Geoffrey Brock

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Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950
by Cesare Pavese (Copper Canyon 2002; Carcanet 2004)
translated by Geoffrey Brock

The PEN Center USA Translation Award, The MLA Lois Roth Award, The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Translation Prize, The L.A. Times “Best Books of 2003” list

Read the introduction or excerpts from the reviews
Read Brock's essay on Pavese's prosody
Read a generous sampling of Brock's translations

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), one of the great Italian writers of the twentieth century, was a poet, novelist and diarist. Born near Turin, he first rose to prominence 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 narative poems, or "poem-stories" as he called them, and then turned most of his energy to fiction. By 1950 he had published nine short novels that Italo Calvino called "the most dense, dramatic, and homogeneous 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 1950, a few weeks after receiving the Premio Strega, Italy's most prestigious literary prize.

Poems from the book on the Web:

22 poems from Disaffections (Poetry Foundation)
Ancestors (at the Academy of American Poets site)
Creation (at the Copper Canyon site)
The House (at the Copper Canyon site)
Passion for Solitude (from The Literary Review)
South Seas (from The Literary Review)
Three poems (from Five Points)
Two Poems for T. (at Verse Daily)

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