An irritating thing about reviewing books translated from languages you think you know is getting past the title. Did the translator get it right—not just the meaning but the tone? If not, then you are already biased against the whole enterprise—which is probably unfair, since the title, which is essentially a fragment cut off from any larger syntactic context, can be the hardest part of the whole book. And yet it wasn’t Minna Zallman Proctor’s decision to render the title of Dialoghi con Leucò, the strange book Cesare Pavese published in 1947, as The Leucothea Dialogues that started me off on the wrong foot. I was willing to write it off as an effort, misguided but understandable, to distinguish this version of Pavese’s book from the earlier one by William Arrowsmith and D.S. Carne-Ross, which was straightforwardly titled, as it should have been, Dialogues with Leucò. I leave aside the puzzle of why Pavese titled his book to imply that the whole thing involves Leucothea, a rather mysterious sea goddess who, according to Homer, came to the aid of Odysseus when his boat was wrecked after his escape from Calypso’s island. The book is, rather, a series of 27 brief dialogues involving figures mostly from Greek mythology—Oedipus and Tiresias, Achilles and Patroclus, Castor and Pollux, Leucothea paired first with Circe and then with Ariadne1—but sometimes from literature (Sappho and Britomartis), each with a brief headnote in the author’s own voice. The concluding dialogue is between two unnamed speakers who might be people of Pavese’s own time. Its key line might be this: “Who we are and what we believe emerges in discomfort, in the reckless hour.”
No, it wasn’t the transformation of the title that bugged me; it was Proctor’s version of the first dialogue’s opening line, which is spoken by Nephele. She’s a cloud goddess Zeus created to resemble Hera to mislead the mortal Ixion, who imagined he could make love to the queen of the gods. “C’è una legge, Issione, cui bisogna ubbidire,” Nephele announces. For Proctor, this becomes “That’s the law, Ixion. Laws must be obeyed.” I don’t think it pedantic to point out that in Proctor’s English, Nephele is reminding Ixion of a certain law, unnamed—one among many—and reminding him, too, rather superfluously, of what a law is. In Pavese’s Italian, however, something more momentous is going on. “There is a law,” Nephele asserts, meaning that now there is a law where before there was none. She is telling him that the state of the world has changed utterly: before, nothing was forbidden; now, limits have been placed on the doings of mortals, and immortals too. As Nephele says a few lines later, “C’è una legge, Issione, che prima non c’era.” Proctor casts the sentence as “There is law, Ixion, now like never before,” which implies that some law had always applied, but that it’s mutated, become stronger. More cogent is Arrowsmith and Carne-Ross’s rendition: “There is a law, Ixion, which didn’t exist before.” A realm of law, of limits, has come into being.
Eventually, Proctor’s Nephele makes this clear. A third iteration of the formula “C’è una legge, Issione” is finally given as “There is law, Ixion.” Exactly. Why did it take Proctor three tries to reach this point? Whatever the reason, I’m glad she got there, and I suppose the fact that she did has something to do with why I overcame the bias against this translation that its first line had instilled in me. I should say that in quibbling about this one line, I don’t mean to denigrate Proctor’s translation overall, or to assert the superiority of the earlier one. Each seems broadly accurate, but each has drawbacks—that of Proctor’s Leucothea is, broadly, an approachable informality that loses something of the dark grandeur of Pavese’s prose, with its constant undertone of metaphysical bitterness.
●
“So long as we continue to believe that there is a reason why things are the way they are rather than some other way,” averred the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his disconcerting book After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, “we will construe this world as a mystery, since no such reason will ever be vouchsafed to us.” Meillassoux’s contention that the laws of nature are contingent and could change from one moment to the next, would represent, at the level of the physical sciences, an equivalent to the idea embodied not only in the exchange between Nephele and Ixion but in half a dozen or more of The Leucothea Dialogues: that in ancient times one world order took the place of another. It’s what the Lacanians would call the shift from the Imaginary to the Symbolic. And yet the new order of the Olympian gods retains memories of the previous, more chaotic state of things, “the time of the Titans when beings of all kinds mingled freely,” lawlessly. Merely implicit is the question of what it means that, since then, the gods and their order have disappeared in turn. Equally implicit: to what extent shifts in the relations among mortals, gods and the earth might allegorize changes in the political order—for instance, from fascist to republican.
