Geoffrey Brock

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Il ritmo del mio fantasticare: Pavese’s Meter in Translation
by Geoffrey Brock
(originally published in Yale Italian Poetry)

Cesare Pavese frequently emphasized the importance of a certain rhythm in his poetry. In his posthumously published diary, Il mestiere di vivere, Pavese describes his process of composition this way:

Quanto a me, la composizione di una poesia avviene in un mode che—se non me lo mostrasse l’esperienza— mai avrei creduto. Muovendomi intorno a un’informe situazione suggestiva, mugolo a me stesso un pensiero, incarnato in un ritmo aperto, sempre lo stesso. [22]

(As for me, the composition of a poem happens in a way that—had experience not shown it to be true—I would never have believed. Circling around an unformed but evocative scene, I murmur to myself a thought, embodied in an open rhythm, always the same.)

And indeed this distinctive “open rhythm” was, with slight variations, a nearly constant feature of his poetry between 1930 and 1940, including all the poems in Lavorare stanca. It is a rhythm remarkable not only for its ubiquity in Pavese’s work of this period, but also for its singularity with respect to Italian prosodic tradition, a singularity that has been widely noted if not widely understood.

Although Pavese referred to “le leggi intrinseche” of his personal prosody, he never actually explained them, assuming perhaps that they were self-evident. Some critics, however, in their efforts to elucidate these laws, have instead obscured them with overly clever and sometimes inaccurate analyses. To put it simply, his standard line is thirteen syllables long and is composed of four anapestic feet; the first line of the first poem in Lavorare stanca is a good example: “Camminiá- | mo una sé- | ra sul fián- | co di un cól- | le.” Pavese at times varies the pattern in certain ways, and the line frequently stretches to five and occasionally even six feet, but anapestic tetrameter is without doubt the foundational meter of Pavese’s poetry in the 1930s.

*

“Anapestic tetrameter”—such Greek-rooted terminology is standard in discussions of English prosody but is less often relevant to Italian poetry, which, unlike English and Greek poetry, is not usually divided into feet at all. Historically, the basic units in Italian poetry, as in French, have been lines—lines whose rhythms are variable and whose lengths are determined primarily by syllable count—the hendecasyllable, for example, or the settenario. Much of the confusion surrounding Pavese’s meter results from attempts to use the traditional terms of Italian prosody to describe it, attempts that have sometimes resulted in critical contortionism. Áine O’Healy, for example, claims that

Pavese’s metrical line can be identified under scrutiny as an inventive variation on a traditional meter, the decasyllable. Each line of “I mari del Sud” begins with a decasyllable composed of three anapestic feet. Then, instead of moving on to the next line, Pavese adds several more syllables in a less pronounced cadence. [24]

It’s not true that each line of “I mari del Sud” begins with three anapestic feet—there are a dozen or so exceptions. More importantly, however, O’Healy implies that the syllables following the first three feet are somehow less rhythmical, which is not typically the case. Her analysis echoes but distorts Massimo Mila’s suggestion that Pavese’s simple addition of an extra foot counteracts the jumpy dynamics of the decasyllable (“toglie tutta la scattante meccanica del decasillabo” [viii]). Mila’s remark is more accurate: the syllables that end the line are not random syllables at all but rather regular feet—indeed precisely the same sort of feet that began the line.
But there remains no compelling reason to see Pavese’s line as a modified decasyllable. Indeed, where Mila sees a decasyllable followed by an extra foot, Doug Thompson, using the same sort of logic, sees a settenario followed by a senario:

The first part of the ‘line’ is a perfectly regular seven-syllable line (settenario), stressed on the third and sixth syllables, whilst the second part is of six syllables (senario), having its stress on the second and fifth. [21]

Thompson’s analysis, like O’Healy’s and Mila’s, adds up mathematically but not poetically. If Pavese employed a regular caesura following the seventh or the tenth syllable, such arguments might have some basis. One of the notable features of Pavese’s line, however, is the variability of the caesuras, which serves to counterbalance the regularity of the rhythm. Thompson’s suggestion is rather like describing Shakespeare’s typical line as a trimeter followed by a dimeter; Mila on the other hand would describe it as a tetrameter with the addition of an extra foot and O’Healy as a tetrameter with a couple of extra syllables.

