Cesare Pavese

Cesare Pavese (September 9, 1908 – August 27, 1950) was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator.

Early life and education

Cesare Pavese was born in Santo Stefano Belbo, in the province of Cuneo. It was the village where his father was born and where the family returned for the summer holidays each year. He did start infant classes in San Stefano Belbo, but the rest of his education was in schools in Turin. As a young man of letters, Pavese had a particular interest in English-language literature, graduating from the University of Turin with a thesis on the poetry of Walt Whitman and translating American and British authors that were then new to the Italian public.

Arrest and conviction; the war in Italy

Pavese moved in antifascist circles. In 1935 he was arrested and convicted for having letters from a political prisoner. After a few months in prison he was sent into "confino", internal exile in Southern Italy, the commonly used sentence for those guilty of lesser political crimes. (Carlo Levi, also from Turin, was similarly sent into confino.) A year later he was back in Turin where he worked for the left wing publisher, Einaudi, as editor and translator.

He was in Rome when he was called up into the fascist army, but because of his asthma he spent six months in a military hospital. When he returned to Turin, German troops occupied the streets and most of his friends had left to fight as partisans. Pavese fled to the hills around Serralunga di Crea, near Casale Monferrato. He took no part in the armed struggle taking place in that area.

After the war

After the war he joined the Italian Communist Party and worked on the party's newspaper L'Unità. Towards the end of his life, he visited frequently Le Langhe, the area where he was born, where he found great solace. However, love frustrations (Constance Dowling) and political disillusionment led him to his suicide, by an overdose of barbiturates, in 1950 – the year in which he won the Strega Prize for 'La Bella Estate', comprising three novellas: 'La tenda', written in 1940, 'Il diavolo sulle colline'(1948) and 'Tra donne sole' (1949).

The circumstances of his suicide, which took place in a hotel room, grossly mimic the last scene of 'Tra Donne Sole' (Among Women Only), his penultimate book. His last book was 'La Luna e i Falò', published in Italy in 1950 and translated into English as 'The Moon and the Bonfire' by Louise Sinclair in 1952.

Some themes in Pavese's fiction

Isolation of the individual; betrayal: The typical protagonist in the works of Pavese is a loner, through choice or through circumstances. His relationships with men and women tend to be temporary and superficial. He may wish to have more solidarity with other humans, but he often ends up betraying his ideals and friends; for example in The Prison, the political exile in a village in Southern Italy receives a note from another political confinato living nearby, who suggests a meeting. The protagonist rejects a show of solidarity and refuses to meet him. The title of the collection of the two novellas is Before the Cock Crows, a reference to Peter's betrayal of Christ.

Langhe, the area where he spent his summer holidays as a boy had a great hold on Pavese. It is a land of rolling hills covered in vineyards. It is an area where he felt literally at home, but he recognises the harsh and brutal lives that poor peasants had making a living from the land. Bitter struggles took place between Germans and partisans in this area. This land becomes part of Pavese's personal mythology. In The Moon and the Bonfires the protagonist tell a story of how he was drinking beer in a bar in America. A man came in whom he recognised as being from the valleys of Le Langhe by his way of walking and his outlook. He spoke to him in dialect suggesting a bottle of their local wine would be better than the beer.

He returns to his village after some years in America. He explores Le Langhe with a friend who remained in the area. He finds out that so many of his contemporaries have died in sad circumstances, some as partisans shot by the Germans, while a notable local beauty was executed by partisans as a fascist spy.

Quotations

Most quotes taken from Pavese's writings are from his Diaries 1935–50, published posthumously as Il mestiere di vivere, a fundamentally pessimistic work.

"We don't remember days; we remember moments." (28.7.1940)

"Religion consists of the belief that everything that happens to us is extraordinarily important. It can never disappear from the world for this reason." (13.10.1938)

"The great lovers will always be unhappy, because for them love is great and so they ask of their beloved the same intensity of thought that they have for her – otherwise they feel betrayed." (14.10.1940)

"We get the things we want when we no longer want them." (15.10.1940)

List of works

• Lavorare stanca (Work's tiring), poems 1936; expanded edition 1943
• Paesi Tuoi (Your Villages), novel 1941
• La Spiaggia (The Beach), novel 1941
• Feria d'agosto (August Holiday) 1946
• Il Compagno (The comrade), novel 1947
• Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò), Philosophical dialogues between classical Greek characters 1947
• Prima che il gallo canti (Before the Cock Crows), two novellas La casa in collina (The house on the hill) and Il carcere (The Prison), 1949
• La bella estate (The Fine Summer), Three novellas including Tra donne sole (Women on their own), 1949
• La luna e i falò (The moon and the bonfires), novel 1950
• Verrà la morte ed avrà i tuoi occhi (Death will come and will have your eyes), poems, 1951
• Il mestiere di vivere: Diario 1935–1950, The business of living: Diaries 1935-1950 (published in English as The Burning Brand), 1952
• Saggi Letterari Literary Essays
• Racconti – two volumes of short stories
• Lettere 1926-1950 – two volumes of letters

External links

• Photo
• [1] Nine Cesare Pavese poems translated into English by Linh Dinh