Dialogues with Pavese: Luigi Ballerini

You have lived and worked for decades in the US, but you have always kept in touch with the Italian cultural and literary scene. How can you explain the huge and apparently never-ending success of Spoon River Anthology among Italian readers?

I believe that the reasons behind what seems to be a never-ending success have morphed significantly over the years. In the beginning, readers of poetry were pleased to find, at long last, a book of poems that did not celebrate butterflies or white lilies (or white telephones). Pavese led his horses to a water they were quite eager to drink. Then Pavese himself became a myth that gave great impetus not only to his own writings but practically to all that he had proposed editorially, as the most prominent member of the Einaudi team. His legacy, which was subsequently carried by Fernanda Pivano, began to wane in the Sixties and Seventies, and Edgar Lee Masters became a light music commodity. Most people have heard of him through Fabrizio de André, who set to music, somewhat re-arranging the words, a few Spoon River Anthology lyrics. The title of his album is a marketing stroke of genius: Non al denaro non all’amore né al cielo. How could you not be attracted by it? There is no denying that the Italian popularity of Masters’s entire work benefited from it. Whether, up to that point, such a voice coincided, approximated or, most likely, distanced itself from the original is something that we shall never cease to debate. Whatever happened afterward is a mystery to me. I can only speculate that readers who did not feel like putting their desperate shoulders to the wheels and viewed poetry as some sort of comfort food were fooled by its most superficial and content-related features. You know, people who believe they are having a poetic experience simply because they feel sympathetic to the plights that take center stage in the “conspiracy” of the poem. This may be the prevailing attitude today, one that goes hand in hand with the so-called primacy of the individual: I’ve never seen so many identical people, all of them convinced to be individuals.

Which reasons motivated your choice to publish a new translation of the book in 2016, 70 years after its first Italian translation?

Antonio Riccardi, at the time director of publications at Mondadori, actually asked me to. They had lost the rights to re-issue Antonio Porta’s translation and did not wish to drop that title from their catalogue. Also, they were keen to have a translation made by one of their own poets, who had some knowledge of American letters, and I seemed to fit the bill. At first, I declined, but Antonio insisted and I eventually accepted. For various reasons: some of them could be clearly and immediately ascertained; others I grasped after sinking my teeth into a book that is by far more problematic than it first appears to be. The translation of a text resulting from a primarily referential use of language often poses a greater challenge than transposing into a target language a text largely motivated by phono-stylistic temptations. Having translated both Gertrude Stein and Herman Melville, I found that her “staccato” poetry was much “easier” to recreate in Italian than the superbly concise precision of his, at times Tacitus-like, prose. And this despite the prevalently polysyllabic structure of the Italian lexicon, which is the opposite of the mono or bi-syllabic beat of the English language. When it comes to poetry, I tend to be rather particular, and Edgar Lee Masters had never been on my radar. Taking him on, I imagined, would be like embarking on an archeological adventure: it would be like visiting a Christian church hoping to discover the ruins of the pagan temple upon which it was built. In the end, however, this motivation played a secondary role, and I began to be visited by a desire to come to terms with a genre that is miles away from my own but shares my repulsion for the egocentric expostulations that plague so much contemporary poetry. After all, Spoon River Anthology is poetry with history in it, as Pound – who was one of the earliest reviewers of the book – would put it. Not exactly neo-epic, to be sure, in the sense of such a major Midwestern poet as Carl Sandburg, but just as significant not merely as a document from which to extract historical information unavailable in “official” historical documents, but also as an opportunity to dig deeper in the nature of the words deployed without being scared off by overly baroque rhetoric and excessively loose forms of predication. Edgar Lee Master had a very soothing, perversely homeopathic effect on my own writing. I cannot deny that, at the end of the day, a new translation was also necessary in order to correct at least some of the most visible among the factual errors nested in previous editions of the work. For example, in one of the poems a woman had become a man. Suspecting that sexes were more clearly discernible at the time of Spoon River Anthology than they are now, I returned the individual to her gender.

