Fall Books: On Cesare Pavese’s The Leucothea Dialogues

The Centrale Montemartini. Photograph by Briner2306, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Cesare Pavese referred to his Dialoghi con Leucò (The Leucothea Dialogues) as “a conversation between divinity and humanity.” In the twenty-seven dialogues, written between 1945 and 1947, figures from ancient Greek mythology discuss things like desire, fate, language, memory, nature, and death. The speakers, many of whom have been extracted from the narratives in which they serve as tragic heroes or gods, exchange words in a space that might be nowhere or anywhere. They reflect on their own existences and dilemmas, debating, interrogating, or confiding in one another. What is it to be Orpheus, Prometheus, Oedipus, Sappho, Endymion, Hermes, or Ixion? What is it to be in love, to be cursed, to be lost, to lose one’s love, to remember, to smile? And what is it to be mortal, to be subject to death, or to be immortal, to lack a death of one’s own? (The author’s suicide, three years after the publication of the Dialogues, gives many of these questions an autobiographical resonance, and has made the book, which he was carrying at the time of his death, into a mythical object.)

The discussions in The Leucothea Dialogues are as wide-ranging as mythology itself—that “hothouse of symbols,” as Pavese writes in his introduction. In one dialogue, two nameless gods admire the symbolic capacity of human beings: “Those people knew too many things. With the simplest name, they could tell the story of a cloud, the forest, the fates. We barely know what they certainly saw. They had neither the time nor the inclination to get lost in dreams. They saw terrible, unbelievable things and weren’t at all shocked. They knew what it was.” Elsewhere, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, speaks to Hesiod of a similar capacity:

Haven’t you ever wondered why a given moment, just like so many other moments past, would grant you a flash of happiness, make you happy like a god? You were looking at the olive tree, the same olive tree on the same trail you’ve walked every day for years, and then one day your exasperation lifts, you caress that old trunk with your eyes, almost as if you were looking at a long-lost friend who utters the very word your heart’s been waiting for. Maybe another time it’s the glance of someone walking past. Or the rain that doesn’t let up for days. The shattering call of a bird. Or a cloud you’ve seen before. Time stops for a moment and the most ordinary thing seizes your heart as if there were no before or after. Haven’t you ever wondered why?

For Pavese, every mythological symbol calls up something of the vastness of human experience. Greek mythology is immediate, conventional, and familiar (at least to Europeans in the twentieth century), and it’s this “stirring up [of] the familiar” that produces the most disquieting effects. Pavese’s path, he writes, is to “stare fearlessly and steadily at the same object.” After a while, “that same object will seem like something we’ve never seen before.”

Archipelago Books’s publication of a translation by Minna Zallmann Proctor is an occasion to stare anew. Prior to this edition, the English text had been available in a 1965 translation by the classicists William Arrowsmith and D. S. Carne-Ross. The midcentury prose tends to be stiffer and sparser. Many of Proctor’s phrases, on the other hand, have an informality that’s closer to contemporary speech without being overly naturalistic, although at times they can feel overworked.

In her introduction, Proctor cites Pavese’s friend Italo Calvino, who wrote of the “living multiplicity” of the classic. The classic is “a book that has never finished saying what it has to say,” by which Calvino wanted to connote the orality of ancient storytelling traditions and of dialogic form, where things are kept open and unsettled and abundant. Yet classics must, in an important and more challenging sense, be dead. Classics like the Dialogues are texts populated by statue-like beings, characters that might as well be made of white, smooth marble, with vacant eyes. They speak in a stilted, cryptic, wooden manner. This is precisely why brief instants of animation, in the hands of Pavese and Proctor, are miraculous. The characters in these dialogues are both in and out of time, both mobile and static. That dialectic and its uncanniness clearly fascinated Pavese, whose smiling gods are trapped within a continuous present. These gods watch as mortals, who have a relation to death and to the past that immortals do not, and who have encounters and make meanings, however fleeting and intimate. Without these there would be no living, no history, no beauty. “Everything they touch becomes time,” says Demeter. “It becomes an action. Waiting and hoping. For them, even dying is something.” Myth is as untimely as ever.

 

Alec Mapes-Frances is a writer and designer.