Welcome to the podcast An Ancient Language for a Modern Soul: Poemi Conviviali by Giovanni Pascoli. I’m here today with Professor Taije Silverman  who has co-translated several poems by Giovanni Pascoli and published them in the highly praised collection Selected Poems by Giovanni Pascoli. Taije is a poet and a translator, teaching poetry and creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. Today we will talk about “Alexandros”, a poem about Alexander the Great, a historical character who has fascinated generations of scholars, writers, and poets. 

ELENA 

“Alexandros” starts with a very concise sentence: “So we’ve come. It is the end.” The poem starts at the end of Alexander’s incredible journey that took him from his native Macedonia to India, crossing Iran and the Himalaya. He lived an extraordinary life, and in the short span of his 33 years of life (he died in 323 before Christ) he conquered a vast portion of the Earth known then, and forever changed the geopolitical landscape of the ancient world. In this poem, Pascoli says that Alexander has reached “the end”, which he identifies with the Ocean – probably the Indian Ocean – but more likely, the Ocean that ancient cartographers thought encircled the Earth. He can no longer move forward. It is a very interesting vantage point from which to portray this incredible historical character. Taije, you have chosen to translate this poem, together with a few others from Poemi Conviviali. What attracted you in this poem? Why did you choose it among the other Conviviali? 

TAIJE

 I think its reputation, primarily: several different people whose sensibility I really trust cited “Alexandros” as their favorite poem among all of Pascoli’s verse and the way that they talked about it lent it this mythic quality. And I was drawn to to the title, to Pascoli’s choice to keep the Greek name instead of translating it into Italian, the otherness of that sound “Alexandros” before all the vowel ends of Italian in the poem to follow . That, that contrast really sparked my curiosity. Something about the consonantal bluntness in the title sounded to me at odds with the lyrical, meandering narrative that follows, and I think intentionally so. Pascoli’s combinations and clashes of registers are always quite, quite wilful, quite intentional, whether they're linguistic or tonal registers and and that, and that intentional desire to contrast and combine registers has been for me, probably Pascoli’s most consistent appeal. And then when I read the poem, I was instantly smitten with it. The premise alone seduced me this, this image of Alexander the Great standing in front of the ocean and believing there's nothing beyond it and that he has essentially claimed the entire known world for himself. I love the absurdity and that level of ambition. And I love that what prompts the poem is Alexander's plan to now conquer the moon. And I love how the moon both shines down on the shields of his men as their shields shine it back to itself, reflecting the thing which is itself, the essence of reflection. And for all its weird turns and even with its really original premise, the poem is stuffed with good, old fashioned gorgeousness, trees traveling along the surface of a river while they remain rooted in the forest. Melodies is steady in his memory as waves inside a shell. I was also really interested in the poem's shift from a persona poem in Alexandros’ voice to this third person perspective that studies the women who aren't on the central stage. Why does he turn away from that first person voice? And why does he turn to the sisters? And then why end with the mother? It's such an unexpected move away from the hero. I. Oh, and the tone in the poem's last line fascinates me and totally puzzles me with the mother hearing this rustle of oaks from the same shadow in which earlier, Alexander wished that he had remained, that sense of ambivalence rings true to me, and it feels familiar.

ELENA 

In my life as a scholar, I’ve written about “Alexandros”, which, for me, is a poem about desire, like many others in the Conviviali. Desire is that inner drive that pushes people to go and achieve their goals, and it can be extremely powerful, and even dangerous. Alexander was driven by more than a desire for conquest, at least Pascoli’s Alexander: it is a desire to discover, to know, to go beyond where everyone else went. But when he reaches his goal, well, it’s a just a vertigo of nothingness, as there is nothing more to desire, nothing more to conquer. You wrote “dream is the endless shadow cast by the true”.  Taije, you are a poet yourself, what can you tell of the various images that Pascoli uses to describe Alexander’s experience, his relentless drive.

TAIJE

I don't know if I should admit that this is my least favourite line in the poem. Each time I came to it. In every draft of this translation, I tried to change the meaning of the line. I tried to make it more tangible. Maybe I will read this this stanza. Maybe I'll read this section and then talk a bit about why I hated that last line of it. So it's the second, it's the second section of the poem, and he's directly addressing these rivers, the torrents of rivers and the mountain ranges. He's speaking to them directly.

 Torrents I forwarded across your clear waters.