As in all good dialogue, any answers that might be ventured are merely provocations to further questions. For Pavese, the myths themselves offer no satisfactory answers, only incomplete fragments of stories that demand elaboration. So he slyly rewrites them and doesn’t hide the fact. It’s his skill in refashioning the myths that reveals just how close to their spirit he is. Thus, he tells us, “For his inhumanity, Zeus turned Lycaon, King of Arcadia, into a wolf. But the myth doesn’t say how or where he died.” Pavese doesn’t say just where either, but we find out how, in the conversation between the two anonymous hunters who killed him. “We have to skin him and get back to the valley. What a feast they’ll throw for us,” says one, to which his companion responds, “I wonder whether we should bury him after we’ve taken the skin. He was human once.” Again, the question of what survives the change from one state of things to another: “You could say that he lived as a wolf but died as a man. You could see it in his eyes.”
Introducing a dialogue between Achilles and Patroclus, Pavese writes, “There’s no need to redo Homer,” and yet later he finds something lacking even in the epic poet. Speaking of how Odysseus was provided by Hermes with the magical herb moly to protect him from Circe’s spell, Pavese asserts that she—“an ancient Mediterranean goddess fallen from favor—had long known destiny would bring an Odysseus to her,” adding: “Homer didn’t track that part of the story as much as we wish he had.” It’s in this dialogue that Circe addresses Leucothea familiarly as Leucò, giving the book its Italian title. Why in the world, Leucothea wonders, was Odysseus averse to being turned into a pig? He’d already refused Calypso’s offer to make him a god. “There was one time I thought I’d explained why beasts are more like us immortals than man is,” Circe explains. “An animal eats, has sex, and has no memory of it. Odysseus replied that he had a dog waiting for him back home.” And then: “He had plenty of courage and intelligence, but he didn’t know how to smile. He never knew the smiling of the gods, the smiling of those who know destiny.” Later she admits that he did, after all, smile—but “the way men smile.”
Only a god could say for sure whether the smile that hovers over the face of Pavese’s stern prose is that of a man or an immortal. Leucothea is a poet’s book of prose. The dramatic monologues in Pavese’s first book, Lavorare Stanca—translated as Hard Labor, a rendering I’ll argue against some other time, in William Arrowsmith’s recently republished 1976 version—had characters and stories, but these were conjured for the sake of a tone, of the sullen music of a certain saturnine view of life, rather than the tone being at the service of the story told or implied by the poem and its unfolding of character. Pavese never had the true novelist’s abundance of invention; his novels, all brief, aim at the concentration of poetry. In Leucothea, Pavese uses the dialogue form to generate even greater poetic intensity than he does in his poems, breaking up any linear discourse into a sequence of feints, interruptions and redirections. That’s where the book’s profound irony persists, in the dissonance between the tragic resonance of so much of its language, full of monumental pronouncements like the thrice-intoned “C’è una legge,” and a quicksilver swiftness of movement characteristic of comedy.
●
Can it be possible to translate a book, and not badly at all, without really understanding it? Or without understanding how to understand it? Proctor says no—“You have to understand what you’re translating—or what comes out is second-degree gibberish”—and yet something of the sort seems to be her situation. Proctor recognizes the gravitas of the book she’s worked with, yet at the same time she sidelines it, almost as a caprice, albeit one touching on serious themes. In her introduction, she entertains two seemingly contradictory opinions about the work’s significance. She reminds us that when in the late summer of 1950 the 41-year-old Pavese checked into the hotel in Turin where he would take a fatal overdose of barbiturates, he brought with him only this one book, on whose title page he wrote his last words, “Perdono tutti e a tutti chiedo perdono. Va bene? Non fate troppi pettegolezzi”: “I forgive you all and ask you all to forgive me. Okay? Go easy on the gossip.” What could make clearer a book’s importance to its author than that? And yet—taking on for part of her introduction the voice of a mythological alter ego she calls Arachne—Proctor also declares, “No one ever claims his most important work was a peculiar little collection of twenty-seven lyrical dialogues featuring the gods and heroes of ancient Greece.”
This is where I raise my hand to say, “Really? No one?”—and declare that I do, and so did Arrowsmith, though its importance might be shared with Pavese’s posthumously published journal, Il mestiere di vivere (another of those tricky titles, though it’s been published as This Business of Living and before that, melodramatically enough, as The Burning Brand, a phrase taken from the headnote to one of these dialogues). Pavese had written outstanding poetry and novels, but these two anomalous books were his twin testaments. (Note to all publishers: we need a new edition of Pavese’s journals, under any title you like.)
