Smokers of Paper/Workers of the World

Cesare Pavese
Who knew Harriet was crawling with Cesare Pavese fans? But the Cesare Pavese poem-podcast Linh Dinh posted below, with Bertolucci’s pretty video, is not typical of what I think of as the great Pavese—the early poems. Don Share’s links in the comments section give a better idea. What I love about early Pavese is that unlike many 20th Century European poets, he generally didn’t use words like “existences,” “soul,” “escape,” “supreme light,” “torment” and “the poor.” Or he did so in the context of poem-stories about people (many of them poor), mysterious and matter-of-fact stories, very specific and very strange. He wrote, by the way, wonderfully about women—although I’m not going to talk about any of those poems in this post.
When I read Pavese, I try to read the Italian, at which I’m generally only semi-successful, alongside a pair of translations. So the Pavese I read isn’t Pavese but some negotiation between the two versions and the original: A fourth thing altogether.

William Arrowsmith’s 1979 Hard Labor translates Pavese’s most famous book of poems, Lavorare Stanca. “Hard Labor” is a brilliant translation of Pavese’s title, but not literal. The literal translation would be “Work’s Tiring,” which is how Geoffrey Brock renders it in his 2002 Pavese book, Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950, which includes both the vigorous earlier poems and the later vaguer lyrics.
Pavese, born in 1908, died in 1950, an anti-fascist and, after WWII, a member of the Italian Communist Party. He was arrested in 1935 and convicted for possessing letters from a political prisoner. A member of the Turin literati, he was given internal exile in isolated and impoverished Southern Italy. He returned after a year to Turin. A novelist, critic and translator, most notably of Moby Dick, he was much influenced by American literature, especially Walt Whitman, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters.
Brock’s translations are generally more literal than Arrowsmith’s; the poems in his versions are excellent. I may slightly prefer Arrowsmith’s versions, however, as being, simply, better poems in English, and perhaps because they are willing to get creative with Pavese. Take the 1934 poem “Fumatori di carta” from Lavorare Stanca. “That’s a beautiful phrase,” said my friend Paola, who comes from near Milan, when I asked her about it. I wanted to know if it was a phrase common in Italy; she had never heard it before. Brock’s translation is literal: “Smokers of Paper.” Arrowsmith’s version is “Workers of the World.”
Here’s the whole poem in Arrowsmith’s version:
Workers of the World
He took me to hear his band. He sat in a corner
and put the trumpet to his lips. A noise like all hell broke loose.
[note: Brock translates the second line “mouthing his clarinet. A hellish racket begins.” The Italian version is “e imbocca il clarino. Comincia un baccano d’inferno.” A “clarino” is indeed a clarinet, not a trumpet, and there’s that sound play between "clarino," "baccano," and "d’inferno," that Brock sort of gets between "clarinet" and "racket." Meanwhile, Arrowsmith’s “trumpet” perhaps makes the politics of the poem more hopeful, romantic, since a trumpet heralds things—and clarinets do not. Arrowsmith gets sound play out of the shifting o-sounds of ‘noise,’ ‘broke’ and ‘loose.’ Brock’s “hellish racket” isn’t interesting language, to me. Arrowsmith’s use of the phrase from Milton—“all hell broke loose”—which has become near-cliché in our own idiom, but has ultimately resisted cliché because of its fineness as a phrase—seems to get at something nifty in Pavese about the way literature, the idiomatic, and the documentary coincide in his poems. But enough interruption; lets start over:]
Workers of the World
He took me to hear his band. He sat in a corner
and put the trumpet to his lips. A noise like all hell broke loose.
Outside, a raging wind. Between flashes of lightning,
the rain gusted down so hard the lights kept failing
every five minutes. In the dark the faces
look twisted, turned inward, as if playing a number
by memory. In the back of the room my poor friend
is working briskly, trying to lead them all. His trumpet writhes,
breaks through the din, moves out beyond them all, then lets loose
like one of the damned, in a dry silence: solo.
The poor brass instruments are all banged and dented,
and the hands that press the stops are peasant hands,
with stubborn peasant brows and eyes that look at the ground
almost always. Poor, miserable blood, worn out
with hard work—you can hear it bellowing like an ox
in their notes. And my friend, as leader, has his work cut out,
with those calloused carpenter hands, stiff from hammering
and pushing a plane, barely squeezing out a living.
He had friends and comrades once, and he’s almost thirty.
He’s part of the postwar generation, they grew up hungry.
