{"id":106379,"date":"2017-01-04T11:59:00","date_gmt":"2017-01-04T16:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=106379"},"modified":"2017-02-17T12:00:34","modified_gmt":"2017-02-17T17:00:34","slug":"paveses-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/01\/04\/paveses-english\/","title":{"rendered":"Pavese\u2019s English"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Cesare Pavese.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

A great many of the writers whom I admire were supposedly fluent in several languages. I say \u201csupposedly.\u201d I have my doubts. Fluent<\/em>\u00a0is a big word.<\/p>\n

In my own life, when I meet Americans who \u201cspeak French\u201d or \u201cspeak Spanish,\u201d I like to put up at least a little bit of resistance. \u201cOkay, so what\u2019s the word for belt buckle?\u201d<\/p>\n

I admit I am partly animated by a mean desire to expose as a sham any accomplishment to which I myself can lay no claim. Such vileness of temperament is commonly appeased by recourse to mutterings. My own bad character prefers a show trial, in which any single piece of prejudicial evidence is sufficient for instantaneous sentencing. If you do know the word for belt buckle, I will find some word you don\u2019t know. Oarlock<\/em>, fidgeting<\/em>, the shoulder<\/em>\u00a0of the highway \u2026\u00a0<\/p>\n

I have a number of collected-letters sets in my apartment. Many, many eighteenth-century people: Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Mary Wortley Montagu, Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gray, William Cowper. I can\u2019t tell you how much it displeases me when I see whole letters in there, in French. The editors always helpfully provide the satisfaction my heart yearns for. Specialists in eighteenth-century literature invariably know a hundred times as much French as their charges did and so can confidently describe Swift\u2019s French as \u201cexecrable\u201d or Johnson\u2019s as \u201cpassable,\u201d et cetera. I have to take their word for it, though, \u2019cuz I know about as much French as did Beowulf.<\/p>\n

A wonderful thought occurred to me, though. What about finding the collected letters of people like Baudelaire and Mallarm\u00e9, who supposedly spoke and read English fluently, and sit in judgment of them? I can\u2019t judge Johnson\u2019s French, but I can definitely judge, say, Cavafy\u2019s English. Or Freud\u2019s.<\/p>\n

Yet, look what happens.<\/p>\n

For years I thought I should check out Cesare Pavese\u2019s correspondence\u2014because I knew some of his last letters (written in the six months before he committed suicide, age forty-one, in Rome) were in English, and were addressed to one of his very last loves, an American actress named Constance Dowling\u00a0\u2026<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll need a little more background than that, actually. Not everyone over here knows that Pavese was deeply interested in American literature, especially twentieth-century American literature. He apparently translated Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner \u2026 and, to go back to the nineteenth\u00a0century, Moby-Dick<\/em>. (He also translated Dickens and Defoe and James Joyce and I don\u2019t know what all.) So he must have known a shit ton of English, right?<\/p>\n

Look at the Moby-Dick<\/em> case. Pavese published his translation of that three-eyed, web-footed dolphin-man of a book, when he was twenty-three years old. All that Shakespearean English, with its weird diction and jungly syntax\u2014no problem. He had it for breakfast.<\/p>\n

Oh, how I would love to pull up some quote from Melville\u2019s original and set it side by side with Pavese\u2019s translation. And I could easily do it, too! I have Pavese\u2019s version right here:<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

But there\u2019s no point, because I don\u2019t know enough Italian to judge whether he\u2019s making a botch of the Melville or what. But I can do this: I can show you the first two paragraphs of a letter that Pavese wrote in English, \u2019bout a year before he began translating the Melville. The letter is to Pavese\u2019s Italian American friend Anthony Chiuminatto, and I am transcribing my copy text very exactly. Note that it was written almost exactly four score and seven years ago:<\/p>\n

12 January 1930<\/p>\n

Dear Mr Chiuminatto,<\/p>\n

I\u2019m befuddled, all in a daze, with your titanic kindness. I\u2019m now seeing the world only through a veil of pink sheets, all bristling with slang-phrases which are meddling together, re-echoing and staring at me from everywhere. I\u2019ve got now I can no more take a pull out of a bottle together with my gang, without thinking I\u2019m going on the grand sneak. And how flip I get sometimes! My whole existence has got a slang drift now. You could almost say I\u2019m a slang-slinger. (Ha!)<\/p>\n