The prize for this sort of casuistry, however, must be awarded to Donatella Riposio, who manages to discover some very exotic fauna indeed in the same line: she spies both a hypermetrical syllable at its beginning (anacrusis) and an adonic foot at its end. This is rather like describing “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” as consisting of an initial amphibrach followed by four trochees, the last one catalectic.

*

Such analyses seem inelegant at best, and at worst they are fundamentally misleading about the nature and purpose of poetic meter. Certainly they are misleading with regard to Pavese’s meter, which does not reflect, as some of these critics imply, an abstruse conversation with traditional meters, but rather a refusal to converse with such meters. By devising his own rhythm, Pavese sought in part to leave behind the cumbersome historical baggage of traditional meters in favor of a rhythm that was personal and simple—even homely, in the best sense of that word. “I had no faith in traditional meters,” he wrote, “and besides I had parodied them too often to take them seriously now” (“Nei metri tradizionali non avevo fiducia..., e del resto troppo li avevo usati parodisticamente per pigliarli ancora sul serio” [Le poesie 109]). He claims to have based his meter, not on the decasyllable or settenario or any other traditional meter, but on an “istintivo” [Le poesie 109] stress cadence that he had been fond of since childhood.

Of course, it is impossible to avoid historical baggage entirely, and Pavese’s verse can and sometimes should be viewed in light of certain traditions. Alfredo Giuliani and Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo, for example, both see in Pavese’s long, rhythmic lines a kinship to the work of Thovez, Bacchelli, and Jahier—a “Whitmanian” strain of Italian poetry. And it’s true that Whitman, the subject of Pavese’s thesis, was an undeniable influence on the long lines and discursive structure of his 1930s poetry, even if Pavese definitively rejected Whitman’s free verse as ill-suited to his spirit (“il verso libero non me andava a genio” [Le poesie 109]).

Pavese’s praxis also has commonalities, whether he intended them or not, with earlier Italian experiments in pseudoclassical meters, experiments that resulted in so-called poesia barbara. And although W. T. Elwert may well be right that in no other Romance literature does the imitation of classical meters play as important a role as it does in Italian (“in nessun’altra letteratura romanza l’imitazione dei metri dell’antichità ha un’importanza così grande come in quella italiana” [172]), one must nonetheless admit that this importance, even in Italian, is relatively minor. And the relationship of these experiments to Pavese’s practice is, in any case, tenuous at best. Although Homeric epithets may well have influenced Pavese’s characteristic use of riprese (repeated words and phrases), there is little evidence to suggest that his meter was classically influenced, either directly or indirectly through the poesia barbara. The similarities between Pavese’s verse and accentual-syllabic experiments by other Italian poets may then be simply coincidental. Indeed, it seems just as plausible that, as Giuliani suggests, Pavese’s use of an accentual-syllabic meter was influenced by his reading of Elizabethan poets, though this too would be difficult to demonstrate.

If one can look backward from Pavese’s unusual line toward the Greeks, the Elizabethans, and Whitman, one can also look forward, toward its influence on subsequent generations of Italian poets. The poems of the Lavorare stanca period are sometimes seen, on the basis of their gritty content—portraits of prostitutes, lonely drunks, laborers, and so on—as precursors of neo-realism. And rightly so. Yet leading critics have made interesting claims for their formal influence, as well. In the late 1950s, Franco Fortini argued that “a new metrics was taking shape” (“una nuova metrica sta formandosi”) based on “rhythmic groupings of three, four, and occasionally five accented syllables, for which Pavese offered the initial model” (“raggrupamenti ritmici su tre, quattro (o, piú raro, cinque) accenti forti, di cui Pavese dette per primo uno schema” [8]). Poets as diverse as Pasolini and Zanzotto reflect, Fortini argues, this new metrics. Giuliani in the 1960s and Mengaldo in the 1970s also sketch a line of modern Italian poetry that both see emerging from what Mengaldo calls “an archetype of metrical modulations that reach, via Pavese, to the recent avant-garde” (“archetipo di modulazioni metriche, che, via Pavese, giungono alla ricente avanguardia” [112]).

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Is the Pavesian line, then, a throwback to a classical past or a precursor to an avant-garde future? The very slipperiness that allows it to be seen in so many different contexts ultimately confirms its singularity, its lack of satisfactory contexts, and gives credence to Pavese’s claims, which might otherwise seem implausible, that his meter was wholly “instinctive.” In any case, as a translator of Pavese’s poetry, I have found these tenuous historical ligaments less important than the physical effect his rhythm has on me as a reader—or better yet as a listener, since Pavese’s poems seem to want to be heard as much as read. (As Marziano Guglielminetti rightly observes, his poems “richiedono sempre la partecipazione degli ascoltatori” [72].)

