 |
| “i sonnecchianti ciclamini . . . a schiudere i loro corallini petali” +++ [“the slumbering cyclamen . . . unfold their small coral-hued petals”] |
Today’s the 125th anniversary of the birth – on August 20, 1901, in Modica, Sicily – of the Nobel-honored poet Salvatore Quasimodo. Let’s commemorate – and celebrate! I’ll do so here by printing, then cerebrating on, and luxuriating in, “L’Aurora” [“The Dawn”] – Quasimodo’s self-described “primo lavoro poetico”[“first poetic work”].
Written probably in 1915, so at age thirteen or fourteen (and first published in by the journal Humanitis (Bari, 13 may 1917)), “L’Aurora”, as a first poem, does not have the era-defining pure language of Quasimodo’s 1930s hermetic verse or compelling gravitas of his more civilly and socially engaged post-WWII poems.
That said, “L’Aurora” charms. As with most of Quasimodo’s youthful poetry, there’s “verbal exuberance” and “entrancing energy,” in the words of Marco Sonzogni, one of the translators (along with Gerald Dawe) of The Night Fountain (Arc Publications, 2008), a bilingual selection of Quasimodo’s early work and the book in which I first read the poem.
In addition, “L’Aurora” has lots of Sicily in it! The island’s atmospherics, birds, colors, and flora – you’ll see! – anchor and enliven the poem. That there’s lots of such detail is not surprising given that Quasimodo wrote the poem while attending secondary school (similar to American high school) in Messina, having to that point always lived in Sicily, including, as a young child, the Ionian coastal town of Roccalumera.
And “L’Aurora” thrills with plenty more to, including an allusion to Dante and – oh how au courant this summer – a Homeric epithet!
In short, while “not yet mature poetry” – those the words of Quasimodo’s son Alessandro, in his foreword to The Night Fountain,“L’Aurora” shows more than enough lexical skill and poetic instinct to justify multiple readings – and a place in your heart. Here’s the 14-line (thus a kind of sonnet) poem, first in Quasimodo's Italian and then an English translation [modified from Sonzogni and Dawes]:
L’AURORA
Bianca, fugace, la nebbia svapora
nell’aria pura. S’indora l’oriente,
s’effonde la luce: ecco l’aurora.
L’ultimo grido il gufo alla fuggente
tenebra getta e nel silente ombroso
bosco dispare. Incomincia l’amore
allegri trillano fra l’odoroso
aere dei giovani arbusti in fiore
gli uccelli. Si drizzan sullo stelo superbi
i sonnecchianti ciclamini,
aspettando impazienti che nel cielo
turchino, luminoso l’astro d’oro
sorga a schiudere i loro corallini
petali. È la rosea aurora: al lavoro!
+++++
THE DAWN
White, fleeting, the mist evaporates
in the clear air. The east turns gold,
the light pours out: here’s the dawn.
The owl casts its final cry into the fleeing
darkness and vanishes into the silent,
shadowy woods. Love begins
birds sing joyously amidst the fragrant
air of the young flowering shrubs.
Proudly, the slumbering cyclamen
straighten on their stems, waiting
impatiently for the luminous
golden star to rise in the deep blue sky
and unfold their coral
petals. It’s the rosy dawn: to work!
I love this poem! May I share a few thoughts about it?
Bianca, fugace, la nebbia svapora[ Bee-AHN-kah, foo-GAH-che, la NEHB-byah zvah-POH-rah ]
The three-syllable patterns continues in the second line, with a combined prepositional phrase that’s – you guessed it – three syllable lexical unit (with the accent on the second syllable) –
– with the sentence then ending withe something that, lexically and sonically, is completely different:nell’aria[ nel-LAH-ryah ]
Coming after five consecutive three-syllable (each with the stress on the second syllable) lexical units, “pura” [“POO-rah”], with its more concise two syllables, with accent on the first one, rings like a bell. It sonically reinforces the the word’s meaning of “clear.” I think Quasimodo purposefully ended his in this way intentionally, for a good poetic reason.pura.[ POO-rah. ]
The syllabic fun of “L’Aurora” continues in the second sentence. That sentence begins mid-second line with a pronoun-verb followed by an article-noun, each of which – natch – has three syllables with -- natch again! -- the stress on the second, and then, in the poem’s third line, continues with yet another pair of –you know it! – three-syllable / second-syllable accented lexical units (a pronoun-verb followed by an article-noun):
. . . S’indora l’oriente,
s’effonde la luce:
[ . . . Seen-DOH-rah lor-YEN-tah,
sef-FOHN-deh la LOO-cheh: ]
all of which sets up, after the the colon, the culminating:
The post-colon “ecco” is marvelous. First, the stressed first-syllable and hard “c” of “ecco”, after all the contrasting three-syllable lexical units that precede it, neatly matches how the twist at the end of the first sentence. But more than that, is there a better word, maybe in the world and certainly in Italian, than “ecco”? The word’s formal meaning, perfectly applicable in the poem, is “here is”. But it also often serves as a cue to pay attention, and that’s certainly happening in Quasimodo’s poem: Dawn is here, and that’s the subject. Ecco! Ecco! Ecco!ecco l’aurora
[ EH-koh low-ROH-rah.]
Quasimodo then presents a lovely image: a night owl’s final cry and both how-it-happens but also kind-of-magical retreat into the trees’ quiet shadows. There may be a symbolic element to the vanishing: in Sicilian folklore, the owl is sometimes considered a bird of ill omen; in the poem, as the day begins, that bird has flown.