You carry the trees from motionless forest

and beneath them your ripple remains. Ranges I climbed past.

Beyond you don't rise up as high,

nor as vast as you'd longed, in my own mind to be

mountains and rivers you share the same blue as the sky and the sea.

It would have been better to stay better to dream

a dream is the infinite shadow cast by the true

Everything that precedes that last line convinced me instantly that ranges don't rise as high after he's climbed them, that rivers are no more or less blue than the sea. Those lines are visceral. They appear instantly before my eye. But I can't get a hook into that, into that line about the dream being the endless shadow cast by the true. Every word in that line, for me is like a cloud. I can't picture a shadow cast by the true. I don't I don't actually know what that shadow looks like. I don't know what the true looks like. And I love Pascoli because I know what every line he writes looks like. I can see it, usually. I can smell it, usually I can touch it. It's such a grand and vague statement with the kind of romanticism and largesse that has basically been banned from modern poetry. So translating that line for me took took me very much out of my comfort zone and into a Pascoli that I had to trust more than feel, about his relentless drive. I actually don't feel it in this poem. What I feel is his understanding that his drive, his ambition, is only another reflection like the moon. He moves through his memories of conquered places in each stanza by undermining them his world of Palestine's hills and Thracian peaks disappears in a sky made of night, and the gold sun that he and Bucephalus chase each evening continues to lure them like a jewel through the black trees. He never catches it, and he leaves the poem weeping and listening to the unknown.

ELENA 

Now that you’ve mentioned the particular place names, let’s talk about the language of this poem. Pascoli is famous for the extreme accuracy with which he identifies objects: he is never vague, it is that plant, that flower, and here there are quite a few references to the ancient world: mistofori, which we translated as “mercenaries”;  “pezeteri”, “soldiers”, “auleta”the ancient toponyms Haemo and Carmelo, which we left as such Haemon and Carmelus . How did you decide to render them? 

TAIJE

 For pezeteri, I wanted the rhyme between “men” and “end”, and I also wanted to convey his intimacy with those who have followed him here to the end of the known world, his men, my men, they belong to him, and he belongs to them. I also did feel some ancient and, of course, totally problematic sense of masculinity in this group with which he associates himself, and it's set up, I think, in opposition, through Pascoli to the women his sisters and mother, who do get the last word, both women and men now can be soldiers for our contemporary reader, but but here, in this in this section, it felt to me more like a gendered form of fellowship. And I do have a few earlier drafts where he addresses these men directly, but I wanted to tone down the more dramatic tone which direct address evokes, it's, it's, it's a, it's a sense of drama there that that would have been plainly moving in Pascoli’s time, but in our time, which is so inundated by irony, his drama can easily sound really silly, or, as a friend told me recently, criticising Pascoli, ampolloso, and so always in translating Pascal's direct address or exclamation marks or final proclamations about death, I try to soften or lighten that tone. It doesn't read the way he intends it. Now in our era, though, I do honour the poem's direct address of the river torrents and the mountain ranges and his direct address of his father, though without his exclamation marks, sorry, without his exclamation marks. So the drama of the direct address is softened a bit by its integration into the lines that follow. And I am also embarrassed to admit that mistofori di Caria, am I pronouncing that right? Yeah, the mercenaries. In my first draft, I translated that as hired guns, though I think it only took one rereading to understand how wrongly that register clashed with the poem. And I did try “mercenary”, but those longer Latinate words are always harder to rhyme with. Three syllable rhymes in English don't sound like they sound in Dante, they sound they sound childish. They always sound like nursery rhymes. So I traded our awareness that these are soldiers who have been paid to fight. I traded that, that information for the rhyme between core and weapon decked core with the final shore. Maybe I'll read that too. Actually, if we we have the time. Yeah, we do.

So this is the first section of the poem.

So we've come it's the end. Messenger, pound the drum.

No other world beckons but that one in air,

Lone wandering sphere which reflects on the shields of my men.

Unreachable end. From this final shore, you can see

the great river encircling earth without wave.

Oh, weapon decked core from Palestine's hills and bear Thracian peaks,

look where the world disappears in a sky made of night.