Admittedly, it’s not hard to understand how the book might seem tangential to the rest of his oeuvre. Starting even from his first poems, which suppress all lyricism, all romanticism and rhetoric, in favor of narrative concreteness and colloquial language, Pavese’s writing seems worlds away from the so-called hermeticism of elder poets such as Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo and Giuseppe Ungaretti, and wholly dedicated to a kind of realism, even to what, following World War II, would be known as neorealism. His subjects (which he thought of as interlocutors) would be “peasants, working men and women, sand-diggers, prostitutes, convicts, and kids.” Pavese joined the PCI around the time he was writing The Leucothea Dialogues, and his putative realism represented, in the eyes of his Communist comrades, what his friend and biographer Davide Lajolo called “the commitment to life, the wish to maintain his dignity as an activist in a party of the masses,” whereas the Dialogues themselves were merely “a decadent justification of his renunciation … a withdrawal into himself.” How little friends and biographers sometimes understand.
Pavese’s prose fiction is almost entirely set in the landscape of his own life. It stretches from the Langhe, the Piedmontese hills around the town of Santo Stefano Belbo, where he was born and spent his early life, to the nearby city of Turin, Italy’s publishing capital, where (except for a year of internal exile in Calabria in 1935-36 for antifascist activities, of which he happened to be innocent) he made his career as a translator and writer. In the irresolvable dialectic between the hills and the city—each a potential place of escape for inhabitants of the other—Pavese finds a structure through which to plumb his characters’ conflicts with themselves and others. He doesn’t succumb to the illusion that rural people live in harmony with the elemental forces that underpin life itself, but he understands that through experience they know those forces in an intimate manner. While The Leucothea Dialogues are set in an imaginary Greece, an ancient landscape of the mind with no relationship to the empirical place, readers of Pavese’s fiction will feel that the dialogues could be taking place in the same Langhe. Incidentally, this is the brilliance of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s great 1979 film Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance), whose first part is a performance of six of the Dialogues while its second half consists of conversations adapted from Pavese’s last novel, La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires): its insistence on the continuity between the two works.
La luna e i falò concerns a man who is at home nowhere, desires to establish a home, but can’t. Its unnamed setting is transparently Pavese’s hometown, Santo Stefano Belbo. The narrator grew up there too, though he’d have to have been about a decade older the author. Anyway, he’s from somewhere else: abandoned as an infant on the steps of a church in the small nearby city of Alba, he was adopted by a penniless peasant couple—more, he thinks, for the monthly imbursement it earned them than anything else. As a restless young man, he got away from Santo Stefano Belbo as soon as he could. Yet he would have wanted to be more attached to these hills he’s abandoned. In America he made some money; now, after twenty years and after the end of the war, he’s returned to the village where he wants to understand his past and imagines settling down—but he finds himself even more unsettled than ever by the political turmoil left by the experience of fascism and resistance that he missed.
The novel is fundamentally a dialogue between the narrator, a rootless man who will never be able to put down new roots, and his friend Nuto, who has never left the town, although his abilities as a musician would have made it easy. A Communist, Nuto is also a believer in—or at least respectful of—the peasant arcana, the atavistic folklore by which the agricultural cycle is accompanied, as evoked by the novel’s title. If the narrator is an avatar of the author, an acute observer who always maintained a mental distance, a man who (in love as in politics) aspired to a commitment he could never attain, Nuto is perhaps his fantasy of who he might have become if he’d never left home, a sort of natural intellectual whose critical intelligence has somehow not cut him off from the primordial experiences.
In The Leucothea Dialogues, Pavese was trying to be, at least for a while, that kind of thinker, a man of the earth and the mind at once. In the jacket copy he composed for the book’s first publication, he wrote of himself in the third person as having “for a while, stopped believing that his totem and taboo, his wild men, the spirits of plants, ritual murder, the realm of myth and the cult of the dead, were useless oddities, and wanted to seek out in them the secret of something we all remember.” The book teases us with a secret that seems to permeate every page but can’t be spelled out. If we need a message to hang on to, it might be Leucothea’s simple statement in the second of the two dialogues in which she figures, where she reminds Ariadne, “Divinity is cruel. It destroys anything that resists it.” After destruction, a new world takes form.
