帕韦泽诗9首
就在那时，我们这些懦夫
就在那时，我们这些懦夫
喜欢躲在那些房间里
窃窃私语，传播真理，
在河的两岸，
肮脏的红光照亮着
那些地方，有一种快乐
却带着无声的悲伤——
我们伸出了我们的手
挣脱出生活的锁链
在沉默中，但我们的心
通过流血震惊着我们，
于是在无法获得更多的快乐以后，
我们不会在河边上迷失自我——
不再是奴隶，我们知道
我们自身是孤独地活着的个体。
夜曲
就像山岭喜欢在夜晚面对着晴空。
你也喜欢昂着头呆呆地面对苍穹，一动不动。
而天空在不停变幻着。于是你变成了
一朵穿梭在树篱间的云。在你看来
笑声和奇幻的天空都不属于你。
山上的泥土和树叶黯淡了你那
闪亮的目光，就在那时，响起了黑暗的弥撒曲。
你的嘴巴张开如一座深不见底的
幽谷。你看起来是在
与崇山峻岭嬉戏，和洁净的天空玩耍。
那么就请你仿照那些过往的经验
使自己变得更加纯洁，更加透明。
可是你的生活在别处，
你那温和的血液流淌自别的地方。
那些你吐露的话语
和这悲伤而丑陋的天空没有任何交集。
因为你是那唯一的一朵温柔而甜美的白云
缠绕在夜幕下的苍老的树枝间。
本能
老人坐在他自己的房门前，沐浴着
柔和的阳光，对世上的一切都不再挂心，
旁观着那些狗儿们遵循着它们自身的本能。
苍蝇萦绕在他那牙齿不多的嘴边。
他的妻子在不久之前去世，她也象
世上的母狗一样不会主动提出需求，
但她却会散发出本能的渴望，让老头子嗅到——
当他还没有掉光牙齿前——在夜幕降临时，
他们会去床上翻云覆雨，一切机能都完好。
狗儿们太爽了，它们总是那般自由自在，
它们可以从早到晚地在大街上晃来晃去，
吃一点儿，睡一会儿，骑着母狗耍一会儿：
它们甚至等不到晚上。它们辩称
它们喜欢做爱时散发出的气味。
老家伙还记得过往的日子里发生的事
他曾在麦田里体验过。
和哪个骚货已记不太清，但永远忘不了
烈日、汗水和他的希望，他希望他可以持久地做下去。
就象现在他躺在床上，假想那些日子重返
他将一直做下去就在麦田里。
一个女人躺在大街上，引得路人停下来观看；
一个牧师经过但又转身离去，在公共场所
你可以做一切事情，甚至这女人
略带娇羞地向一个男人回眸，让那男人愣在那里
只有一个男孩无法忍受这种游戏
他向他们投掷石块，惹得那个老男人满腔火起。
你总是在清晨归来
黎明时的微弱气息
从你的嘴巴里呼出
发散到空荡荡的街道两端。
你的双眼在暗淡的光线下，什么也看不见。
黎明的芬芳滴落在
黑暗的群山。
你的脚步声和呼气声
好像是黎明时的风
氤氲在房间里。
城市战栗，
石头发声：
你是一个生命，在觉醒。
星星迷失了
迷失在晨光中，
微风颤动着
带来温暖，瞬息间
夜晚结束了。
你就是光明，你就是清晨。
死神将会来临，取走你的眼睛
死神将会来临，取走你的眼睛。
这死神跟随着我们
从早至晚，一刻也不停歇，
它还假装成聋子，听不见我们痛苦的叫喊
它就像我们以往做过的一件憾事
或犯下的一个愚蠢的过错
追讨着我们。它将使你的所有见解
变成一句空话，一段沉默的
哭泣，和一片无声的寂静。
当你每天早晨醒来
独自一人俯看镜中
你就会看见这些：
空话、哭泣和寂静。
哦，难能可贵的希望啊，
到了那一天我们也将会知道
你的生命是虚无的。
死神关注着我们每一个人，时机一到
它就会来到你的身边，取走你的眼睛。
到那时似乎就不再有罪恶了，
我们还将会看到一张死人的脸
在镜子里再次显现，这一切都好像是
听命于禁闭的双唇的吩咐。
而我们也将会一声不吭地堕入深渊。
古老的习性
醉汉们不知道怎么去开口叫住女人，
他们落在了后面晃来晃去,无人在意他们,
他们慢跌在街道上；街道和路灯
延续到更远处,对惺忪的醉眼来说，
归家的路程仿佛是没有尽头的；
但没有什么要担心的,明天他们就会回家。
醉汉游走着，他多想身边有个女人陪着，
路灯没有改变，女人也没有改变，同样没有改变的
还有这个夜晚，他张口说着却无人倾听。
他想解释些什么但女人是不想听的。
这些女人,会嘲笑他，这造成他的疑惑：
为什么她们要这样大声地笑，为什么啊，她们哭时，也会这样大声吗？
醉汉想要一个这样的女人，她能在他喝醉时
乖乖地听他说醉话，就在这时，她们却咆哮地说：
“你想要一种新的生活，你就要远远地离开我们。”
