RE-READING GIOVANNI PASCOLI ~

Birthplace



Dream of a summer day.



Limitless cicadas

trilled and quivered.

Wind from the north

whipped crumpled leaves

through a line of trees.



Sun fell between elms

in strips of dust:

From the sky, two clouds

hung threadbare:

white brushed



across wide blue air.



Tamarisk shrubs,

pomegranate trees, the far

throb of a threshing machine

and the silvery swell

of the evening call to prayer. . .



Where was I? The bell

for the prayer said where,

in tears, while a dog

bayed at a stranger

who walked by, head bowed.





_________________
Giovanni Pascoli
Selected Poems
translated by Taije Silverman with
Marina Della Putta Johnston
Princeton 2019 






Tell me you don't have the outdoors circulating through you

GIOVANNI PASCOLI ~

Giovanni Pascoli "addresses the deepest part of himself" and in doing so

addresses the nature of language. Here is a moral harmony, a manifesto for

a poetry of common memory and dream. Pascoli, quite simply, names truth;

while of the nineteenth century, he is utterly contemporary. There is much

of timeless poetics here, something of Blake's visionary innocence, something

of Whitman's self-contradictions, yet Pascoli has his own tragic sadness to

reconcile: He is unique.

In John Martone he has met his perfect translator. Martone matches

Pascoli's erudition and intelligent ordering. He brings us a clarity from the

limpid and sometimes conflicting apparent simplicity of Pascoli's work.

O Little One is vital to everyone who loves poetry.

— Gerry Loose

Laertes

2019