Our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness

Below, the entries for 22nd-25th March from Cesare Pavese‘s diaries, published in English as The Business of Living (I would like to offer you a translator but incredibly, my edition, put out by Transaction Publishers, doesn’t say who translated the book, which originally appeared as Il mestiere di vivere after the author’s death. My edition has an introduction by John Taylor but since he refers to this edition as “welcome”, I doubt he translated it. Any suggestions, folks? It’s a shame to whoever translated this magnificent book). I have owned the German equivalent in different translations for a while and while it’s not without its flaws (such as a strand of low-key misogyny that is threaded through it), it’s always been in many ways an important book for me.

22nd March
There are many things I have not told her. Deep down my terror at the thought of losing her now is not a longing for “possession,” but the feat that I shall never more be able to tell her those things. What they may be I do not now know, but they would pour out like a torrent if I were with her. That is creation. Oh God, make me find her again.

23rd March
Love is truly the great manifesto; the urge to be, to count for something, and, if death must come, to die valiantly, with acclamation – in short, to remain a memory. Yet my desire to die, to disappear, is still bound up with her: perhaps because she is so magnificently alive that, if my being could blend with hers, my life would have more meaning than before.

25th March
One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love -any love- reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness.

The night doesn’t matter

Cesare Pavese: Passion for Solitude
translated by Geoffrey Brock

I’m eating a little supper by the bright window.
The room’s already dark, the sky’s starting to turn.
Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,
after a short walk, to open fields.
I’m eating, watching the sky—who knows
how many women are eating now. My body is calm:
labor dulls all the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch
the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,
but not worth these cherries, which I’m eating alone.
I look at the sky, know that lights already are shining
among rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.
A gulp of my drink, and my body can taste the life
of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.
A small dose of silence suffices, and everything’s still,
in its true place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,
which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.
All things in this darkness—I can know all of them,
just as I know that blood flows in my veins.
The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,
a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,
lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins
with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn’t matter. The square patch of sky
whispers all the loud noises to me, and a small star
struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,
from all houses, alien. It isn’t enough for itself,
it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, alone,
my body is calm, it feels it’s in charge.

(from Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950, by Cesare Pavese, translated by Geoffrey Brock. A beautiful, biligual edition. Highly recommended!)