醉汉抱住一个同醉者，好像抱住自己的儿子，
今晚这同醉者就是他的儿子，这个不是那些女人给他生的。
那些只会骂他和哭泣的小女人怎么可能
给他生一个如此贴心的儿子呢？如果他喝醉了，
他不会记得那些女人，他晃悠悠地往前走着，
他们可以继续处在这种平和之中。儿子不再仰仗
女人给他生了，否则他自己会成为
一个女人。儿子会陪着他这个父亲走着和聊着：
而那些路灯将会陪着他们整夜亮着。
你有一张石头雕刻而成的脸
你有一张石头雕刻而成的脸，
由风化的硬土构成，
你来自于海洋。
你汇聚着一切打量着世界
排斥着污秽
就如同海水一样。在你的心中
沉默的话语在那里
潜藏着。你是黑暗之神。
对于你，黎明也会保持着沉默。
你喜欢地球上的这些声音——
提桶落井的扑通，
篝火旁的嘤嗡，
苹果落地的咚咚，
听天由命的嗯嗯
和门槛撞击的嘭嘭，
还有一个男孩的哇哇——
这些事物永远不会消失。
你不是哑巴。你是无知。
你象一间封闭的地下室，
在和地球的搏斗着，
一个进入过其中的
赤脚男孩
将会被永远铭记。
你又变成那黑暗的房间
他永远记得这一点，
就像在古老的庭院里
黎明终于显露出它本来的面目。
迪奥拉的回转
我在街上转身看见那些行人，
想到自己也是一个过路人，也在学着
如何获取和保存那些夜间的恐惧
过去我常常在外出散步时遇到它们。
我要利用我的心灵去工作一段时间,
我会从窗口回到那里，然后吸着烟
放松自己。但我的眼睛还是原先那样，
我的手势和我的面孔也没有改变。那个空无的秘密
消磨着我的身体,模糊了我的视线
它将死于血液的凝滞
在那里一切都将消失。
我整整在外面待了一个上午,
因为没有任何一座房子属于我;我只能在大街上游荡;
夜间的恐惧将会离开我;
虽然我害怕独处，但我却想一个人待着。
我要看看那些路人的脸上死一般的微笑
有人被殴打，但没有仇恨和喊叫;
因为我知道那自古以来的命运---
所有你曾经历的或将要经历的---是在血液中
在充满杂音的血液中。我皱起眉头
站在大街的中间，独自倾听着来自
血液中的回声，没有别的更多的回声了，
我将会抬起头，继续观望着大街上的一切。
Cesare Pavese is widely regarded as one of the foremost men of letters in twentieth-century Italian cultural history, and in particular as an emblematic figure: an earnest writer maimed by fascism and struggling with the modern existentialist dilemma of alienated meaning. Little known in the United States, Pavese was profoundly influenced by American literature, and, when official censorship closed his mouth, he would use his position as a translator and editor indirectly to bring into Italy messages of freedom and new ideas from English-language authors. Most Italians first encountered Herman Melville, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and Daniel Defoe in Pavese's translations, and also encountered their influence, and echoes of their meditations, in Pavese's own highly accomplished body of novels, short stories, and poems.
