Ma quando gli dico/ch'egli è tra i fortunati che han visto l'aurora/sulle isole più belle della terra/al ricordo sorride e risponde che il sole/si levava che il giorno era vecchio per loro.

Which, pace Robert Frost's definition of poetry as 'that which is lost in translation', might be rendered as:

But when I tell him/that he is one of the lucky few who have seen the dawn/on the most beautiful islands on earth,/he smiles at the memory and answers that at the rising of the sun/the day, for them, was already old.

Cesare Pavese's description of a man who has spent many years travelling and returns home ends on this seemingly melancholy note. But what is expressed in the traveller's smile? It can be read as one of indulgence, the tempered, worldly-wise elder to the romantic youth, saying long may you live to believe it. And so there would be pity here as well, in the knowledge that experience will eventually destroy, without necessarily remaking, the younger man's notions of beauty and of its importance. The day was already old...they had been busy, they were too tired to take in whatever beauty might be in the dawn. Had the elder gone looking for this beauty and then forgotten about it in the daily grind, making the smile one of regret? Or had it never interested him in the first place, and now he is smiling at the memory of the work, the companionship amongst the crew which he has given up for this new life, for a wife he leaves at home? Perhaps it is a genuine smile at the remembered beauty and his gruff, worldly qualification, the day was already old, is an attempt to exorcise that memory, since the feeling of nostalgia, or of the beauty itself, is too intense and threatens to break through into this new life and destroy it.