Cesare Paves; Geoffrey Brock, trans. (MFA, 1998)
Copper Canyon, 2002
ISBN: 1556591748
Cesare Pavese – poet, novelist, diarist – was among the greatest Italian writers of the twentieth century. This bilingual volume gathers all the poems he wrote during his last two decades, including work originally deleted by Fascist censors and poems discovered after his death. Pavese’s poetry was revolutionary, both artistically and politically. By rejecting the verbal and philosophical constraints of tradition and utilizing direct, colloquial language, he freed himself to find the daily poetry of men and women who, like himself, felt torn between city and country, work and idleness, solitude and desire. Out of each nexus, the poem rises starkly, stripped of ornament and artifact, sometimes in longer-lined “story-poems,” sometimes in imagistic or erotic invocation.