Cesare Pavese, il poeta | |
Born | 9 September 1908 |
---|---|
Died | 27 August 1950 (aged 41) Turin, Piedmont, Italy |
Cause of death | Suicide by overdose of sleeping pills |
Occupation | Poet, novelist, literary critic and translator |
Signature |
Chapter 1: Cesare Pavese: “un autore troppo biografato e mitizzato”? 16 Cesare Pavese, Lavorare stanca, Solaria (Firenze, 1936).
Cesare Pavese (UK: /pæˈveɪzeɪ,-zi/pav-AY-zay, -zee,[1]Italian: [ˈtʃeːzare paˈveːze, ˈtʃɛː-, -eːse]; 9 September 1908 – 27 August 1950) was an Italian poet, novelist, literary critic and translator. He is widely considered among the major authors of the 20th century in his home country.
Early life and education[edit]
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 started infant classes in Santo Stefano Belbo, but the rest of his education was in schools in Turin.
He attended Liceo Classico Massimo d'Azeglio in Turin for his sixth form/senior high school studies.[2] His most important teacher at the time was Augusto Monti, writer and educator, whose writing style attempted to be devoid of all rhetoric.
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. Among his mentors at the university was Leone Ginzburg, expert on Russian literature and literary critic, husband of the writer Natalia Ginzburg and father of the future historian Carlo Ginzburg. In those years, Pavese translated both classic and recent American and British authors that were then new to the Italian public.[3]
Arrest and conviction; the war in Italy[edit]
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 and Leone Ginzburg, also from Turin, were similarly sent into confino.) A year later Pavese returned to Turin, where he worked for the left-wing publisher Giulio Einaudi as editor and translator. Natalia Ginzburg also worked there.
Pavese was living 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. During the years in Turin, he was the mentor of the young writer and translator Fernanda Pivano, his former student at the Liceo D'Azeglio. Pavese gave her the American edition of Spoon River Anthology, which came out in Pivano's Italian translation in 1943.
After the war[edit]
After World War II Pavese joined the Italian Communist Party and worked on the party's newspaper, L'Unità. The bulk of his work was published during this time. Toward the end of his life, he would frequently visit Le Langhe, the area where he was born, where he found great solace. Depression, the failure of a brief love affair with the actress Constance Dowling, to whom his last novel and one of his last poems ('Death will come and she'll have your eyes'[4]) were dedicated, and political disillusionment led him to his suicide by an overdose of barbiturates[5] in 1950. That year he had 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).
Leslie Fiedler wrote of Pavese's death '...for the Italians, his death has come to have a weight like that of Hart Crane for us, a meaning that penetrates back into his own work and functions as a symbol in the literature of an age.'[6] The circumstances of his suicide, which took place in a hotel room, 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 Bonfires by Louise Sinclair in 1952.
He was an atheist.[7]
Themes in Pavese's works[edit]
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 people, 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 before his death.
The 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 recognised 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. The land became part of Pavese's personal mythology.
In The Moon and the Bonfires, the protagonist tells a story of drinking beer in a bar in America. A man comes in whom he recognizes as being from the valleys of Le Langhe by his way of walking and his outlook. He speaks to him in dialect suggesting a bottle of their local wine would be better than the beer. After some years in America, the protagonist returns to his home village. He explores Le Langhe with a friend who had 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 had been executed by partisans as a fascist spy.
Books[edit]
- Lavorare stanca (Hard Labor), poems 1936; expanded edition 1943.
- See also: McGlazer, Ramsey (May 2017). 'The Decay of Sighing: Cesare Pavese's Lavorare stanca'. differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies. Duke University Press. 28 (1): 94–123. doi:10.1215/10407391-3821712.
- 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.
- Il diavolo sulle colline (The Devil in the Hills), novel 1948.
- 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 e avrà i tuoi occhi (Death Will Come and 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.
- Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930–1950, translated by Geoffrey Brock. (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)
References[edit]
- ^'Pavese, Cesare'. Oxford Dictionaries. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 9 August 2019.
- ^Ward, David. 'Primo Levi's Turin.' In: Gordon, Robert S.C. (editor). The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi (Cambridge Companions to Literature). Cambridge University Press, 30 July 2007. ISBN1139827405, 9781139827409. CITED: p. 11.
- ^Garofalo, Piero (2011). 'Pavese: Editorializing America'. In Concolino, Christopher; Nelson, Elisabetta (eds.). Cesare Pavese a San Francisco. Incontro per la celebrazione del centenario della nascita. Florence: Cesati Editore. pp. 139–148.
