Disaffections: Complete Poems. This item is unavailable.Disaffections: Complete Poems

Cesare Pavese was one of Italy's great post-war writers. His poetry was revolutionary—both artistically and politically—rejecting the verbal and philosophical constraints of tradition and utilizing direct, colloquial language. His subjects were peasants, hobos, and prostitutes, and this bilingual volume includes all the poetry Pavese ever published, including work originally deleted by Fascist censors. A landmark volume.

Cesare Pavese (1908-50) was a novelist, poet, and translator and a major literary figure in post-war Italy. He brought American influence to Italian literature through his translations. Pavese's flight from the Fascists and subsequent confinement were reflected in his writings, which dealt with social struggle and revealed his sympathy for the oppressed. He committed suicide at the height of his literary powers.

A Kage-an Series Book

Born in 1908 in a small town near Turin, Cesare Pavese first rose to prominence in the 1930s, as a translator and critic of American literature. In 1936 he published the first of two editions of Work's Tiring (Lavorare Stanca), an extraordinary collection of narrative poems, or "poem-stories" as he called them, and then turned most of his energy toward fiction. By 1950 he had published nine short novels that Italo Calvino called "the most dense, dramatic and homogenous narrative cycle of modern Italy." Pavese returned to poetry near the end of his life, and his late lyrics provide a haunting coda to his career. He killed himself in August of 1950, a few weeks after receiving the Premio Strega, Italy's most prestigious literary prize.