Pavese was born to Eugenio and Consolina Pavese in their family summer vacation spot, Santo Stefano Belbo, on September 9, 1908. Eugenio Pavese was a functionary in the law courts of Turin, in the north of Italy, and died of a brain tumor when Cesare was only six years old. Pavese's mother, Consolina, was evidently remote and unavailable for her son, and Pavese grew into a state of solitude from which he never fully emerged. One of his few friends, Natalia Ginzburg, in a posthumous memoir published in London magazine, remembered him: "It seemed to us that his sadness was that of a boy, the voluptuous heedless melancholy of a boy who has still not come down to earth, and moves in the arid, solitary world of dreams."
Turin was the crucible in which Pavese's character was formed, and his powerful sense of connection to it and the countryside of northern Italy would recur in his stories: the typical Pavese narrator is part of a landscape, the product of a certain place. At the time, Turin was considered by many to be more a French than an Italian city, and, a generation before, German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had made it his home for several years prior to his mental collapse in 1888. While studying at Turin's Lyceum, Pavese met and more or less adopted one of the instructors, Augusto Monti, who would later publicly oppose Mussolini's fascist regime. Monti became Pavese's intellectual father and mentor, and it was most likely this period of study with Monti that confirmed Pavese in his literary vocation; Pavese's first poems date from his Lyceum years.
After graduating, Pavese enrolled at the University of Turin and continued to pursue his study of literature, especially American literature, which, he became increasingly certain, offered a viable alternative to European cultural alienation and outright disintegration. Writing in the Kenyon Review, Leslie Fiedler addressed Pavese's "preoccupation with the meanings of America," stating, "Pavese's impulse as an artist was toward a dimension he liked to call 'mythic', a dimension he found in Melville and not in Flaubert . . . and it is through [Melville] that [Pavese] finds in our books an identity of word and thing . . . not the aristocratic symbolisme of the French. . . . The American artist, Pavese believed, had discovered how to reject conformism without becoming 'a rebel in short pants,' how to be at once free and mature." Pavese took his degree in 1930 with a thesis on poet Walt Whitman.
After University, Pavese threw himself into all manner of literary work, from producing his own poems, stories, and novels, to translating and editing English literature: Sinclair Lewis, Melville's Moby Dick (Pavese's favorite book), Sherwood Anderson, James Joyce's Dedalus, and John Dos Passos. As fascism took hold in Italy, Pavese stood in desultory attendance at meetings of diverse anti-fascist groups, remaining characteristically on the margins, and it was at these meetings that he met and fell in love with Tina Pizzardo, who was secretly a member of the Italian Communist Party. She convinced Pavese to receive certain letters for her at his address—letters from jailed anti-fascist dissident Altiero Spinelli—and, on the evidence of these letters, Pavese was arrested in 1935 and sentenced to three years incarceration at Brancaleone Calabro, in the south. Pavese served his time under house arrest, and wrote of his ordeal in Prima che il gallo canti ("Before the Cock Crows," translated as The Political Prisoner ) in 1949. Arguably more wounding to Pavese than the prison term was his discovery, on returning to Turin, that Pizzardo had not waited for him.
In the meantime, however, Pavese's first book, a collection of poems titled Lavorare stanca or "Hard Work," had appeared in 1936, shortened by four poems deleted by fascist censors. Seven years later, Pavese would publish an expanded version nearly double the size of the original. William Arrowsmith, in his introduction to the English language volume, described Lavorare stanca as "an act of radical personal culture." Pavese is widely regarded as a modern "mythic" poet, who bridged the gap between the general and the particular, the past and the present, and external and internal experience, by means of a personal mythology. He called his poetry "an attempt to express a cluster of fantastic associations, of which one's own perception of reality consists, with a sufficient wholeness." The language of his verse is both conventional and conversational, in contrast to the often extremely convoluted and oblique rhetoric of other contemporary Italian poets—a rhetorical complexity and indirectness that allowed them to hide their anti-fascist views from inastute censors. Pavese opted instead a more "American" style that R. W. Flint described in Delos as a "knotty, emphatic, improvised syntax." Pavese also published four further translations during his time in prison: a second novel by John Dos Passos, the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein, Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe, and one of John Steinbeck's novels.
