Dialogues with Pavese: Julianne VanWagenen

You have focused your studies on the Italian translations of Spoon River Anthology, a book forgotten by American readers but a long seller in Italy. As an American, what are the reasons behind its long-lasting success, in your opinion? I studied it for my Master’s thesis and I think that Italians have always misread its content. 

Some of my scholarly research has been dedicated to Masters and Spoon River, which I discovered (neither the author nor the book title were familiar to me before that, though I’d done my undergraduate degree in English) while researching a chapter of my dissertation that was dedicated to Fabrizio De André’s album Non al denaro non all’amore né al cielo. I was recently on a panel at the American Literature Association Annual Conference, and I discussed just this question. Based on my research, I’d say it has a lot to do with the origin story in Italy, related to Fernanda Pivano’s and Cesare Pavese’s publication of the translation of Spoon River during WWII, which Pavese supposedly snuck through the censors by using the title Antologia di S. River. I’ve never determined if this story is apocryphal, by the way. Luigi Ballerini and I attempted to get our hands on a picture of a first edition and were unable to. Spoon River made it into Italian culture, but the rest of Masters’ work (xenophobic, poor in quality, polarizing, poorly received), as well as American criticism of his later work, didn’t make it into Italy during the years of Fascist isolationism, and, by the time the war and Fascism were over and Italy was returning to business as usual, Masters was near the end of his life (he died in 1950), and the US had really forgotten Masters and there wasn’t much to see in scholarship about his work. To a certain degree, I agree with you that the original popularity has to do with a misreading of the original content. However, more than mis-translating the work, Pavese and Pivano lacked some cultural and historical specificities about the American context at the time of Spoon River’s writing. That historical specificity was lacking from the original translation, so what was a quite political book came across as largely a-political, or differently political. I think its continued popularity, however, has a lot to do with its origin story and with De André’s album. 

In particular, you focused on Fiddler Jones as an example of how the original content of Masters’ book was changed by its Italian translation. Although new translations have been published, no one of those reintegrated Masters’ ideology. Do you think that this has to do with cultural or with linguistic reasons?

It seems to me that there is a reluctance on the part of translators today to tarnish Masters’ or Spoon River’s reputation in any way. In my book chapter, I talk pretty extensively about the most recent, centennial translations, from Mondadori and Feltrinelli, and how those translators seem to do a careful dance. On the one hand, they make their translations more precise but, at the same time, they don’t introduce any of the problematic aspects to the anthology or Masters’ ideology, which US scholarship made clear in the late 1990s and early 2000s. John Hallwas’s 1993 annotated edition of Spoon River and Herbert Russell’s 2005 biography Edgar Lee Masters: A Biography are two examples of works that are cited extensively in later Italian editions, but without mentioning much or any of the problematic aspects of Masters’ personality and work, which those books highlight quite thoroughly. 

In “Masters vs. Lee Masters: The Legacy of the Spoon River Author between Illinois and Italy”, one of the two articles that you wrote about this topic, you mentioned that the “anti-Fascist aura” of Cesare Pavese contributed to hide the most negative aspects of Masters’ ideology, like his sympathies for the Confederacy and his racism. Do you think that it will be possible to make an Italian translation of the book more adherent to Masters’ voice?

I think all that is needed for a more precise translation is an introduction that tells the whole story of Masters, without elision or sugar-coating, and a complete contextualization of key terms, using footnotes that gloss and clarify the terms, to place them in their historical and cultural setting. To give one example, Masters comes across as a Franklin Delano Roosevelt-style Democrat in the book when he’s read in 1940s Italy as a ‘Democrat’. However, when Masters was writing in 1914-15 (and Spoon River is set even further back in the post-Civil-War US), he was a Southern Democratic who opposed Lincoln (a Republican). He was ambivalent about slavery, thought the Civil War had ruined the country, and, while he wanted individual rights, at that time, that would have meant the right to own slaves. That is, individual rights for Masters wouldn’t have been universally applied, but available to a privileged few. While I believe it is possible and could even be interesting, I’m not sure it’s completely necessary to have an Italian version of the anthology that adheres totally to Masers’ voice. Spoon River lives on in Italy with its own meaning and significance today, and I think that’s fine. Masters’ latent xenophobia and nostalgia for a pre-Civil-War agrarian frontier American Midwest doesn’t come across in Italian translations, so I just wonder if we really have to drag it into it. Or could we just let the work live on and mean something in Italy that’s different from the US?

