Day 585 of the daily poems. Your Editor’s niece Harriet and her husband are off to Rome for a brief holiday; maybe they will visit the Piazza di Spagna. The Italian poet Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), who was from Turin, visualised that famous piazza under cloudless summer skies in his poem ‘Passerò per Piazza di Spagna’. Here is Your Editor’s translation.
When I cross the Piazza di Spagna
by Cesare Pavese (1908-1950)
translated from Italian by Peter Ualrig Kennedy
The sky will be cloudless.
Streets will open
to hills of pine and stone.
The tumult of the streets
will not affect that still air.
The colour-splashed flowers
beside the fountains
will make eyes
like giggling girls.
Stairways, terraces, swallows
will sing in the sun.
The road will open, the stones will sing,
my heart will beat, trembling
like the water in the fountains –
this will be the voice
which will climb your stair.
The windows will allow
scents of stone and of morning air.
A door will open.
The tumult of the streets
will become the tumult of my heart
in the bewildered light.
Then you – still, pale.
Cesare Pavese
translated by Peter Ualrig Kennedy