But I must, for the first thing, give utterance to a whole row of thanksgivings for your long-yearned, hard-hoped, fast-sent and all- surpassing answer to my letter, with all its flippancy and hardboiled guyness. But you were so widely christian as to ship your hand to the poor sinner hearkening to him.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not so fast, though. I\u2019ve neglected to mention something of great importance. As the reader may have guessed, Pavese entered into this correspondence with Chiuminatto partly because he (Pavese) was looking for help with American slang. So, when his American friend teaches him an idiom, Pavese is eager to show he has learned it. He\u2019s also giddy with pleasure.<\/p>\n

He makes me giddy. For starters, nothing else in Pavese\u2019s correspondence is lighthearted like this. Not even close. Readers of Pavese\u2019s famous diary (translated in the 1960s as This Business of Living<\/em>; the American edition was called The Burning Brand<\/em><\/a>) will watch, openmouthed, as Count Dracula says things like:<\/p>\n

I skulk away and on the bargain sting you in the rear: here\u2019s a list of some words from Babbitt <\/em>I yet am puzzled about and some others gleaned from Van Velton, O. Henry and Anderson.<\/p>\n

I guess you are muttering: \u2018Damned fool! I\u2019m too late onto his intentions now. He has made a shipping clerk of me and, what\u2019s the worst, he teases me with the very words I taught him. Blow him!\u2019 Don\u2019t you, Mr Chiuminatto?<\/p>\n

But think it out: ain\u2019t you enticing people with your unearthly serviceableness?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and signs off with\u2014<\/p>\n

Now pardon me my long silence and have a friendly wallop on the shoulder by your\u2014<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

or<\/p>\n

Good night old socks and keep remembering your<\/p>\n

Cesare Pavese<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The adventurous blend of Gatsby-era slang (\u201ctoodle-oo,\u201d \u201chunky dory,\u201d \u201cold chap,\u201d \u201cdoggone,\u201d \u201ccorking\u201d) and archaisms (\u201cmethinks,\u201d \u201c \u2019tis,\u201d \u201cbeseech,\u201d \u201csportful\u201d) along with really funny mistakes like thinking that posthumously<\/em> means \u201clater than was scheduled or promised\u201d (as in: \u201cSo you\u2019ll receive, in a few days since, there in Chicago, a little present I dare to make you, to sweeten\u2014posthumously (it\u2019s my habit)\u2014your birthday. It is some liquor-center chocolates you wrote me once you are so fond of\u201d)\u2014all this made me so happy, I forgot to sit in judgment. And then, when I remembered, I felt myself befuddled, lost in a daze, seeing the world only through a veil of pink sheets.<\/p>\n

One final note. My copy text for the letters quoted here was Cesare Pavese: Selected Letters 1924\u20131950<\/em><\/a>, edited\u00a0and\u00a0translated by A. E. Murch (1969). I discovered too late, in the process of writing this piece, that Pavese\u2019s correspondence with Chiuminatto has been edited and footnoted, all by itself, with both participants\u2019 contributions left absolutely intact: Cesare Pavese and Anthony Chiuminatto: Their Correspondence<\/em><\/a>, edited by Mark Pietralunga (2007). Fifty bucks, used, but I ordered it instantly; however, it hasn\u2019t come yet. Just the same, I felt it would be wrong not to mention it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Anthony Madrid<\/a> lives in Victoria, Texas. <\/em>His second book of poems is called <\/em>Try Never\u00a0(Canarium Books, 2017). He is a correspondent for the\u00a0<\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Italian writer\u2019s translation work left him with a strange grasp of slang: he was fond of \u201ctoodle-oo,\u201d \u201chunky dory,\u201d \u201cold chap,\u201d \u201cdoggone,\u201d \u201ccorking\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1005,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22700],"tags":[26489,26492,26486,26485,20059,26488,5733,26487,687,182,26491,3072,26490,530],"class_list":["post-106379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-our-correspondents","tag-anthony-chiuminatto","tag-belt-buckles","tag-bilingual","tag-bilingual-authors","tag-cesare-pavese","tag-constance-dowling","tag-correspondence-2","tag-fluency","tag-language","tag-letters","tag-selected-letters","tag-slang","tag-the-burning-brand","tag-translation"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nCesare Pavese\u2019s Slang<\/title>\n<meta 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