He attended school and later, university, in Turin. His many translations of American novels and his critical essays opened a window during Italy’s fascist years on to another, more democratic, world. And yet his marvellously peopled poems not only document the time – what Calvino called “the Pavese era” – but also bear witness to a unique and restless intelligence.Įven some of his images – his hills and streetlamps – can become over-insistent, while his favoured trope of pvese and bitch to describe human sexuality is as bleakly reductive as late Tolstoy. No trivia or quizzes yet.Īt the poem’s heart lies a typically sensuous perception. Infine per una che dipinge per mestiere il fatto che Poesia spontanea, narrativa, che parla per immagini. That Pavese’s first book should have passed so unscathed only four of its poems fell foul of Mussolini’s censor is a testimony to how mildly, or else inattentively, that office was undertaken. Interessante Da Il mestiere di poeta: Brock loses the two explicit references to the Langhe in this poem, universalising them as “hills”. His language and syntax would seem to offer few obstacles to the translator.Įlsewhere “rubando le zuche” means “stealing the pumpkins” not “filling his gourds”. The mechanic dreams of producing his own wine in the future, but his present is lived in the thirsty summer dust raised by the passing cars, themselves thirsting for petrol. Much depends also on the resonance of his final lines, which often reinscribe the whole poem’s trajectory, while deftly avoiding the epigrammatic.Ĭamminiamo una sera sul fianco di un colle, in silenzio. Poetry represents only part of Pavese’s rich and compact achievement, which includes short stories and nine brief novels, as well as a compelling, often lacerating, journal that records his literary development from until his suicide in at the age of Da Il mestiere di poeta: The heart of the book takes place in a country town part of its curse seems to be the Italian suspicion of anything but a real city.Įliot, magari, della solitudine, della citta, etc. His cesaree, inclusive vision, however, and his refusal to turn away from human misery give his writings an additional, almost documentary, value. Giada rated it it was amazing Sep 20, An initial novella, Paesi tuoi The Harvesters,recalled, as many of his works do, the sacred places of childhood.
Lavorare Stanca by Cesare Pavese,, available at Book Depository with free delivery worldwide. A poem by Cesare Pavese (from Lavorare Stanca). CESARE PAVESE: A POEM FROM LAVORARE STANCA English translation by Stefi. and he thought of his first book of poems, “Lavorare stanca” (“Work is exhausting”) as. Pavese, Cesare: Hard Labor revd by Jonathan Galassi.