Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) was born on his family's vacation farm in the country outside of Turin in northern Italy. He graduated from the University of Turin, where he wrote a thesis on Walt Whitman, beginning a continuing engagement with English-language literature that was to lead to his influential translations of Moby-Dick, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Three Lives, and Moll Flanders, among other works. Briefly exiled by the Fascist regime to Calabria in 1935, Pavese returned to Turin to work for the new publishing house of Giulio Einaudi, where he eventually became the editorial director. In 1936 he published a book of poems, Lavorare stanca (Hard Labor), and then turned to writing novels and short stories. Pavese won the Strega Prize for fiction, Italy's most prestigious award, for The Moon and the Bonfires in 1950. Later the same year, after a brief affair with an American actress, he committed suicide. Pavese's posthumous publications include his celebrated diaries, essays on American literature, and a second collection of poems, entitled Verra la morte e avra i tuoi occhi (Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes).
R.W. Flint translated, edited, and introduced The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese in 1968 and Marinetti: Selected Writings in 1971. He has contributed interviews, essays, translations, and reviews on Italian writers to various journals includingParnassus, Canto, and The Italian Quarterly. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The translation is fluent, and each work bears the distinctive
Pavesean coat of arms.
-- Time
Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic and
homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy, and are also...the
richest in representing social ambiances, the human comedy, the
chronicle of a society. But above all they are works of an
extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new
meanings...Each one of Pavese's novels revolves around a hidden
theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to
say.
-- Italo Calvino
Now there can be no excuse for not reading Pavese, one of the
few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century. The new
translations and the introduction by R.W. Flint are admirable.
-- Susan Sontag
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