ON AUGUST 27, 1950, two weeks short of his forty-second birthday, Cesare Pavese took an overdose of sleeping pills in a hotel room in his native Turin. A suicide note, inscribed on the first page of his 1947 Dialogues with Leucò, read: "I forgive everyone and ask everyone's forgiveness. OK? Don't gossip too much."

The gossiping began straight away, with newspapers querying the identity of various young ladies that accompanied the funeral procession, and has continued more or less unabated ever since. The formidable myth-building of the 1960s and 1970s gave way to various attempts at deconstructions and reconstructions in the 1990s. Myth and reality have been intermeshed to such a degree, however, that it might be best to take a stoic approach and ponder the irony that such a situation after all, does reflect Pavese - a life torn between the need to reach out to timeless gods and everyday individuals, between solitude and company.

A suicide, as Tim Lott pointed out in his meditation in the Guardian on some of the reactions to the mass murderer Harold Shipman's recent demise, shakes the foundations of our belief system, and we seek to redress our own balance by labelling the act as cowardly, wicked, tragic, or by some other tag. "Our perception of the suicide almost never fits with the reality, but this will not stop us. Like the suicide, the deepest part of ourselves is angry and afraid, and thus we always consider the assertion of our selves, more important than the facts."

Where poets are concerned, the suicide of a Sylvia Plath, Paul Celan or Cesare Pavese influences our reading of the words left behind. We search the poems as if they are cryptic clues to some hidden meaning that might explain the desperate act. But such a reading merely causes us to slide into gossip.

On the tenth anniversary of Pavese's death, Italo Calvino (in Pavese: Essere e Fare - Pavese: Doing and Being) wrote: "Too much has been said about Pavese in the light of his extreme act and not enough in the light of his battle won day after day against his own self-destructive drive." Calvino offers a rare portrait of a man whose laconic and unsociable traits were not a defensive shield against pain but "an internal iron shell able to contain the pain like the fire in a furnace". It is a portrait of a nervous man in the grip of a febrile creative activity.

Disregarding, indeed destroying, much of his teenage writings, Pavese set 1930 as the year he began his literary career. His output over the next twenty years was to fill sixteen volumes, spanning poetry, fiction, essays and diaries. To these should be added sixteen volumes of translations from English (which he taught himself as a teenager) beginning in 1931 with Sinclair Lewis's Our Mr Wren, followed by Melville's Moby Dick in 1932, and going on to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and others.

By 1932, when Pavese presented his thesis on Walt Whitman at the University of Turin, he had already composed Ciau Masino, an unfinished novel composed of short prose vignettes and poems that intertwine the lives of Masino, the intellectual drawn to America and the blues, and Masin, a labourer caught in a downward spiral, a no-hoper. Published posthumously in 1968, Ciau Masino contained the seeds of many of his later works as well as the poems that open his first collection of verse.

Many of his contemporaries, Montale and Calvino amongst them, felt that Pavese gave his best to narrative. The fact that, along with Moravia, he was the most frequently translated Italian novelist in the 1950s and 1960s might reflect a similar judgment on the part of English and American publishers. But poetry was central to his own conception as a writer. In a 1945 essay on reading and about his work, Pavese wrote "the most successful work, one that alone can stand as representing the character of my art is today still Lavorare Stanca" and goes on to compare several of his novels, which he saw as poetry in prose, as being simply a "particularly enjoyed and protracted" page drawn from the book of poems.

Pavese published two editions of Lavorare Stanca (Work's Tiring), the first in 1936 and the second in 1943. The second edition was revised and expanded with poems written between 1936 and 1940 as well as poems that had been censored from the first edition. Except for "Earth and Death", a sequence of nine poems written in 1945 and published in a journal in 1947, the remainder of Pavese's poetry was only published posthumously.

First released in the USA by Copper Canyon Press and published with a revised introduction in the UK by Carcanet, Geoffrey Brock's translation is the first of the complete poems of Pavese, and is by far superior and more accurate than the select translations that were published in 1969 and 1976. Indeed, it is odd that it should have taken so long for a complete poems to appear.

WITH THE FIRST edition of Work's Tiring Pavese brought to full fruition his unique vision of narrative poetry. In diction, form and content the collection of poems did not echo or reflect the trends of Italian poetry of the time but sought to bring new currents, especially cross-Atlantic ones, to bear upon what he felt to be the stifled air of Italian literature. Against regionalism he posited universal archetypes, against the hermetic a language stripped down to its bare simplicity, and against romantic idealism the stark reality of the social world of farmers, factory workers and prostitutes.

