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Note on Peasant Moon  

I’d translated Giacomo Leopardi’s Canto notturno di un pastore errante dell’Asia into cod 19^th century poetics, an effort which I still find quite re-readable, I don’t know about others.  The image of Leopardi’s shepherd, stumbling through a hard life, regarded by a cruelly detached moon, wouldn’t leave me until I’d done my own version, far enough disentangled from the original not to be a translation.  ‘Rock calls to rock’:  the gravity of massive objects like the earth and the moon ‘bends’ the space around them.  ‘The one which would efface the many’: there is an ancient and unresolved problem as to whether ultimately everything is a One or a Many.  The matter is to be pursued by looking into what has been written about monism and pluralism. To William James, who inclined towards the importance of multiplicity, the puzzle about whether everything is ultimately a One or a Many was ‘the most central of all philosophical problems’, holding that our view on this subject determines our thinking about many other philosophical problems.  I’m inclined to believe, without sufficient argument, I might add, that in a Zen-like way Nature is both.  In this poem I see the One-aspect as crushingly inimical towards the Many-aspect, and more especially towards the many tiny spurts of insignificant selfness, i.e. consciousness.  ‘Druidic face, it blesses ... stupid things like sheep / perhaps’: if the One bestows what to us might look like ‘benediction’—and it’s only ignorant (‘druidic’) superstition which believes it could—it would be lavished on dumb beasts, not on intelligence, which should be able to take care of itself.

Alan Marshfield

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