Someone Else’s 
Matthew Reynolds
Does an Italian poet need translating even when he writes in English? Two of the poems in Disaffections make you wonder. Pavese addressed them to Constance Dowling, the American actress with whom he was involved in the months before his suicide in 1950, and they now frame the sequence published posthumously as Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (‘Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes’). Adopting Dowling’s language, Pavese expresses his wish and his inability to be at one with her:
ballet of boughs
sprung on the snow,
moaning and glowing
– your little ‘ohs’ –
white-limbed doe,
gracious,
would I could know
yet
the gliding grace
of all your days
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Matthew Reynolds’s last book was The Realms of Verse; he is now reading a lot of literary translations.
Other articles by this contributor:
Most Himself · Dryden
Jamming up the Flax Machine · Ciaran Carson’s Dante
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