Yeah, so I traded, I traded that information that they are, in fact, assassins, that they are mercenaries for the rhyme between core and final shore, and even the off rhyme with bear and wear and disappear. I also like the assonance between weapon where and decked, weapon and decked, which echoes, I think, out of encircling and I wanted “weapon-decked” to emphasise the fact that these mistofori are all about the fighting and not about the loyalty or the cause. They're really about the weapons, but is a compromise between meaning and sound. For sure, I do lose Pascoli's precision, but it's a precision I think that not many Italian readers now would catch anyway. The term belongs to another time, and translating something archaic into something else archaic doesn't jibe with my translation ethos, which is to make the poem come alive in in the language I feel and know, and to make it feel relevant and moving as a text today. So I think readers in English would draw a blank if they read Carmelo or Haemo, as I did. I don't I don't know those places. I don't picture those places. And when I looked them up, I learned that Haemo is the ancient Greek term for a mountain range in northern Thrace. So I, so I, I made it become that. And Carmelo is near modern day Hebron, or also Haifa in this place, which could not be more relevant right now, and which some people call pal. Palestine. And some people call Israel, some Palestinian territories, some the West Bank. lets it invoke this much vaster history through Pascoli and Alexander the Great for a place that we think about now and in I think, very limited and violent terms, you

ELENA 

I am also intrigued by the last few stanzas, because there, suddenly  we move from Alexander to the women of his family: his mother Queen Olympias, and his unmarried sisters, weaving and carding wool for him. It is a striking transition, how do you interpret it? 

TAIJE

I am totally intrigued by it, too. It's one of the things that drew me to the poem. I find it, I guess I find it shocking and inevitable, given Pascoli’s biography and given his interests, women were the center of his life. His sisters were the center of his life. His memory of his mother was the fuel, I think, for as he himself said, most of his poetry, yeah, it's really weird, isn't it? It's totally bold, it's totally modern. He moves away from this final dramatic end of the earth entirely, and he goes back to the simple, continuing daily life, which is the poetic foundation of Pascoli’s work, women weaving his own sisters, who remained his family throughout his adult life after his parents and his brother died. I do hate the sexism implied in the word “virgin”, so I changed that to unmarried for his virgin sisters. I couldn't bear to say virgin sisters or virgin anything, makes my skin crawl, but I felt okay with unmarried, thinking about how important it is to possibly that his sister Maria never marry, and how betrayed he felt by his sister I had his marriage, I guess I Why don't I read this? I'll read this too. Yes. All right. All right. So this is the last section of the poem. And I am so struck by that meantime.

Meantime, in the hard northern hills of Epirus,

his unmarried sisters card fine Milesian wool

weaving from the absent …

sorry, let me, let me start over. I want to get rid of fine. I know this is not right for a podcast, but fine. I can't not do it.

Meantime, in the hard northern hills of Epirus,

his unmarried sisters card Milesian wool

weaving for the absent beloved, late at night,

with their handmaiden steadfast beside them,

heir pliable fingers turned thread on the spindle,

and wind ambles past and stars wander.

His mother Olympias, deep in a dream,

hears the chattering words of a wellspring. S

he hears in the hollow of the infinite shadow

the hush of huge oaks on the hills.

Yeah, it's a really intensely abrupt transition. The beginning of this section, we go from Alexandros’ sense of failure, his weeping at having gone as far as he can go, and understanding that it's not far enough and it can't be far enough to this totally different ongoing form of time, this mean time that starts this last stanza, and that opens into this tranquility of women weaving as they wait for him, the way That Penelope ultimately, is the is the is the ground on which the whole of the Odyssey settles, and what's faded, what's destined in the wind and the stars just ambles by, just passes, but the home remains and becomes, ultimately, more important than destiny and moon landings and the mother, of course, makes me think of Pascoli’s mother much more than it makes me think of Alexandros’ mother, whose ambition made her son's ambition look quite paltry. Pascoli brings his mother back to life in the stanza, as he so often does in his poetry, and and he and he also brings life into that space of death, as in so many of his poems, into the dream space, which is no longer the great delusion of the hero who can't conquer anything else, but is the pascolian dream space. Where the dead remain vivid and present through the absolute, almost prayer, like particularities of nature of oaks just here we are. We're no longer at the moon. We're no longer at the end of the world. We've just got these simple oaks the sound of the oaks on the hills. And that's how this poem about Alexander the Great ends.

ELENA

Thank you very much Taije for being our guest today,

TAIJE

it's been a real pleasure for me to have loved talking about the poem with you, and thank you all for listening.