I Mari del Sud
Cesare Pavese
1931

Translated by Frank W. Donovan

(Translator's note: Over 30 years ago I first translated this most difficult poem, difficult because it was based on models of Walt Whitman and Lee Edgar Masters. Pavese himself called it "poesia racconto" or narrative poetry. Given the inherently lyrical nature of the Italian language, this poem was no small accomplishment and not imitated by his contemporaries, at least in poetry. The current translation is a travesty which completely ignores the complex syntax of the original and takes various liberties that only I know. It is also a labor of love and a homage to a poet I could never forget. It is above all else in its imperfection my own, not Pavese's.)

We silently stroll one evening on a ridge of the hill.
In the shadows of a growing twilight,
my cousin looms,
dressed in white,
deliberate steps,
face tanned,
no words.
An ancestor of ours
was surely taciturn,
a man among idiots
or a sad fool,
to teach us such silence.

My cousin spoke tonight,
asking me to climb with him
to the summit
where on clear nights
the distant beacon of Turin
is reflected in the sky.
"You who live in Turin,"
he said,
"You are right,
life is lived far from home,
you live and grab,
and then like me at forty
you come back
and all is renewed.
These hills are forever."
Slowly he speaks the dialect,
like the stones of this hill,
rough and hard
that twenty years
of idioms and oceans
have not changed.
He walks on the ridge
disquieted,
a look I remember
as a child
in tired farmers,
unyielding.

For twenty years he traveled the world.
I was a child when he left, cuddled by women
who said he was dead.
They would speak of him as in a tale,
but the men forgot him.
One winter my father,
by then deceased,
received a card
with a green stamp of ships in a port
and best wishes for a good harvest.
The boy, now grown, in the general wonderment
said that the card came from Tasmania,
south of Australia
encircled by a bluer sea,
savage with sharks.
He added that his cousin,
no doubt,
was pearl fishing
and he saved the stamp.
Everyone had their say,
but all concluded that,
if not dead,
he soon would be,
and more time passed.

Such time has passed since I played pirates of Malay,
since I bathed that mortal spot,
since I chased a playmate through a tree,
cracking branches as we went,
smacking a rival,
getting smacked,
so life slips by
Other days, other games,
one's heart in the throat
before other rivals more elusive,
the thoughts and the dreams.
The city taught me endless fear,
a crowd, a street brings trembling,
sometimes a look gleaned from a face.
Still my eyes feel the mocking light
of thousands of street lamps
playing on shuffling feet.

My cousin returned with the end of the war,
a giant among the few,
and with money.
Quietly it was said,
"One year and it's gone.
He'll go off again,
the wild ones die like that."
My cousin of that resolute face
bought a village ground floor flat
that he turned into a garage
with a brilliant colored gas pump
and a billboard dominating the bend in the road.
He put a mechanic there
to make the money,
and he walked the hills smoking.
Meantime he married,
a girl from the village,
but slender and fair,
like the girls he must have known
in other lands.

He still went out alone.
Dressed in white,
hands behind his back,
face bronzed,
mornings he would visit the fair
and with a craftiness about him
would haggle over horses.
He explained to me,
when his plan failed
that the idea was
to eliminate the beasts from the valley
and force everyone to buy motors from him.
"Yet," he said,
"I was the dumbest beast of all.
I forgot that oxen and people here
have the same blood in their veins."

More than half an hour we have walked
and the summit grows near
and the wind rustles and whistles.
My cousin stop suddenly and turns.
"This year I'll put it on the poster.
Santo Stefano was always first in the Belbo
on Feast day. Canelli can say what it wants."
He resumes his walking.
Wind and earth's perfume collect us in the dark,
distant lights, farms, cars barely noticed.
I think of the force
that restored me this man
tearing him from the sea
and distant lands,
from that silence that endures.
My cousin doesn't speak of past voyages.
Dryly he tells of being in this place or that
and thinks of his motors.

Only one dream has remained in his blood.
A stoker on a Dutch fishing boat,
he crossed paths with the whale
and he has seen the heavy harpoons
flying through the sun,
whales fleeing in the bloody foam,
tales raised in the fight against the spear.
He mentions it occasionally.

But when I tell him
that he has seen the dawn
on the most beautiful islands,
at the memory he smiles
and replies that the sun
was rising
but the day was old for them.