If an Italian precursor must be sought for these "story-poems" (as Pavese called them), then it would have to be the Colloquies of Guido Gozzano (1883 - 1916), also a Torinese by birth. But to Gozzano's casual-ironic strolling tone, Pavese's irony (to which not enough attention has been paid) is a dark, obsessive gait that is constantly going against the current - a climb with no descent.

We're walking one evening on the flank of a hill
in silence. In the shadows of dusk
my cousin's a giant dressed all in white,
moving serenely, face bronzed by the sun,
not speaking. We have a talent for silence.
Some ancestor of ours must have been quite a loner -
a great man among fools or a crazy old bum -
to have taught his descendants such silence.

From these first lines of "South Seas", the opening poem of Work's Tiring, Pavese's distinct voice is self-evident. By his own reckoning, this is the poem in which he found the metre, an accentual-syllabic rhythm, that best suited him. A rhythm that Pavese had used for emphasis ever since he was a child, when he would murmur over and over the phrases that obsessed him most in the novels he was reading. Pavese's rhythm, equally discernable in his novels, is also evident in the juxtaposition and arrangement of the poems and themes of Work's Tiring.

By 1940 Pavese had rearranged Work's Tiring, adding twenty-eight new poems, removing seven older poems, re-inserting those that had been censored, and dividing the collection under six themes. If there is one element that the present translation can be chastised for it is that it follows "the organising principles" of Mariarosa Masoero's Italian edition of the complete poems, without giving Masoero's editorial rationale and notes to the texts, which here are kept to a skeletal minimum. For part two (poems added to the second edition of Work's Tiring) Geoffrey Brock's note that "there is little reason to maintain the thematic divisions that Pavese introduced in the 1943 edition" is at best indolent and at worst conceited in respect to Pavese's authorial privilege. A simple listing of the 1943 sequence of poems under their headings would have sufficed. Given that we are presented with the original facing text, a few extra pages of notes would have made this Italian - English edition richer and a more powerful means of understanding the various facets, stages and shifts in Pavese's work.

Anco Marzio Mutterle (Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Venice) whose latest book of essays on Pavese I Fioretti del Diavolo (2003) includes a study on the implications of Pavese's rearrangement and themes of the 1943 edition of Work's Tiring, has carefully mapped the various changes that Pavese brought to his work. As Mutterle notes, the fact that the index of the second edition included the dates of composition denotes to what extent Pavese saw the rearrangement of Work's Tiring as a survey and a stocktaking of the first decade of his poetry.

The first four poems, kept over from the first edition but now under the heading of Ancestors, form a quartet that binds the narrator to the hills (between Turin and the sea) where Pavese spent his childhood summers. The sequence ("South Seas" - "Ancestors" - "Landscape (I)" - "Displaced People") sets an autobiographical agenda only to veer off into the portrait of a cast from a mystery play, the opening lines of "Landscape (I)" echo the first poem, but the cousin who sailed the south seas is replaced by the hermit:

Up here the hill isn't worked anymore. It's all bracken,
and rocks on the ground, and sterility.
It's no place for work now. The peak is scorched
and the only cool thing is your breath. The real labour
is in reaching the top: one day the hermit climbed up
and has stayed ever since, to recover his strength.
The hermit wears nothing but goatskin,
and he gives off a musk of animal and pipe
that has soaked into the land, the bushes, the cave.

The themes in Pavese's work always gather round a core of juxtapositions: hills/sea, country/city, work/leisure. Many of the poems intertwine these correlatives and explore his ambiguous relationship to them. Mutterle builds a strong case for viewing each section (named after individual poems: Ancestors, Afterwards, City in the Country, Motherhood, Green Wood, Fatherhood) as a distinct canzoniere or collection of lyrics with both poems and sections working in sets. Thus, following "Landscape (I)" which takes place on the summit of the hill with its hermit, "Displaced People" transposes us to a dream of hills among the sea.
The sea, which Pavese often said he hated, is constantly alluded to as a place of danger. Direct contact or sight of it is habitually avoided, as the opening lines to "Displaced People" illustrate:

Too much sea. We've had enough of the sea.
In the evening, pale water stretches away
and shades into nothing, my friend watching it,
and me watching him, and nobody speaking.

Another set of poems that are contiguous in both editions, although moved to the fourth Motherhood section in the 1943 edition, is the pair "Sad Supper" and "Landscape (IV)", the latter being perhaps one of the most evocative of Pavese's story-poems. With the first line the scene is set - "The two men smoke on the bank. A woman swims" - and by the second stanza an intricate web of tensions is at play:

Beneath the cold water are grasses. She floats,
suspended, above them. But the grass beneath us
is crushed by our bodies. Along these banks,
there's no weight but ours. We alone feel the earth.
Maybe her body, stretched out in that water,
can feel the greed of the cold as it soaks
her sun-dulled limbs, as it melts her alive
in the motionless green. Her head doesn't move.

