Abstract:
Cesare Pavese’s poem Passerò per Piazza di Spagna is included in his posthumously published collection of love lyrics Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi, which is dedicated to Constance Dowling, who did not respond to the poet’s love. Considering this fact, it is understandable that the poems of the collection resound with melancholic mood. However, this does not hold true for the poem in question: it is curiously optimistic and expresses the poet’s wish about what will happen one sunny spring morning. A question of relatively minor importance is what the word pietra implies in the poem and how it should be translated. The question which bulks largest is the correct interpretation of the following three verses towards the end of the lyric:
Il tumulto delle strade
sarà il tumulto del cuore
nella luce smarrita.
A word for word translation of these verses belies the overall optimistic tone of the poem as well as its final line, which says that Constance will be standing bright on the threshold of her flat. It is unclear what the “lost light” is. For the poet, Constance is light herself and she will be standing there bright to receive him. How then should “lost light” be understood? Pavese seems to use hypallage here. Hypallage was common in ancient Greek and Latin literature. It was inherited by Italian poetry, too: Sorgon così tue dive / membra dall’egro talamo (Ugo Foscolo, All'amica risanata, vv. 7-8) – the word egro, although grammatically linked to talamo, semantically modifies membra.
di foglie un cader fragile (Giovanni Pascoli, Novembre, v. 11) – the line should be understood as “un cadere di fragili foglie”.
Pavese seems to have employed this figure of speech not only in his earlier poems but also in another poem from the same collection. The passage under consideration should be understood in the following way: the word smarrita, though grammatically linked to luce, should be semantically linked to tumulto in the phrase il tumulto del cuore – the tumult of the streets will be the tumult of the heart, and the latter will disappear in the brilliance of Constance’s beauty. Such an interpretation is in line with the general optimistic mood of the poem.
