Cesare Pavese and America: Life, Love, and Literature

“Introducing Cesare Pavese”

“introducing Cesare Pavese” R that is the title Leslie Fiedler gave his 1954 essay on Pavese, an essay which in 2001 the italian editors of a collection of pieces on Pavese translated and included because “Fiedler saw beyond all italian criticism of the time; he succeeded . . . in digging deeply, writing truly illuminating pages well ahead of their time.”1 Fiedler described Pavese as “the best of recent italian novelists,” better than “moravia, vittorini , Berto or Pratolini . . . or silone . . . Pavese is the most poetic of recent italian fictionists.” he wrote this four years after Pavese, at the height of his powers and fame, had killed himself. at the time, only three of Pavese’s nine novels had been translated into english and none of his poetry, short stories, essays, diary, or letters. now, over half a century later, virtually everything Pavese wrote has been translated into english, his poetry and last novel three different times, several of his other novels and diary twice. Yet, Cesare Pavese still needs to be introduced to most american readers, because what Fiedler said about the translations then available to him applies to all those since: “they have not succeeded in stimulating a general interest in or understanding of Pavese.”2 since Fiedler’s essay, american academic critics have produced high-quality studies on various aspects of Pavese’s works, including one book on a topic similar to my own.3 interest, however, has flagged; not one american book dealing with Pavese appeared between 1988 [฀฀1 ] and 2007.4 this relative indifference on the part of both the public and the academy contrasts sharply to what has happened in italy. Pavese died in 1950 as one of italy’s most famous and respected writers . that reputation continues. his nine novels have never gone out of print, and all of them, as well as his short stories, poetry, essays, and diary, have appeared in many different editions, most of them well introduced and some annotated. two of them, La casa in collina (The House on the Hill) and La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires ), have secure places as classics of twentieth-century italian literature . Furthermore, italian scholars and critics, including a few italianamericans writing in italian, have continued in recent years their production of Pavese-related works. For example, in the eleven years from 1996 to 2006, part of that longer period when no englishlanguage books on Pavese appeared, i count twenty-five in italian devoted solely to Pavese, including a new biography, plus a half-dozen others devoted mainly to him. virtually all his papers—which are voluminous, for he was something of a packrat—have been collected at the Centro Gozzano-Pavese, which has become an engine of Pavese scholarship. the staff there, headed first by Pavese scholar marziano Guglielminetti (1937–2006), and now by the equally eminent mariarosa masoero, has put all those papers in order, numbered every page, even those of Pavese’s pocket notebooks, and created an index that can now be accessed on-site or online.5 that literate america knows Pavese only slightly despite his standing in italy reflects the problems associated with literature in translation ; few important foreign-language novelists transcend their own languages to make an impact in english. there are exceptions, of course, but they do not change the rule. Günter Grass, for example, has had great success in english, as have other earlier and towering twentiethcentury writers in German such as thomas mann and Franz Kafka. But how many americans outside the academy ever heard of robert musil before the 1995 full english translation of The Man Without Qualities? or have read heinrich Böll in translation or know that he won the nobel Prize for Literature in 1972? who, other than teachers of German literature, can name, beyond Grass, an important Germanlanguage novelist now writing? one could ask the same kinds of questions about literature in French. among spanish-language writers, 2 ]฀“introduCinG Cesare Pavese” american readers tend to know Gabriel García márquez and Jorge Luis Borges, but few others, if any. italian literature follows the same pattern. For every international blockbuster like umberto eco’s The Name of the Rose, hundreds of fine italian novels go untranslated. For every italian novelist who becomes well known in the englishspeaking world, such as italo Calvino, others, such as Leonardo sciascia or Beppe Fenoglio, even when translated, barely...