An irritating thing about reviewing books translated from languages you think you know is getting past the title. Did the translator get it right—not just the meaning but the tone? If not, then you are already biased against the whole enterprise—which is probably unfair, since the title, which is essentially a fragment cut off from any larger syntactic context, can be the hardest part of the whole book. And yet it wasn’t Minna Zallman Proctor’s decision to render the title of Dialoghi con Leucò, the strange book Cesare Pavese published in 1947, as The Leucothea Dialogues that started me off on the wrong foot. I was willing to write it off as an effort, misguided but understandable, to distinguish this version of Pavese’s book from the earlier one by William Arrowsmith and D.S. Carne-Ross, which was straightforwardly titled, as it should have been, Dialogues with Leucò. I leave aside the puzzle of why Pavese titled his book to imply that the whole thing involves Leucothea, a rather mysterious sea goddess who, according to Homer, came to the aid of Odysseus when his boat was wrecked after his escape from Calypso’s island. The book is, rather, a series of 27 brief dialogues involving figures mostly from Greek mythology—Oedipus and Tiresias, Achilles and Patroclus, Castor and Pollux, Leucothea paired first with Circe and then with Ariadne11. The name Leucothea means “white goddess,” but she is not the same white goddess of whom Robert Graves was writing at this time, in what Pavese considered “a book of staggering and very risky erudition.”—but sometimes from literature (Sappho and Britomartis), each with a brief headnote in the author’s own voice. The concluding dialogue is between two unnamed speakers who might be people of Pavese’s own time. Its key line might be this: “Who we are and what we believe emerges in discomfort, in the reckless hour.”
No, it wasn’t the transformation of the title that bugged me; it was Proctor’s version of the first dialogue’s opening line, which is spoken by Nephele. She’s a cloud goddess Zeus created to resemble Hera to mislead the mortal Ixion, who imagined he could make love to the queen of the gods. “C’è una legge, Issione, cui bisogna ubbidire,” Nephele announces. For Proctor, this becomes “That’s the law, Ixion. Laws must be obeyed.” I don’t think it pedantic to point out that in Proctor’s English, Nephele is reminding Ixion of a certain law, unnamed—one among many—and reminding him, too, rather superfluously, of what a law is. In Pavese’s Italian, however, something more momentous is going on. “There is a law,” Nephele asserts, meaning that now there is a law where before there was none. She is telling him that the state of the world has changed utterly: before, nothing was forbidden; now, limits have been placed on the doings of mortals, and immortals too. As Nephele says a few lines later, “C’è una legge, Issione, che prima non c’era.” Proctor casts the sentence as “There is law, Ixion, now like never before,” which implies that some law had always applied, but that it’s mutated, become stronger. More cogent is Arrowsmith and Carne-Ross’s rendition: “There is a law, Ixion, which didn’t exist before.” A realm of law, of limits, has come into being.
Eventually, Proctor’s Nephele makes this clear. A third iteration of the formula “C’è una legge, Issione” is finally given as “There is law, Ixion.” Exactly. Why did it take Proctor three tries to reach this point? Whatever the reason, I’m glad she got there, and I suppose the fact that she did has something to do with why I overcame the bias against this translation that its first line had instilled in me. I should say that in quibbling about this one line, I don’t mean to denigrate Proctor’s translation overall, or to assert the superiority of the earlier one. Each seems broadly accurate, but each has drawbacks—that of Proctor’s Leucothea is, broadly, an approachable informality that loses something of the dark grandeur of Pavese’s prose, with its constant undertone of metaphysical bitterness.
●
“So long as we continue to believe that there is a reason why things are the way they are rather than some other way,” averred the philosopher Quentin Meillassoux in his disconcerting book After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, “we will construe this world as a mystery, since no such reason will ever be vouchsafed to us.” Meillassoux’s contention that the laws of nature are contingent and could change from one moment to the next, would represent, at the level of the physical sciences, an equivalent to the idea embodied not only in the exchange between Nephele and Ixion but in half a dozen or more of The Leucothea Dialogues: that in ancient times one world order took the place of another. It’s what the Lacanians would call the shift from the Imaginary to the Symbolic. And yet the new order of the Olympian gods retains memories of the previous, more chaotic state of things, “the time of the Titans when beings of all kinds mingled freely,” lawlessly. Merely implicit is the question of what it means that, since then, the gods and their order have disappeared in turn. Equally implicit: to what extent shifts in the relations among mortals, gods and the earth might allegorize changes in the political order—for instance, from fascist to republican.
