Cesare Pavese

Passion for Solitude

By Cesare Pavese
Translated by Geoffrey Brock

I'm eating a little supper by the bright window.
The room's already dark, the sky's starting to turn.
Outside my door, the quiet roads lead,
after a short walk, to open fields.
I'm eating, watching the sky-who knows
how many women are eating now. My body is calm:
labor dulls the senses, and dulls women too.

Outside, after supper, the stars will come out to touch,
the wide plain of the earth. The stars are alive,
but not worth these cherries, which I am eating alone.
I lookat the sky, know that lights already are shining
amoung rust-red roofs, noises of people beneath them.
A gulf of my drink, and my body can taste the life
of plants and of rivers. It feels detached from things.
A small dose of silence suffices, and everything's still,
in it's place, just like my body is still.

All things become islands before my senses,
which accept them as a matter of course: a murmur of silence.
All things in this darkness - I know all of them,
just as I know that blood flows in my veins.
The plain is a great flowing of water through plants,
a supper of all things. Each plant, and each stone,
lives motionlessly. I hear my food feeding my veins
with each living thing that this plain provides.

The night doesn't matter. The square patch of sky
whispers all the loud noise to me, and a small star
struggles in emptiness, far from all foods,
from all houses, alien. It isn't enough for itself,
it needs too many companions. Here in the dark, along,
my body is calm, it feels it's in charge.


Pavese was born in 1908 in Santo Stefano Belbo in Italy. He is not generally known in the United States which is a shame since he was profoundly influenced by American Literature. He had a rather short life and died in 1950. It was in his last years that he achieved success in his literary life after many years laboring in obsecurity and fighting fascism and censorship.


Many scholors attributed his losing his father to brain cancer and a emotionally unavailable mother to his tendency towards depression. Certainly he was attached to northern Italy especially Turin all of his life. He attended the University of Turin where he pursued his love of American literature because he felt it offered a viable alternative to European cultural alienation and disintegration. It is through HermanMelville, according to Leslie Fiedler in an essay in the Kenyon Review that Pavese has an "impulse as an artist towards a dimension he liked to call 'mythic' a dimension he found in Melville but not in Flaubert...and it is through [Melville]that (Pavese) finds in our books an identity of word and thing...not the aristocratic symbolism of the French...." Pavese took his degree with a thesis on the poet, Walt Whitman.

After graduating from the university, Pavase wrote and produced his own poems, stories and novels, translating and editing English literature. As fascism grew in Italy, Pavese attended anti-fascism groups although he remained on the margins of these groups. Things changed when he fell in love with Tina Pizzardo who was a secret member of the Italian Communist Party and convinced Pavese to receive letters for her at his address from jailed anti-fascist dissident Altiero Spinelli. Pavese was arrested and sentenced to 3 years. Pavase was devastated to learn that after serving his prison term and returning to Turin, Pizzardo had not waited for him.

In the meantime, his poetry was being censored by fascist censors. After his release, Pavese did not publish his work for three years although he wrote privately and published two novels in 1941 and 1942. During 1938 to 1941, he translated and helped Einaudi Publishing Company bring out such tittles as Charles Dicken's "David Copperfield" and Herman Melville's "Beneto Cereno". Pavese also encouraged Einaudi to publish Freud, Jung, Durkheim and other important authors and scholars, some for the first time in Italy.

Finally, with the demise of Fascism, Pavase's work grew in popularity. Many people saw him as a writer who was right about fascism all along. He was awarded the Stega Prize for "ire romanze" in June of the last year of his life. It was during this time he had an unhappy love affair with the American actor, Constance Dowling. He wrote in his diary that he was devastated by the failure of this relationship and took his life at the age of 41 years with an overdose of pills.

Just a final few notes about this poet, I was fascinated with Cesare Pavese's poetry and his ability to put into words the different subjects he wrote about such as solitude and about women in "A Season". Sometimes when reading poetry, I learn to trust the poet and his ability to handle his material in a way that brings me along in his vision. I certainly learned to trust Pavese's talents as a poet. I just wish I lived somewhere that I can read his novels in translation.

I keep thinking of my house in California and how it is full of books and all of those wonderful second-hand book stores and Barnes and Noble. I can't mine those veins of literary gold here in Korea, but it has created in me an appreciation of the availability of books in English. Pavese worked very hard in his short life to bring American and English writers into Italian life. He fought fascism although he did it for love and paid for it with a prison term and censorship.

I can't imagine someone ending his life over a failed romantic relationship especially when his writing career was beginning to take off. I guess I am too much of a pragmatist for that, but I can appreciate the wonderful art Pavese brought into this world including his own words. Maybe someday someone will write the real story of this wonderful poet and writer's life. I don't think it was written in the small descriptions that I read.