Cesare Pavese, Dissaffections: Complete Poems 1930 - 1950 translated by Geoffrey Brock, Copper Canyon Press, IBSN 1-55659-174-8, 372 pages, $17.00.

Cesare Pavese (1908�1950) is best known in his native Italy as a novelist, essayist and diarist, though he wrote poetry off and on throughout his life. In this bilingual edition, Geoffrey Brock has done a great service to English-speaking readers by translating the two decades of Pavese�s poetical output and placing them under one cover in their entirety.

Brock�s translations are grouped into four sections: 1) the original 1936 edition of Work�s Tiring (Lavorare stanca), 2) the poems added to the 1943 edition of Work�s Tiring, 3) poems written between 1930 and 1940 that were not included in Work�s Tiring, 4) and poems written during the last five years of his life.

The first two sections are definitely the strongest in the book, followed closely by section three, which is comprised of poems that for a variety of reasons, including the censorship of Mussolini�s Fascist Italy, were not included in either editions of Work�s Tiring. Section four marks a clear change in poetic style and subject matter moving to shorter lines, a more lyric format and a darker personal tone not apparent in the earlier works.

Pavese�s writing is most effective, in my opinion, in the story-poems of Work�s Tiring that showcase his strong narrative gifts. These poems are about a boy�s journey to manhood as well as a country�s transformation from an agrarian to an industrial society. The tension between city and country (reflected in Pavase�s own life by the growing metropolis of Turin and the rural town Santo Stefano Belbo), between inner and outer landscapes propel the book forward. The economic promise of the city is a gravity that draws the people toward it looking for work and fulfillment. Throughout these poems Pavese gives voice to the disenfranchised, those who have no one to speak to them. We follow the stories of day laborers who come to the city to find work but spend their days in idleness, women who commute to the city each day to work but return to the family farm each night, a priest who comes to the city leaving his mother behind in his hometown to die alone. Throughout these stories we follow the plight of farmers, factory workers, drunks, thieves, prostitutes. Lonely women and men fill the pages with their anguish and dreams. But Pavese doesn�t put their stories in a box tied off with a ribbon on top. They are open-ended and unresolved, as if each is a photograph of lives that are still unfolding.

I first became acquainted with Pavase�s work through William Arrowsmith�s now out of print edition of Hard Labor, a fine book in its own right. But Arrowsmith�s versions were loose and chatty. In contrast Brock�s translations are economical, adhering more closely to the rhythms of Pavese�s verse. The resulting poems feel as if they were originally written in English instead of Italian, and still maintain their grit and vitality sixty to seventy years after their original publication.
 

                                                                                                � Jim Doss

 

Loch Raven Review Winter 2005 — Vol. I, No. 2
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