The Stopover

A swan sings. From the marshes’
far reaches, its sharp call rings
in a coppery snare of cymbals.

This is the endless arctic dark.
Huge hills of infinite ice
soar on a slab of sea.

A swan sings. Slowly the sky
blurs, and smoulders to yellow.
A fringe of green unfurls.

Like harps barely brushed
that metal voice quavers; already
on peaks, the green gleams.

From the core of the night’s loaned colours,
a sequin-sleeved arc scatters gold.
The aurora unfolds into porticoes.

Now green and vermillion, the arc splits
to arrows and sheaves. They falter, falling
mute and far, and swell to swaths of stars.

With a sound like the toll of a bell’s
last ring, the swan stirs its wings:
Immense wings, swinging them wide to fly,

white against white, into the boreal light.

A particular pleasure of the collaboration of the poet Taije Silverman and the Italian scholar Marina Della Putta Johnston, the translators of this parallel-text edition, is that they bring us poems in English rather than “Translation-English”. The rhythmic structures have a line-by-line integrity that neither imitates the Italian line, nor cramps its energies in a metrical straitjacket. The translations become consistently free-standing poems in their own right.

My first impression was of encountering a major poet who belonged to my own language and its poetics, and yet fired those engines across sometimes dazzling new landscapes. I’ll be focusing on The Stopover primarily as a self-contained poem, but, of course, this isn’t to sideline the song and sense of the original, Il Transito, which, even if your Italian is as limited as mine, you can enjoy.

Giovanni Pascoli, poet and classical scholar, was born in 1855 in San Mauro di Romagna, since-re-named in his honour, San Mauro Pascoli. His comfortable rural childhood was disrupted by a series of tragedies, beginning with the murder of his father. But the lost childhood and the teeming vitality of the natural world that surrounded it remained accessible to his imagination in the form of immediate experience: Silverman writes in her Introduction that Pascoli “reiterates loss through a constant exploration … of local and present surroundings”.

The Stopover is woven light and sound, a visionary nature poem with an unexpected connection to the Italian war effort of 1896. It begins with the three-word declaration, “A swan sings”. This abruptly signals the classical myth of the swan song; additionally, as the Note to the poem suggests, Tennyson’s The Dying Swan (1830) might also be part of the transit of ideas. Tennyson describes how the “low warble” of the bird acquired grandeur, and “[w]ith a music strange and manifold,/ flow’d forth in a carol free and bold,/ As when a mighty people rejoice/ With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold…” In The Stopover the swan’s “sharp call rings/ in a coppery snare of symbols” (“snare” perhaps adding a drum-beat) and the quavering “metal voice” of the swan is compared ingeniously with the vague and thin tonality of “harps lightly brushed”. But the Pascoli swan is not merely the mythical bird, nor merely the symbol of a would-be “mighty people”. The “stopover” doesn’t necessarily evoke troop movement, and, in the heft of its icy polar imagery, the second verse reveals the vast and unforgiving migratory distances the ordinary Whooper swan must encompass.

Verse three echoes the first, with “The swan sings”, and this time it’s as if the bird sang the aurora borealis into existence. After the unfolding shapes and strange colours of the aurora have been richly explored, the swan’s song is heard again, and culminates rather tersely in the sound of a tolling bell’s “last ring”. But a dramatic recovery ensues, with some marvellously kinetic visual imagery, the spreading of the swan’s “immense wings, swinging them wide to fly,// white against white, into the boreal light”.

To return to the poem’s political context, Il Transito was first published in a pamphlet intended to raise funds for medical aid for “the mutilated Ascaris”. These Eritrean troops were part of the colonial Italian army fighting in the First Italo-Ethiopian war. Captured by the Ethiopians, who considered them traitors, they were maimed before being set free. While the northern lights of the aurora borealis have to be read as part-symbolic of Italy’s imperialistic reach, The Stopover enforces no direct connection: it makes the aurora, like the migratory swan, present and volatile, without any laborious building of a metaphorical vehicle.

Pascoli revised Il Transito, initially written in quatrains, as terza rima, enhancing the cohesion of the images, and creating a more melodious soundscape than the English language can achieve. The translators’ decision to avoid terza rima, while inevitably producing a harder sonic edge, is a good one, with internal rhyme picking up other melodic trace elements. Vowel and consonantal proximities are deployed with subtle effect, even when rhyme is minimal, as, for example, in the lovely verse six description of the aurora borealis: “Now green and vermillion, the arc splits/ to arrows and sheaves. They falter, falling/ mute and far, and swell to swaths of stars.”

Pascoli is a poet who brought French symbolism into his mix of influences and textures, but retains a wonderful immediacy and passion.

• The Stopover appears in Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli (Princeton University Press, copyright © 2019) and has been published here with permission.