In the Reckless Hour

An irritating thing about reviewing books translated from languages you think you know is getting past the title. Did the translator get it right—not just the meaning but the tone? If not, then you are already biased against the whole enterprise—which is probably unfair, since the title, which is essentially a fragment cut off from any larger syntactic context, can be the hardest part of the whole book. And yet it wasn’t Minna Zallman Proctor’s decision to render the title of Dialoghi con Leucò, the strange book Cesare Pavese published in 1947, as The Leucothea Dialogues that started me off on the wrong foot. I was willing to write it off as an effort, misguided but understandable, to distinguish this version of Pavese’s book from the earlier one by William Arrowsmith and D.S. Carne-Ross, which was straightforwardly titled, as it should have been, Dialogues with Leucò. I leave aside the puzzle of why Pavese titled his book to imply that the whole thing involves Leucothea, a rather mysterious sea goddess who, according to Homer, came to the aid of Odysseus when his boat was wrecked after his escape from Calypso’s island.