What are the most relevant innovations that your book introduced in the general structure of the volume?

I feel funny talking about innovation: I would rather say restoration. My translation is based on the, if not fully critical, certainly very conscientiously annotated edition of Spoon River Anthology procured by John E. Hallwas in 1993. My predecessors either could not have availed themselves of it or chose to ignore it. It was certainly ignored by the editors at Einaudi who keep re-issuing the old Pavese-Pivano translation. Another feature of my translation is its completeness. The conclusive fragment of the nightmarish, mock-heroic poem with which the work ends had previously been omitted. Leaving out The Spooniad, as it is titled, is, in my view, a great error as it dusts off the eerie patina that covers the entire work. I would like to add that, whenever I thought it might be useful to a fuller appreciation of the texts, I did not refrain from providing individual poems with linguistic, rhetorical, and historical annotations. Hoping not to have added errors of mine, finally, I corrected the not few made by others. 

Many scholars – among them, Julianne VanWagenen – demonstrated how the success of the anthology among the Italian readers in 1943 was due to a misunderstanding of its true content: the book was published under Fascism, and for this reason Italians saw in the voices of the dead a cry for the freedom that the regime had taken away from them. But these characters embodied a reactionary political message since Masters’s political ideal was Jefferson’s America, which economically relied upon slavery. Is this what really happened? Have you tried to change this perception?

First of all, we should not conflate Masters’s ideological sentiments and his psychological drive with those of his characters, even though this possibility may, in some cases, suggests itself. One of the most important lessons that can be learnt from Spoon River Anthology comes from the author’s insistent denunciation of the hypocrisy permeating the villagers’ life. See for instance all the poems advocating joyous activities (singing, drinking, square dancing at the sound of a fiddler, etc.) and rebuking the pretended austerity flaunted by members of the incipiently affluent bourgeoisie. Some characters are reactionary and some are not, but I do not at all think that Masters bestowed his benediction on the former batch. There is indeed a not very encouraging picture of a black man, not praiseworthy, to be sure from a social standpoint, but there is no indication of an authorial endorsement. At any rate ignoring or denying the existence of supremacist feelings circulating in the Spoon River society in Masters’s time would even be much more philistine. Furthermore, this has nothing to do with poetry. Masters’s effort is to make viable, through poetic specimens of realism, a communicational tool that would permit humans to interact “spiritually” and not merely “ceremonially”. That is, I think, what attracted Pavese. As to Masters’s own view, yes, he did not like Lincoln’s politics and did condemn the scheming enacted to protect very specific financial interests: they were the real, number one cause of the civil war. This does not mean that he looked favorably upon slavery. His idea, perhaps not sublime but definitely rooted in reality, was that slavery would come to an end by itself because it was no longer economically feasible, and he certainly deplored a bloodbath in which the number of casualties exceeded by far that of the slaves liberated. Let’s not forget that the war was declared in 1861 and the issue of slavery is not listed among its causes. That notion appears in 1863, two years into the war. How about that? as Humphrey Bogart would say. 

You are a poet and a translator. What do you think of Pavese and Pivano’s efforts in providing Italian readers with the first translation of these poems in 1943?

Heroic. Nothing short of heroic. Pavese has many merits as a writer, translator, editor, all-around intellectual, and the translation of Spoon River Anthology into Italian clearly testifies to more than one of them: it was exactly what Italian poetry needed. At the time (1943) most Italian poets were in hiding, so to say, in the maquis of Hermeticism. Very few dared to stick their poetic neck out and more than a decade had to pass before the alarm of Pasolini’s neo-realistic proposals would be sounded. Much has been said about the cooperation of Pavese and Pivano and we are now pretty sure that Pavese’s revisions of what Pivano submitted for publication are so numerous and insightful that he should be recognized as a co-translator. You know this better than anyone else having had the opportunity to study the manuscript which in recent years has been removed from the Pivano Archive, causing all sorts of speculations, not to mention the plausible rumor that its examination would clearly speak against Pisano’s claim that she carried out the translation without any help from Pavese. Be that as it may, it is regrettable that Einaudi continues to issue a version of Spoon River Anthology that, despite Pavese’s editorial interventions, remains marred by serious misunderstandings and oversights. The heroism I am talking about should be admired and placed in historical perspective, rather than exploited commercially. 