As in all good dialogue, any answers that might be ventured are merely provocations to further questions. For Pavese, the myths themselves offer no satisfactory answers, only incomplete fragments of stories that demand elaboration. So he slyly rewrites them and doesn’t hide the fact. It’s his skill in refashioning the myths that reveals just how close to their spirit he is. Thus, he tells us, “For his inhumanity, Zeus turned Lycaon, King of Arcadia, into a wolf. But the myth doesn’t say how or where he died.” Pavese doesn’t say just where either, but we find out how, in the conversation between the two anonymous hunters who killed him. “We have to skin him and get back to the valley. What a feast they’ll throw for us,” says one, to which his companion responds, “I wonder whether we should bury him after we’ve taken the skin. He was human once.” Again, the question of what survives the change from one state of things to another: “You could say that he lived as a wolf but died as a man. You could see it in his eyes.”
Introducing a dialogue between Achilles and Patroclus, Pavese writes, “There’s no need to redo Homer,” and yet later he finds something lacking even in the epic poet. Speaking of how Odysseus was provided by Hermes with the magical herb moly to protect him from Circe’s spell, Pavese asserts that she—“an ancient Mediterranean goddess fallen from favor—had long known destiny would bring an Odysseus to her,” adding: “Homer didn’t track that part of the story as much as we wish he had.” It’s in this dialogue that Circe addresses Leucothea familiarly as Leucò, giving the book its Italian title. Why in the world, Leucothea wonders, was Odysseus averse to being turned into a pig? He’d already refused Calypso’s offer to make him a god. “There was one time I thought I’d explained why beasts are more like us immortals than man is,” Circe explains. “An animal eats, has sex, and has no memory of it. Odysseus replied that he had a dog waiting for him back home.” And then: “He had plenty of courage and intelligence, but he didn’t know how to smile. He never knew the smiling of the gods, the smiling of those who know destiny.” Later she admits that he did, after all, smile—but “the way men smile.”
Only a god could say for sure whether the smile that hovers over the face of Pavese’s stern prose is that of a man or an immortal. Leucothea is a poet’s book of prose. The dramatic monologues in Pavese’s first book, Lavorare Stanca—translated as Hard Labor, a rendering I’ll argue against some other time, in William Arrowsmith’s recently republished 1976 version—had characters and stories, but these were conjured for the sake of a tone, of the sullen music of a certain saturnine view of life, rather than the tone being at the service of the story told or implied by the poem and its unfolding of character. Pavese never had the true novelist’s abundance of invention; his novels, all brief, aim at the concentration of poetry. In Leucothea, Pavese uses the dialogue form to generate even greater poetic intensity than he does in his poems, breaking up any linear discourse into a sequence of feints, interruptions and redirections. That’s where the book’s profound irony persists, in the dissonance between the tragic resonance of so much of its language, full of monumental pronouncements like the thrice-intoned “C’è una legge,” and a quicksilver swiftness of movement characteristic of comedy.
●
Can it be possible to translate a book, and not badly at all, without really understanding it? Or without understanding how to understand it? Proctor says no—“You have to understand what you’re translating—or what comes out is second-degree gibberish”—and yet something of the sort seems to be her situation. Proctor recognizes the gravitas of the book she’s worked with, yet at the same time she sidelines it, almost as a caprice, albeit one touching on serious themes. In her introduction, she entertains two seemingly contradictory opinions about the work’s significance. She reminds us that when in the late summer of 1950 the 41-year-old Pavese checked into the hotel in Turin where he would take a fatal overdose of barbiturates, he brought with him only this one book, on whose title page he wrote his last words, “Perdono tutti e a tutti chiedo perdono. Va bene? Non fate troppi pettegolezzi”: “I forgive you all and ask you all to forgive me. Okay? Go easy on the gossip.” What could make clearer a book’s importance to its author than that? And yet—taking on for part of her introduction the voice of a mythological alter ego she calls Arachne—Proctor also declares, “No one ever claims his most important work was a peculiar little collection of twenty-seven lyrical dialogues featuring the gods and heroes of ancient Greece.”
This is where I raise my hand to say, “Really? No one?”—and declare that I do, and so did Arrowsmith, though its importance might be shared with Pavese’s posthumously published journal, Il mestiere di vivere (another of those tricky titles, though it’s been published as This Business of Living and before that, melodramatically enough, as The Burning Brand, a phrase taken from the headnote to one of these dialogues). Pavese had written outstanding poetry and novels, but these two anomalous books were his twin testaments. (Note to all publishers: we need a new edition of Pavese’s journals, under any title you like.)