Next comes a sentence that, in the Italian, extends over parts of four lines, and, with its birds singing in the air made sweet by young flowering shrubs presents yet more naturalistic details – but which begins with, at least on first reading, may seem like a jarring abstraction:
Incomincia l’amore
[ Love begins ]
This abstraction works because, while different from the naturalistic particulars that both precede and follow it, the idea that “Love begins” simply and sincerely reflects Quasimodo’s understanding of life’s passion at daybreak. Hearts do swell when day begins. The dawn is ardent. Of course it’s fine that the phrase “Love begins”is unconnected by formal punctuation or grammar to the remainder of the sentence: a poem after all is a poem: the “rules” need not apply.
Next come the poem’s key lines, which contains its most compelling and complex image. Quasimodo lays out a compound-complex sentence of three clauses (both in the original and translation here) that takes up most of the line on which it begins, the next four lines completely, with a final word enjambed onto a sixth (which happens to be the poem’s last) line. It’s an eyeful, but oh so great: :
. . . Si drizzan sullo stelo superbi
i sonnecchianti ciclamini,
aspettando impazienti che nel cielo
turchino, luminoso l’astro d’oro
sorga a schiudere i loro corallini
petali.
+++
[ Proudly, the slumbering cyclamen
straighten on their stems, waiting
impatiently for the luminous
golden star to rise in the deep blue sky
and unfold their small coral-hued
petals. ]
O I love these lines! Perhaps first are, in the beautiful Italian, the alliterative zz’s and ss’s of the first-quoted line and the the c/che sounds in the second, plus of course word-ending d “ee” rhymes in the second line’s sonnecchianti ciclamini, a word-combination of eight syllables oh so wonderful in the layrnx, on the tongue, and in the air. If you need to, please copy-and-paste those two words into a site that pronounces foreign languages. Bella, yes?
I love too the use of l’astro d’oro [the golden star] instead of the more pedestrian – “il sole” [the sun]. Quasimodo’s more term is not only more poetic but also infuses a sun-worshiping vibe that I dig. It also, especially with the added ‘luminoso” [luminous] energizes with a shock of sparkle-color – even more so given the sensuous “cielo turchino” [deep blue sky] in which those colors appear. Quasimodo then adds to the marvelous color wheel with the cyclamen’s unfolding coral petals. Deep blue, gold, and coral. Oh là là: what complementary colors!
Cyclamen is native to Sicily, so its appearance here is on one level but another detail of the island’s flora and fauna in the poem. But I suggest the flower’s coral has important symbolic value too. In Sicily, coral – the sea-dwelling animal / substance, and by extension the color, has a deep traditional / cultural history as a symbol of protection, life, and good luck. How deep is the tradition? Consider this: in Antonello da Messina’s San Gregorio Polyptych (1473), Sicily’s early Renaissance painting masterwork, a kind of Mona Lisa for the island – and which alas was just last week stolen (!) from a Sicilian museum – features in its center panel a baby Jesus wearing around his neck, as protective charm or apotropaic amulet, a small red coral pendant!
I believe that in “L’Aurora”, Quasimodo’s “Corallini / petalli”, appearing as the day begins, has the same same protective / apotropaic role.
And there’s still more! As other have pointed out, Quaismodo’s six lines about the straightening on the stem, petal-unfolding cyclamen were plainly borrowed from a similar image in Dante’s Inferno. Here are relevant tercets (lines 127-132) from the Inferno’s second canto, in Italian and English (the latter by John Ciardi):
Quali fioretti dal notturno gelo
chinati e chiusi, poi che ‘l sol li ‘mbianca,
si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo,.
tal mi fec’ io di mia virtude stanca,
e tanto buono ardire al cor mi corse,
ch’i’ cominciai come persona franca . . .
+++
As flowerlets drooped and puckered in the night
Turn up to the returning sun and spread
Their petals wide on his new warmth and light –
Just so my wilted spirits rose again
And such a heat of zeal surged through my veins
That I was born anew . . .
[Alternatively, and perhaps more directly though abbreviated, the Hollanders’ translation: “As little flowers, bent and closed / with chill of night, when the sun / lights them, stand all open on their stems, / such, in my failing strength, did I become.”
Of course, Quasimodo in “L’Aurora” does not explicitly use the awakening cyclamen as a simile for his own renewed confidence and energy, as Dante does with his morning flowers. But doesn’t Quasimodo’s unspoken but surely recognized-by-many allusion to Dante’s lines and simile here surely make that same connection happen without being obvious about it? I certainly say it does. The cyclamen’s straightening and unfolding here corresponds precisely to Quasimodo’s – the poet-speaker’s – renewed creative focus and strength as the day begins.
There’s then the poem’s final sentence. It begins with a declaration:
È la rosea aurora:
[ It’s the rosy dawn: ]
That must be an allusion to Homer’s oft-used epithet, right? In that regard, when Quasimodo decades later published his translations of selections from The Odyssey – Dall’Odissea (Mondadori, 1951) --
– a half-dozen of the excerpts included, you will not be surprised to learn, “Aurora dalle dita di rose” [“Rosy-fingered dawn”], to quote the words Quasimodo used! In “L’Aurora”, the use of the Homeric term is both a convincing detail of how it actually was, and a reminder of Quasimodo’s s familial and cultural Siculo-Greco identity: his paternal grandmother was Greek, and of course Sicily was central to Magna Gracea.
Finally, there comes in the last line the sequent / complement / concluding clause, after the colon:
Explication isn’t needed here. Let’s just salute the enthusiastic vigor of youth, and the dedication of the poet to the craft or task at hand!al lavoro!
[ to work! ]
And salute also today, on the anniversary of his birth, the marvelousness of Salvatore Quasimodo’s “primo lavoro poetico”[“first poetic work”].
+++++
No comments:
Post a Comment