Spoon River Anthology was originally published in 1915 in the US. Do you think that it will continue to find readers, especially in Italy, in the future years and decades or do you think that it will be progressively forgotten by readers and critics, as it happened in the US? 

The notion that Spoon River Anthology, in North-America, has gone by the wayside is only partially correct. Its life thread has not been totally cut, especially in semi-rural America, from which the book sprung in 1915. No later than 2020 it was adapted for the theater and performed at the Lakeshore House, in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on the nights of November 12th, 13th, and 14th. Also there are more or less official recordings of it that people can listen to online. Complete editions of Spoon River Anthology, by Penguin for instance, continue to be available in bookstores and through Barnes and Noble and Amazon. It is however quite obvious that its heydays are over and that selections of Spoon River Anthology have become increasingly rare even in schoolbooks. The neglect affecting this book must be inscribed in the severe decrease of the rate of attention paid to poetry, in general. The responsibility of this sad state of affairs falls, in my view, primarily on educators who have not managed to impress upon their pupils how significant language used at a poetic level can be in the formulation of types of truths that cannot be demonstrated and, at the same time, cannot be denied. As such they transcend the merely instrumental forms of truth in which we are pitifully immersed day in and day out. Considering that two “new” editions were published after mine, one would speculate that the future of Spoon River Anthology is brighter in Italy than in the US. Assuming also that the conflict between the wilderness of the frontier and the advancing “civilization” (from leather-stocking explorers, to growers and farmers, to lawyers) – which sits at the very center of so many of the anthology poems and is no longer vibrant in America – may still resonate unconsciously, as a subliminal nostalgia, in a country such as Italy where conflicts of this kind, and their mythology, have been buried long ago (is anyone still reading Francesco Jovine’s Terre del Sacramento?), I imagine that new translations of Spoon River Anthology will continue to appear. Cui prodest?

“Un Pavese ci vuole”: this misquotation from a very famous passage from The Moon and The Bonfires was the title of a series of video-interviews I conducted with the director of Fondazione Pavese, Pierluigi Vaccaneo. Seventy-four years after Pavese’s suicide, do we still need him? And, whether yes or no, why?

Not one, but two, maybe three Pavese would be greatly beneficial to our beleaguered Republic of Letters, and above all to its editorial headquarters. I imagine that if Pavese were alive, he would severely object to a great part of his own beloved Einaudi’s catalog. I’d like to think that under his stewardship, much of what is today labeled as fiction and probably all that and is published to satisfy the morbid curiosity of celebrity-stricken readers, would find its proper destination in the waste-paper basket. At a time when fewer and fewer people read books, and the few who do read more and more, his opinions and judgement show a courage and a sense of responsibility that seem to have vanished from the editorial radar of the major publishing houses. Luckily, today there is a plethora of significant small presses that have invaded the reading market without succumbing to the temptation of immediate success. Naturally, Pavese remains an essential part of today’s literary conversation as the author of such pivotal works as The Moon and the Bonfires and Dialogues with Leucò. I do not think he will be remembered as a major poet, although his effort to widen the lexical platform of poetic writing can be appreciated. Oddly enough, much can also be learned from his essays on American Literature, both as ways to penetrate the texts he analyzed and as time-indicators. In this respect, although not specifically identifiable as an essay but rather as an open-ended tract, The Craft of Living is an essential read for anyone who does not conflate the origin of the world with his own birthday.

An interview by Iuri Moscardi

>> Read the other Dialogues with Pavese