Although he did not publish any of his own work for another three years after his release, Pavese again immersed himself in literary pursuits and accumulated a sizeable cache of unpublished writings. Giulio Einaudi, a Turinese friend from his youth, had revived Italy's most prestigious publishing company, which bore his name, and Pavese not only subsequently published almost exclusively with Einaudi, but also provided some welcome editorial guidance to the company as well.
Pavese's public silence during the period from 1938 to 1941 was most likely due to the ongoing subjection of the press to fascist censorship; Pavese preferred to remain silent rather than see his material edited, cut, or deleted. Instead, while continuing to write in private, he translated and shepherded into print five English language titles, including Charles Dickens' David Copperfield, the long story Beneto Cereno by Melville, and pieces by Stein, Trevelyan, and Morley. What is less well known, is that Pavese also encouraged Einaudi to publish Freud, Jung, Durkheim, and numerous other important authors and thinkers, some for the first time in Italy.
Pavese broke his silence with two novels in 1941 and 1942, and released his translation of William Faulkner's The Hamlet, but it wasn't until Mussolini's demise and the end of the war in Europe that the floodgates opened for Pavese's own work. In light of the defeat of fascism in Italy, Pavese was regarded as a minority member of the side that was "right all along." Of the three books that followed, Feria d'agosto (1946), La terra e la morte (1947), and Dialoghi con Leuco (1947), it was the latter, translated as Dialogues with Leuco in 1965, that most critics regard as Pavese's masterpiece. It is a series of dialogues between mythological figures, treating the question of human destiny as the personal content of myths. In his foreword, Pavese elaborates on his method in the Dialogues: "What is more acutely disturbing than to see familiar scenes troubled into new life? . . . A true revelation, I am convinced, can only emerge from stubborn concentration on a single problem. I have nothing in common with experimentalists, adventurers, with those who travel in strange regions. The surest, and the quickest, way for us to arouse the sense of wonder is to stare, unafraid, at a single object. Suddenly—miraculously—it will look like something we have never seen before." Sven Birkerts commented, " Dialogues with Leuco . . . is a Gordian knot of a book, except that no stroke of the sword will solve it; one must work, slowly and patiently, drawing continually on what one knows of life."
Pavese's prose was anything but fantastic. He chose a flat, restrained realism closer in spirit to the styles of Anderson or Hemingway, and his subject-matter was generally restricted to the friction between individual men and society; violence, the country and the city, the north and south of Italy, the tension between men and women—Pavese's experience with Pizzardo seemed to confirm a durable misogynistic strain in him—and the broader question of human destiny familiar to all European postwar literatures, are his reliable themes.
In 1949 Pavese met and fell in love with Constance Dowling, an American actress, but after a year their time with each other was clearly at an end. In 1950 Pavese stood at the zenith of his literary career, widely lauded on all sides and acclaimed as one of the two greatest living Italian authors, and awarded the Strega Prize for Tre romanze in June; two months later, on August 27, he was discovered dead in his hotel room, having administered to himself a fatal dose of sleeping pills. His diary, which he apparently intended for posthumous publication, indicated that he had been devastated by his failure with Dowling, and took it as a sign that he would never find happiness in marriage, or among people under any circumstances. He was two weeks away from his forty-second birthday.
After Pavese's death, much of the critical discourse about him was focused on his personal psychology, in light of the highly personal nature of his art. Italo Calvino became an early champion of Pavese's work, and was instrumental to its preservation. Subsequent generations of critics have valued his work for its resistance to fascism, its individualism, erudition, and philosophical sophistication. Pavese was furthermore responsible for a change in the manner and mode of Italian poetry, as others followed his example and deviated from the established, academic, and formal style and adopted his deliberate, blunt inelegance. In prose, he helped to establish a realism that did not rely on the bantering charm of other Italian narratives; a different strain in which suffering legitimates, and provokes, utterance, such that each of his novels and short story collections was, as Sven Birkerts said of Dialogues with Leuco, "a repository of human wisdom and the anguish that earns it."
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