- ^di Vincenzo, Ludovica (2014). 'Death will come and she'll have your eyes – The Times Stephen Spender Prize 2013 (commended)'. Stephen Spender Trust. Retrieved 7 February 2014.
- ^'Cesare Pavese'. Italica. Archived from the original on 6 June 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2009.
- ^Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature: First Supplement, edited by Stanley J. Kunitz, New York: The H. W. Wilson Company, 1955.
- ^Paloni, Piermassimo, Il giornalismo di Cesare Pavese, Landoni, 1977, p. 11.
External links[edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Cesare Pavese |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Cesare Pavese. |
- Cesare Pavese at Find a Grave
- Cesare Pavese poems translated into English by Linh Dinh. Milk Magazine
- Of Sea and Words and Toil: The Poetry of Cesare Pavese by Olivier Burckhardt, Quadrant. 48:7/8, (2004) 82–85
- Cesare Pavese and America: Life, Love, and Literature by Lawrence G. Smith
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cesare_Pavese&oldid=917985527'
This essay locates a poetics of fatigue in Lavorare stanca, the first collection of verse published by Cesare Pavese. This poetics entails several related shifts. Pavese, Cesare: Hard Labor revd by Jonathan Galassi. and he thought of his first book of poems, “Lavorare stanca” (“Work is exhausting”) as. In the meantime, however, Pavese’s first book, a collection of poems titled Lavorare stanca or “Hard Work,” had appeared in , shortened by four poems .
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Tsanca trivia or quizzes yet. Interessante Da Il mestiere di poeta: Rodrigo rated it liked it Jun 09, L’anno scorso ho tradotto tanti poesie, ma non tutte, del questo libro. Chiara Villa rated it it was amazing Jan 06, 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.
Shortly after receiving the Strega Prize for it, Pavese committed suicide in his hotel room by taking an overdose of pills. His first volume ceeare lyric poetry, Lavorare stanca ; Hard Labour,followed his release from prison.
Hard Labor
Mar 01, Laurence Li rated it it was amazing. Denied an outlet for his creative powers by Fascist control of literature, Pavese translated many 20th-century U.
Altrimenti, uno parla da solo. View all 3 comments.
Infine per una che dipinge per mestiere il fatto che Poesia spontanea, narrativa, che parla per immagini. Zachary Harless rated it it was amazing Jun 22, Books by Cesare Pavese.
The bulk of Pavese’s work, mostly short stories and novellas, appeared between the end of the war and his death. Qualche nostro antenato dev’essere stato ben solo – un grand’uomo tra idioti o un povero folle – per insegnare ai suoi tanto silenzio. Sep 30, Alan rated it really liked it Shelves: An initial novella, Paesi tuoi ; The Harvesters,recalled, as many of his works do, the sacred places of childhood.
Jun 06, Rhea Tregebov rated it it was amazing. Aglaja rated it it was amazing Jan 06, Mi sembra come T. Poesia spontanea, narrativa, che parla per immagini. Alessandro Massimino rated it really ,avorare it Jan ceszre, Trivia About Hard Labor. Bitterstranger rated it it was amazing Jan 27, Da Il mestiere di poeta: He attended school and later, university, in Turin. Preview — Hard Labor by Pzvese Pavese.
Cesare Pavese was born in a small town in which his father, an official, owned property. Pavdse couple years ago, I read Lavorare Stanca in Italian, and translated maybe six of the poems while listening to my wife at her cello lessons in Providence, RI. Eliot, magari, della solitudine, della citta, etc.
Want to Read saving…. Paperbackpages. Camminiamo una sera sul fianco di un colle, in silenzio. Carmen Rita Vastola rated it liked it May 07, Il titolo si spiega con Il mestiere di vivere e con Battisti Several other works are notable, especially La bella estate ; in The Political Prisoner, Just discovered Pavese and am thrilled.
There are no discussion topics on this book yet. Quotes from Hard Labor. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Pavese’s long line and plain language were a revelation. I found the speaker desolate, modern for sure. Bisogna fermare una donna e parlarle e deciderla a vivere insieme. Sabrina rated it liked it Sep 10, Solamente girarle, pvese piazze e le strade sono vuote.
Lavorare Stanca : Cesare Pavese :
Between lavorzre he lived with partisans of the anti-Fascist Resistance in the hills of Piedmont. Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. To ask other readers questions about Hard Laborplease sign up.
Just a moment while we sign you in to your Goodreads account. His work probably did more to foster the reading and appreciation of U. Spettacolari i testi poetici che proprio per la loro natura discorsiva e non ermetica possono essere apprezzati facilmente anche da chi come me non si intende di poesia.