So he came to Torino with the rest, looking for life, a living,
and found injustice. He learned how to work in factories,
learned not to smile. He learned how to measure
the hunger of other men against his own fatigue, and found
injustice, it was everywhere. He tried resignation,
roaming around at night, half-dead, through the endless streets,
but all he saw was mile after mile of streetlights blazing on
injustice. Drunks, women with husky voices, puppets,
staggering, wandering, lost. He came to Torino
in winter, in the glare and slag and smoke of the factories.
And he learned what work was. Work was hard, work
was man’s hard fate, and he accepted it. But what if all men
accepted work? Then there wouldn’t be injustice in the world.
Men must be comrades then. He put up with long, boring
speeches, forced himself to listen, waiting for the end.
All men were comrades. There were families of comrades in every house.
The city was a circle of comrades. And the face of the world
was covered with comrades. They felt inside themselves
a desperation that could conquer the world.
The band sounds harsh tonight, though he’s coached them all
in person, one by one. He doesn’t seem to notice the sound
of the rain or the lights cutting out. His face is stern,
staring at a grief, while he lips his horn.
I’ve seen him with that look before. It was night, we were alone—
he and I and his brother, who was ten years sadder than he—
waiting, in a failing light. His brother was learning,
working at a useless lathe he’d put together on his own.
And my poor friend was cursing the fate that kept him nailed
down, chained to his hammer and plane
and feeding two old people nobody wanted.
Suddenly*
he shouted that it wasn’t fate that made the world suffer,
that made men curse the light and the day they were born.
The trouble was man, it was man’s doing. At least we could pull out,
we could starve to death in freedom, and say No
to a life that makes use of love and family and pity
and a little plot of land to tie us together, and shackle our hands.
What’s Pavese’s attitude toward the man’s politics? Compare Brock’s rendering of the last half of that third stanza:
...He came,*
one winter, to Turin—factory lights, smoke and ash—
and he learned what work is. He accepted that work
was part of man’s hard fate; if all men did that,
there just might be some justice in this world.
And he found new comrades. He suffered their long words,
he listened and waited for them to be over.
He made them his comrades. Families of them
in each house, the city surrounded by them, the face
of the world covered with them. And each of them
felt desperate enough to conquer the world.
I like this Brock version very much. It's more elegant, more pleasing on the level of (English) language. But the plodding of the Arrowsmith seems to come not from the poet-speaker but from the musician-worker, his exhaustion, his dogged adherence to Communist idealism. And that seems right to me.
Here’s what Arrowsmith says in his note about why he replaces this poem’s strange beautiful Italian title, “Fumatori di Carta” with the slogan “Workers of the World”:
After World War I and during the Depression, tobacco in Italy became very expensive, and those who could not afford it made (I am told) an ersatz out of shredded newspapers. But the word fumare has connotations of hazy, vaporous dreaming (cf. English “pipe dreams”), and in this sense “paper smokers” would be as it were doctrinal visionaries, that is, political dreamers whose visions are based upon printed abstraction and “party line” ideology. P’s title thus conveys his characteristic ambivalence: on the one hand, sympathy and solidarity with the poor and oppressed; on the other, a skeptical literary man’s distrust of dialectical abstractions which scanted or obscured human tragedy. “Workers of the World” is my effort to suggest something of the ambivalence of the (untranslatable) Italian title, and, perhaps, a sense of P.’s ironic detachment. If it is generally known that P. was a Communist, it is less well known that he was, at least in the period of Hard Labor, often detached from and even diffident toward official ideology.
And yet, I’m finding in this poem a note of hope—of trust in the musician, possibly even in the ideological cant as it comes, summarized, out of the musician’s mind. Maybe it’s that the musician-worker gets the last word—the last yawp, really—even if he despairs about the human condition. Maybe it’s just that the poem refuses to sentimentalize the human plight, and refusal to sentimentalize always seems hopeful to me. Brock's version seems less hopeful. Instead of “At least we could pull out,” as Arrowsmith puts it, Brock renders it “If we could just leave.” Brock’s “If we could just” is close to “if only” which means: it’s not happening. Arrowsmith’s “At least”—which I think is truer to Pavese’s “Almeno”—seems like a rebuke instead of a surrender, and therefore seems more powerful.
All this makes me think that reading various translations of poems side by side makes explicit the abusive pleasure of reading. We will do to, and with, texts what we will. We will always be reading versions, even if we are trying our best to read from the point of view of the author, even if we are reading in a language in which we can think and feel so easily that we don’t even know we are doing so as we read.
(*Those two short lines from the poem above, "Suddenly" and "...He came," should be indented to the end of the line, but this publishing platform wouldn't let me do it.)