Pavese describes his poems as getting drunk on their own rhythms [Il mestiere di vivere 23], and their incantatory cadence has always been, for me, one of their most striking features. The effect of this cadence on my ear influenced my translation decisions far more than any of the literary-historical considerations I’ve described, though I have tried to avoid overemphasizing the cadence. In “The Poet’s Craft” (“Il mestiere di poeta”), Pavese writes of his meter:

Sempre ebbi cura di non lasciar tiranneggiare, pronto ad accettare, quando mi paresse il caso, altri accenti e altra sillabazione. Ma non mi allontanai piú sostanzialmente dal mio schema e questo considero il ritmo del mio fantasticare. [Le poesie 110]

(I was always careful not to let it tyrannize me and was open, when it seemed appropriate, to different stresses and syllable counts. But I never strayed very far from my scheme and I consider it to be the rhythm of my imagination.)

In translating Pavese, I took my cues from this passage. I too have tried not to let his meter tyrannize me, and I have been ready when necessary to deviate from it. For the most part, however, I have tried to adhere closely to his scheme.

My first impulse, when searching for an appropriate meter for Pavese in English, was to employ a loose iambic hexameter. Such a line seemed to provide the necessary length and scope while avoiding the triple meter, which in English is so often associated with comic verse—though Auden and others have proved that it is perfectly capable of serving serious poetry as well. The hexameter, though, ultimately felt too stately, even stodgy, and it is, after all, a canonical meter of sorts—all of which goes against the spirit of the original. Eventually, I settled on the same anapestic tetrameter that Pavese used; it is an unusual meter in English, to be sure, but so it is in Italian, and that strangeness seems significant and worth preserving.

I also found that, given the nature of Pavese’s poetry, I didn’t have to worry much about any objectionable comic effects of the meter. Quite apart from his frequently melancholic outlook, there are his unpredictable line lengths, irregular and sometimes jarring enjambments, and prosy, colloquial diction, all of which counterbalance the regularity of the rhythm and sometimes obscure it altogether. Thompson, indeed, complains that Pavese is occasionally guilty of excessive counterbalancing, of “loosening the bonds of poetic form until the verse becomes indistinguishable from prose” [20], a neat trick, considering that the line Thompson cites as an example of this loosening—“Qualche nostro antenato dev’essere stato ben solo”—is perfectly anapestic. And in any case, given Pavese’s desire to create a hybrid form, a kind of cross between a poem and a short story that he called the poesia-racconto, he might have taken Thompson’s complaint as praise.

Works Cited

Elwert, W. T. Versificazione italiana dalle origini ai giorni nostri. Le Monnier: Firenze, 1983.

Fortini, Franco. “Su alcuni paradossi della metrica moderna.” Paragone 106 (October 1958): 3-9.

Giuliani, Alfredo, ed. “Il verso secondo l’orecchio.” In I novissimi, 183-191. Rusconi e Paolazzi: Milano, 1961.

Guglielminetti, Marziano and Giuseppe Zaccaria. “Lo sperimentalismo tecnico e metrico.” In Cesare Pavese: introduzione e guida allo studio dell’opera pavesiana, 67-72. Le Monnier: Firenze, 1976.

Mengaldo, Pier Vincenzo. La tradizione del Novecento: da D’Annunzio a Montale. Feltrinelli: Milano, 1975.

Mila, Massimo. “Prefazione.” In Poesie, by Cesare Pavese, vii-xi. Einaudi: Torino, 1964.

O’Healy, Áine. Cesare Pavese. Twayne: Boston, 1988.

Pavese, Cesare. Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935-1950. Edited by Marziano Guglielminetti and Laura Nay. Einaudi: Torino, 2000.

-----. Le poesie. Edited by Mariarosa Masoero. Einaudi: Torino, 1998.

Riposio, Donatella. “Ipotesi sulla metrica di Lavorare Stanca.” In Cesare Pavese oggi, edited by G. Ioli, 41-45. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi: San Salvatore Monferrato: 1989.

Thompson, Doug. Cesare Pavese. Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 1982.

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