Dialogues with Pavese: Pietro Montorfani

Spoon River Anthology represents a unique case of long seller in Italy, which is not the country where the book was originally published. As a scholar and critic of Italian literature, how do you explain the book’s never-ending success?

In general, I believe that the success of a book among different generations of readers – especially in the difficult field of poetry – is due to a multiplicity of reasons: vividness, effectiveness, being memorable, but also strength of expression and uniqueness of its message. In one word: its capacity to go straight to the heart. All these features are present in the Anthology while they are missing, for example, in Rilke’s Duino Elegies or in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, whose language and cultural references are much more obscure than Masters’ ones. Listening to someone who is speaking, frankly and sometimes cynically, from “beyond” death is something very immediate to catch by a reader and this would put him in the best position to understand the message of the text. For Italian readers, educated by Dante and the journeys beyond death made by Ulysses and Enea, this was even easier and more natural.

The Italian version of the Anthology has been frequently modified and changed: the first edition was a selection of its poems and in the following years all its translators frequently changed the form of the poems. Also, the Spooniad and the Epilogue were almost always missing. What was Antonio Porta’s approach to the form of the book and how did he present it to Italian readers?

You are right: for many reasons, including the lack of philological care about the original or analyzed editions published in the United States, the masterpiece of Edgar Lee Masters was introduced in Italy in dribs and drabs. This is due to the pioneers of this tradition, Cesare Pavese and Fernanda Pivano: they have many merits, but lack textual criticism. The extraordinary success of its earlier translations contributed to this trend: when a poetry text immediately meets thousands of readers, philology inevitably has to step aside. This is one of the reasons why for decades in Italy we have not read the Spooniad, which Masters considered an integral part of the book, although it was a sort of semi-epic text featuring the same characters of the Anthology, though from a less innovative angle. Not to mention the Epilogue, which is even worse due to its visionary style and its theater-like manners: a third language in such a few pages. We are now aware that Antonio Porta wanted to present Masters’s work in its entirety. He worked on it with his American wife, Rosemary Ann Liedl, a literary agent, but he was unfortunately not able to complete these two translations: I had to finalize them, building on his drafts and notes.

Porta’s translation was a poetical text translated by another poet, and it was influenced by its historical context, the 1980s and the first manifestations of the globalization. Which aspects of Porta’s translation are more peculiar than the previous translations and how his style as a poet influenced this work?

When Porta, accepting a suggestion from Mondadori, was preparing to translate this new Spoon River, he was indeed an accomplished poet and an experienced intellectual: he was a contributor to many periodicals, the director of poetry collections, the organizer of poetry events, but also an editor, a talent scout, and many other things. He was an intellectual fully identifiable with his time, the cultural context of the 1980s. I am mentioning this because one of the most relevant merits of his translation is the adherence to a certain cultural dimension, which is at the same time Italian and international. Among the many details that struck me there is, for example, Porta’s choice of not translating some words or some names. In 1987, the English language was already an established part of the Italian culture, if only as a covered reference. Being aware of this but also of the fact that poetry should speak directly to the reader, without an excess of rhetorical or cultural references, Porta proposed a very straightforward and “down-to-earth” (if you allow me to say so) version, identical to the kind of poetry that he was writing. Such poetry in some way was still related to the literary revolution of 1963 [Gruppo 1963 was an intellectual neo-avantgarde movement confronting mainstream literary models of the time, namely neorealism, editor’s note] – although Porta later had a more personal evolution which detached him from that avantgarde group. In this sense, a poem from Yellow (2002) dedicated to Edoardo Sanguineti remains memorable: «If I only knew, and maybe I know, / that void is our destiny / but if I am listening to a woman behind a wall / or a sound of steps on the latest cobblestones / or a laughter which is sincere, in no hurry / or if I kiss a baby girl saying: I am not sick, / so I won’t stand for a killing game, / I would prefer what divine elements language have / and I don’t care, friends, of what you will say, / I speak as a naïve (like Freud), I take for granted / the evil and I am looking for the good, with a desperate mind». 

How do you consider Pavese and Pivano’s heroic efforts in their attempt to give Italian readers a book that they considered fundamental? 

I am sure that any work of translation is deeply related to a precise time and a precise historical and cultural context, and Pivano’s Spoon River is no exception. It is a pioneering, enthusiastic, sometimes even bold and irresponsible (there are some rough mistakes) version, but it nevertheless remained tied to a country where  editors kept printing “Giulio” Verne or “Guglielmo” Shakespeare on book covers. Pivano even translated cigar brands or the names of local desserts: «fumavo Aquile Rosse» («Red Eagle cigars») and «mangiar torta scottante» (Cooney Potter’s «hot pie»). In the 1940s and 1950s, Italy was like that. Without detracting from the original translators, half a century later a poet sensible to the language of modernity like Porta could not rely on a similar style, which he perceived as outdated and vintage. Unfortunately, translations age, but in this also lies their beauty.

Among the reasons of the book’s success in Italy there are the apparent “easiness” of these texts and the human complicity expressed by the characters. Which elements of the text (style or content) contribute to maintaining the appeal of these poems on Italian readers, encouraging publishers to embark on new translations?

We must not forget that, behind any new translation proposals (historical, made by a renowned author, brand new, and so on), there are also commercial purposes, big or small. Since translations age, in this case the turnover is higher when compared with critical or analyzed editions. Porta’s attempt was not an isolated one, in those years: Letizia Ciotti Miller translated the book for Newton Compton in 1974, and in 1986 Rizzoli published Alberto Rossatti’s version. Then, Luciano Paglialunga’s work came out in 1996 for Piemme and Alessandro Quattrone published his version (among the ones I prefer) in 2001, now in Giunti’s catalog. Finally, Luigi Ballerini’s translation came out for Mondadori in 2016, and this is the reason why Porta’s version disappeared from Mondadori’s list of titles. Ballerini is a very experienced translator, who knows American literary culture very well . All these translations offer – to some extent – a different perspective, and they are precious for this. But I don’t think that the Pavese-Pivano primacy would ever been contested because of the historical relevance of their efforts. From this perspective, Antonio Porta unfortunately is in a weaker position.

“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?

We will always need Pavese and men like him because they witness with facts, in the difficulties and contradictions of their tormented existence, what being free really means. The entire question surrounding the Secret Notebook – rediscovered and published by Lorenzo Mondo in 1990 and recently republished and edited by Francesca Belviso for Aragno in 2020 – really struck me. It is clearly a burning issue bordering on gossip, which Pavese rejected. But it is also an important historical document, a crystal clear proof of a cultural torment and of a mind openness that we today struggle to understand and accept since we are used to distinguish everything in black and white, Fascists and anti-Fascists, the dictatorship and the after War. If only for this, which is a lot, we will always need someone like Pavese: I myself have no doubt about this.

An interview by Iuri Moscardi

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