You defined Pivano and Pavese as “partisans” who, thanks to their translations, fought Fascism with words, instead of swords. Eighty years later, how can we consider their operation with Masters’ translation: was it really a success or, on the contrary, the ideology overcame the literary quality of these poems?

I would argue that, today, most people come to Spoon River in Italy through Fabrizio De André, whose album really eliminates completely any potentially hurtful or negative ideology that may exist in the original text. Even if they come to the work in school, let’s say, without ever having heard of De André’s album, they likely would hear the story of the brave young Pivano and the anti-Fascist Pavese, and they would filter the poems through that lens. In both cases (and add to that that Italian translations render the anthology’s original politics either absent or meaningless), I think the work can still be read as revolutionary because of the specific Italian origin story and historical context that surrounds it. Might there come a day when Masters’ ideology becomes well known in Italy and the book is wielded in a different way? Maybe. The Western world appears to be going through polarizing political times. 

In your articles and your book, you have analyzed Fabrizio De André’s musical rendering of some of these poems. Was De André’s record simply a transposition of texts in music or do we need to consider his as another, indirect translation of the book?

De André stays pretty true to a few of the poems and completely changes some others in his album. It’s also significant that he only chooses a handful (9 of the original 244 epitaphs), which means that a lot of the original meanings that are created intertextually, between poems and people who refer to each other, are lost. I argue in my book that De André’s album, I think unwittingly, pivots the original nostalgia of the anthology, which I see in Masters’ writing as what Svetlana Boym would call restorative nostalgia. That is, it is a nostalgia that would like to see a transhistorical reconstruction of the past, the lost home. This becomes problematic in Masters because the lost home is quite specifically the agrarian United States of Thomas Jefferson and Masters’ own ancestors, which was based largely on slave labor (though I think Masters’ ancestors weren’t known to be slave holders). De André, it seems to me, creates an ambience of what Boym would call reflective nostalgia, which allows for an ambivalence about the past and which, as Boym says, is wistful but it is also ironic and self-aware. Take for example Fiddler Jones, who is a deeply restoratively nostalgic character for Masters, a representative of exactly what has been lost in Masters’ modern times. Masters’ Jones “babbles of fish-frys of long ago, / Of horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove, / Of what Abe Lincoln said / One time at Springfield.” There’s an emphasis on idyllic aspects of the past in the original Jones. On the other hand, one can hear De André’s Jones “Cianciare ancora delle porcate / mangiate in strada nelle ore sbagliate” and “dire al mercante di liquore / ‘Tu che lo vendi cosa ti compri di migliore?’” De André’s Jones is no longer reminiscing about an idyllic past. In fact, he doesn’t seem convinced there’s anything for this life but to drown it in alcohol, which comes across as rather cynical instead of nostalgic.

“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-three years after Pavese’s suicide, do we still need him? And, whether yes or no, why?

I’m not a Pavese scholar, so take this with a grain of salt, but I like Pavese a lot. I don’t think Pavese really got much wrong that he could have controlled when it came to the original translation of Spoon River. He was living in isolationist Italy, he didn’t have access to much or any American literature or criticism. So, he was reading and writing in a void. What he had seen and heard of Spoon River in the 1930s, when he first wrote about it, was positive American criticism that included discussions of Masters as part of the revolt against the village movement. American reception and understanding of Spoon River changed as Masters continued to write and proved himself to hold some pretty ugly ideas and feeling about people who weren’t like himself. Pavese, I think, wouldn’t have known that in the 1940s when he was working with Pivano. It’s worth noting that, before his death, Pavese does seem to have changed his opinion of Spoon River. While in 1931 he had written: “The great merit of Lee Masters is to have begun, in his country, the merciless description of provincial people, villagers, Puritans,” in 1943 he defines Spoon River as a ballade du temps jadis, a ballad to times past. Masters died just a few months before Pavese himself, and in Pavese’s eulogy for the poet, he says Spoon River was “a humiliated celebration of the energy and youth of the great past.” So, that’s all to say, Pavese was revising his view of Spoon River during his life. I don’t think we should put the weight of a continued misunderstanding of the work in Italy on his shoulders. If he’d lived longer, he may very well have helped clarify Italy’s understanding of the anthology.

An interview by Iuri Moscardi

>> Read the other Dialogues with Pavese