The poem Lavandare by Giovanni Pascoli is from the collection ‘Myricae’, (1894). I chose it a while ago, but life got in the way, and I only just go around to finishing it. As always, what seemed simple upon reading the original filled me with distress during the translation. It wasn’t just the thought of having to reproduce the numerous poetic devices necessary to relay the depth of emotions, but also the fear of not being able to recreate the sound of Pascoli’s extreme loneliness and feelings of abandonment. This may seem absurd, but those who have experienced them know those feelings produce a sound, and that it is so loud it echoes forever inside one. I translated, and I hoped the plough, left there abandoned in the middle of the fallow, and the women’s sad song, drifting through the air, would create the same emotions in the English reader as it did in me. The structure of the poem is circular: it starts and ends in the same place, where the abandoned plough stands in the first verse and the woman in the last.

In every stanza of Lavandare different senses are awakened: sight (the abandoned plough in the middle of the dry land, the haze that blurs everything like in an impressionist painting); sound (the onomatopoeic sciabordare and tonfi, and the women’s slow sad song); sight and sound together in the last one (the sound of the wind, the falling of the leaves, again the plough in the middle of the fallow).

The poetic devices include: enjambments (vv.2/3 and vv.4/5); chiasmi (v.6 tonfi spessi e lunghe cantilene, noun/verb, verb/noun) and v. 7 (vento soffia e nevica la frasca, noun/verb, verbo/noun); synaesthesia (v.6 tonfi spessi; alliteration (r in nero, aratro, pare, vapor leggero, gora, sciabordare, lavandare, torni ancora, rimasta, aratro, and f in tonfi, soffia, frasca, s and sc in spessi, soffia, sciabordare, t in tu non torni, al tuo, partisti, rimasta, and m in mezzo alla maggese); simili (vv.9/10 come son rimasta! / come l’aratro in mezzo al maggese); metaphors (v. 7 nevica la frasca immagine che evoca il cadere delle foglie come fiocchi di neve).

Obviously, the poetic devices we sometimes impossible to reproduce: the alliterations, for example, were either lost or replaced with other sounds (f with th, etc.). But I hope the ‘sound’ of Pascoli’s loneliness can be heard and his sense of abandonment felt…

Have a wonderful Sunday…what’s left of it. Cheers. – M.C.

Painting: Vincent Van Gogh – The Plough and the Harrow (after Millet), 1890