In the Leucothea Cesarea paavese dialogue by Alec Mapes-Frances

Cesare Pavese refers to his own Dialogue with leucò (That Leucothea dialogue) as “conversation between divinity and humanity.” In twenty seven dialogues, written between 1945 and 1947, figures from ancient Greek mythology discussed things like desires, fate, language, memory, nature, and death. The speakers, many of them have been extracted from narratives where they function as tragic heroes or gods, exchange words in spaces that may not exist or anywhere. They reflect their own existence and dilemma, debate, interrogate, or tell each other. What are the Orpheus, Prometheus, Oedipus, Sappho, Endymion, Hermes, or Ixion? What can fall in love, be cursed, get lost, lose love, to remember, to smile? And what becomes mortal, must die, or become eternal, have no own death? (Author’s suicide, three years after publication DialogGiving many of these questions as an autobiographical resonance, and has made the book, which he brought at the time of his death, became the object of myth.)

Discussion at That Leucothea dialogue as broad as mythology itself-that “home symbols,” as written by Pavese in the introduction. In one dialogue, the two without names admire human symbolic capacity: “The people know too many things. With the simplest name, they can tell the story of clouds, forests, fate. We barely know what they certainly see. They do not have time or slope to get lost in dreams. They see bad things, cannot be trusted and no one is shaken at all. The same:

Have you ever wondered why certain moments, just like many other moments ago, will give you a flash of happiness, make you happy like God? You are looking at olive trees, the same olive tree on the same path as you live every day for years, and then one day a little hopeless, you stroking the old trunk with your eyes, almost as if you were seeing a friend who had been lost for a long time who said the word you have been waiting for. Maybe next time, at first glance someone walks past. Or rain that does not stop for days. Calling a broken bird. Or the clouds you have seen before. Time stopped for a moment and the most common thing to win your heart as if it was not there before or after. Have you ever wondered why?

For Pavese, every mythological symbol calls something from the extent of human experience. Direct, conventional, and familiar Greek mythology (at least for Europeans in the twentieth century), and this “moves upwards [of] The familiar “which produces the most unpleasant effect. Pavese’s path, he wrote, is to” stare without fear and steady on the same object. “After a while,” The same object will look like something we have never seen before. “

The publication of the Archipelago Books translation by Minna Zallmann Proctor is an opportunity to look again. Before this edition, English texts were available in 1965 translations by the classics of William Arrowsmith and DS Carne-Ross. Medieval prose tends to be more rigid and frequent. Many Proctor phrases, on the other hand, have informality that is closer to contemporary speeches without too naturalistic, although sometimes they can feel too much working.

In his introduction, Proctor quoted a friend of Pavese Italo Calvino, who wrote about the classic “multiplicity of life”. Classic is “a book that has never been finished saying what he said,” where Calvino wants to connotes the orality of the tradition of ancient storytelling and dialogical forms, where everything remains open and restless and abundant. But the classic must be, in the important sense and more challenging, dead. Classic like Dialog is a text inhabited by creatures such as statues, characters that may be made of white marble, smooth, with empty eyes. They spoke in a rigid, faint and wooden way of wood. This is precisely why a short animation, in the hands of Pavese and Proctor, is magical. The characters in this dialogue are inside and outside time, both cellular and static. The dialectics and discomfort clearly charming, the gods who smiled were trapped in the sustainable present. These gods witnessed humans, who have a relationship with death and the past that eternal people are not, and who have met and made meaning, however fast and intimate. Without this no one will live, there is no history, there is no beauty. “Everything they touch becomes time,” said Demeter. “That is an action. Waiting and hoping. For them, even dying is something.” The myth is the same time as usual.