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  • The Bagpipes
  • Giovanni Pascoli (bio)
    Translated by Italian by Taije Silverman (bio) and Marina Della Putta Johnston (bio)

In my sleep I heard something like bagpipes, a sound like the songs that would comfort me when I was small. There are in the sky all the stars. There are lights in the shacks by the road. The bagpipes came down from black hills and did not try to speak. They woke the good folk who rose up from warm straw to light lamps hanging silent from beams. The lamps flicker shadows and yawns. They flicker marked steps, and low tones. The dutiful lamps share their glow with the homes, and just here, farther on, and now there, in the brush— the dark world before dawn seems a tiny, huge crèche. In the sky the stars pulse as if waiting. It begins—the clean, thin tune of bagpipes seeps down, with that seamless dream sound of both churchyard and home, of mother and cradle and sleep. Of nothing, that once made us weep. Song of earliest years, before day, and what’s true, will you—now when the stars are still there and aware of our mystery here, when we’re not thinking yet about bread, or the fire, or the sweet blend of bells—make us weep again, just for a time? Not weep about nothing, but something, but so many things. The heart wants to weep with that measureless grief which will cease. A grief that forgets, then, to grieve. More than what it desires, than what it must leave, more than new grief conspiring to tether us here, the heart wants its reasonless tears. It wants its relished, long ago, good tears. [End Page 106]

Giovanni Pascoli

Giovanni Pascoli (1855–1912), a founding figure of modern Italian poetry, might be seen as an Italian equivalent to both Robert Frost and Ezra Pound. He’s like Frost in his particular combination of morbidity and lyrical transcendence, and for the fact that every Italian school kid memorizes his terrifically musical poems. And he’s like Pound for having been the first to modernize the Italian language for poetry, revolutionizing classical standards through a new use of dialect and natural speech. He is best known for his books Canti di Castelvecchio (1903–06) and Myricae (1891).

Taije Silverman

Taije Silverman’s book of poetry, Houses Are Fields, was published by LSU in 2009, and newer poems have appeared in journals such as Massachusetts Review and Harvard Review. She was a 2011 Fulbright Fellow in Italy and teaches poetry and translation at the University of Pennsylvania. Her translations of Pascoli have most recently been published in Five Points, the Nation, and AGNI.

Marina Della Putta Johnston

Marina Della Putta Johnston is the assistant director of the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where her scholarly work focuses on Medieval and Renaissance texts. Her translations of Pascoli have most recently appeared in Five Points and the Nation.

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