengths of the Arrowsmith versions is that they emerge into English with an undeniable energy and sensibility of their own. For my taste, such translations are nearly always preferable to blandly literal versions, which in their loyalty to the letter often betray the spirit. Still, Arrowsmith’s versions sometimes betray the spirit of the Pavese poems in other ways. They are, for example, chattier and less measured (in all senses of that word) than Pavese’s original poems, whose tight-lipped rhythm becomes an integral part of the experience of reading them, as it apparently was of the experience of writing them. I have felt obligated, in my translations, to try to create a similar rhythmic experience.”
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