Admittedly, it’s not hard to understand how the book might seem tangential to the rest of his oeuvre. Starting even from his first poems, which suppress all lyricism, all romanticism and rhetoric, in favor of narrative concreteness and colloquial language, Pavese’s writing seems worlds away from the so-called hermeticism of elder poets such as Eugenio Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo and Giuseppe Ungaretti, and wholly dedicated to a kind of realism, even to what, following World War II, would be known as neorealism. His subjects (which he thought of as interlocutors) would be “peasants, working men and women, sand-diggers, prostitutes, convicts, and kids.” Pavese joined the PCI around the time he was writing The Leucothea Dialogues, and his putative realism represented, in the eyes of his Communist comrades, what his friend and biographer Davide Lajolo called “the commitment to life, the wish to maintain his dignity as an activist in a party of the masses,” whereas the Dialogues themselves were merely “a decadent justification of his renunciation … a withdrawal into himself.” How little friends and biographers sometimes understand.
Pavese’s prose fiction is almost entirely set in the landscape of his own life. It stretches from the Langhe, the Piedmontese hills around the town of Santo Stefano Belbo, where he was born and spent his early life, to the nearby city of Turin, Italy’s publishing capital, where (except for a year of internal exile in Calabria in 1935-36 for antifascist activities, of which he happened to be innocent) he made his career as a translator and writer. In the irresolvable dialectic between the hills and the city—each a potential place of escape for inhabitants of the other—Pavese finds a structure through which to plumb his characters’ conflicts with themselves and others. He doesn’t succumb to the illusion that rural people live in harmony with the elemental forces that underpin life itself, but he understands that through experience they know those forces in an intimate manner. While The Leucothea Dialogues are set in an imaginary Greece, an ancient landscape of the mind with no relationship to the empirical place, readers of Pavese’s fiction will feel that the dialogues could be taking place in the same Langhe. Incidentally, this is the brilliance of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s great 1979 film Dalla nube alla resistenza (From the Cloud to the Resistance), whose first part is a performance of six of the Dialogues while its second half consists of conversations adapted from Pavese’s last novel, La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires): its insistence on the continuity between the two works.
La luna e i falò concerns a man who is at home nowhere, desires to establish a home, but can’t. Its unnamed setting is transparently Pavese’s hometown, Santo Stefano Belbo. The narrator grew up there too, though he’d have to have been about a decade older the author. Anyway, he’s from somewhere else: abandoned as an infant on the steps of a church in the small nearby city of Alba, he was adopted by a penniless peasant couple—more, he thinks, for the monthly imbursement it earned them than anything else. As a restless young man, he got away from Santo Stefano Belbo as soon as he could. Yet he would have wanted to be more attached to these hills he’s abandoned. In America he made some money; now, after twenty years and after the end of the war, he’s returned to the village where he wants to understand his past and imagines settling down—but he finds himself even more unsettled than ever by the political turmoil left by the experience of fascism and resistance that he missed.
The novel is fundamentally a dialogue between the narrator, a rootless man who will never be able to put down new roots, and his friend Nuto, who has never left the town, although his abilities as a musician would have made it easy. A Communist, Nuto is also a believer in—or at least respectful of—the peasant arcana, the atavistic folklore by which the agricultural cycle is accompanied, as evoked by the novel’s title. If the narrator is an avatar of the author, an acute observer who always maintained a mental distance, a man who (in love as in politics) aspired to a commitment he could never attain, Nuto is perhaps his fantasy of who he might have become if he’d never left home, a sort of natural intellectual whose critical intelligence has somehow not cut him off from the primordial experiences.
In The Leucothea Dialogues, Pavese was trying to be, at least for a while, that kind of thinker, a man of the earth and the mind at once. In the jacket copy he composed for the book’s first publication, he wrote of himself in the third person as having “for a while, stopped believing that his totem and taboo, his wild men, the spirits of plants, ritual murder, the realm of myth and the cult of the dead, were useless oddities, and wanted to seek out in them the secret of something we all remember.” The book teases us with a secret that seems to permeate every page but can’t be spelled out. If we need a message to hang on to, it might be Leucothea’s simple statement in the second of the two dialogues in which she figures, where she reminds Ariadne, “Divinity is cruel. It destroys anything that resists it.” After destruction, a new world takes form.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.