The interplay of earth and water, the men who crush the grass and the woman who floats above it, echo and ricochet through this poem and, when the poems are read in sequence, build on the images and sensations established by the previous poem, as here, in the closing stanza of "Sad Supper":

Sometimes on the banks of the river a scent,
as of grapes or a woman, pools in the grass,
and the moon flows silently by. Someone appears,
passing over the plants, incorporeal, grieving
in the hoarse tones of the voiceless: he lies
down on the grass and can't feel the ground -

WHAT IS BROUGHT to evidence in Brock's translation and organisation of the poems added to the 1943 edition, is the distinct shift in Pavese's tone. The added poems are more desperate, more introspective, and it is to Brock's credit that such a palpable and yet elusive shift of diction should have been so smoothly transposed from Pavese's Italian. By 1938, as his diary entries attest, Pavese's interest in American culture had lessened and he became more and more fascinated by the need for myths, those "fantastical universals" as Pavese, using Vico's definition, wrote in a letter of 1942, "to fully and unforgettably express this experience which is my place in the world".

The first stanza of "Myth" added to the last section of the second edition of Work's Tiring sets the theme that was to haunt Pavese's subsequent works:

One of these days the young god will become a man,
painlessly, with the dead smile of the man
who now understands. And the faraway sun
will redden the beaches. One of these days the god
will have forgotten the sands he once walked on.

The poem that immediately follows, "Paradise above the Roofs", takes the theme of lost youth one step further:

The day will be calm, with cold light, as if
from a sun that's newborn or dying; the window
will keep the filthy air out of the sky

and closing, "Memory will be the flame / that burned until yesterday in snuffed eyes."

The closing poem of the 1943 edition is "Lo Steddazzu /Morning Star over Calabria", written in 1935 in Brancaleone in Calabria, where Pavese had been exiled following his arrest for suspected anti-Fascist activities. It returns to the theme of the sea, and loops back to the closing lines of "South Seas" that opens Work's Tiring: "he smiles at the memory, then says that the sun /didn't rise till the day for them was already old":

The man alone rises when the sea is still dark
and the stars waver. A warmth like a breath
drifts up from the shore, where the sea has its bed.

Poems of Disaffection, the third section in the present translation, contains the poems that Pavese wrote from 1930 through 1940 and which were not included in either edition of Work's Tiring. The concluding section, Last Blues, contains the poems that Pavese wrote during the last five years of his life, the sequence Earth and Death, written in 1945, Two Poems for T and Death Will Come and Will Have Your Eyes.

WITH EARTH AND DEATH and the subsequent poems, Pavese radically changed the form and tone of his poetry. Employing a shortened clipped line that reads urgent, pervaded by an agonised lyricism that is addressed to a mysterious "you" (Pavese was known for addressing himself in the third person), but which are most times addressed to a female "you", the poems are anchored to a mythical world. Gone is the variety of personas and narrative structure of Work's Tiring. In many ways these last twenty-odd poems are akin to Dialogues with Leucò, a series of dialogues between mythological figures that Pavese published in 1947 and which, their poor reception notwithstanding, he held as being his most original and intimate work.

Keeping in mind Pavese's injunction not to "gossip too much", a key into these later poems might be found in the correspondence of 1950. On April 20 Pavese wrote to Lalla Romano to re-read "La Belva" ("The Wild Beast") from Dialogues with Leucò to know his state of mind, and two days before taking an overdose of sleeping pills he reiterated the same message to Davide Lajolo, adding "as always I had foreseen everything five years ago". "The Wild Beast" is a dialogue in which Endymion relates his meeting with Artemis to a stranger. The name Endymion denotes the sun as it dips into the sea, and in Greek mythology he was a mortal shepherd who on falling asleep dreamt that the moon goddess Selene came down to lie beside him. Upon waking he begged Zeus to let him sleep and never to awaken, making him immortal in sleep and forever united with the goddess. Artemis the virgin of the hunt is also a moon goddess; her name is associated with the whiteness of the rising sun, she is mistress of wildlife and vegetation, giver and destroyer of life who is unmoved by love.

In "The Wild Beast" Pavese creates his own myth, Endymion dreams that he awakens under moonlight to witness the birth of Artemis and falls under the terrible spell of her eyes, henceforth he can find no peace in sleep. She awaits him there:

She stands there before me, a lean, unsmiling girl,
watching me. And those great transparent eyes have
seen other things. They still see them. They are
those things. Wild berry and wild beast are in her
eyes, and the howling, the death, the cruel turning
of the flesh to stone. I know the spilled blood, the
torn flesh, the voracious earth, and solitude. For
her, the wild one, it is all solitude. For her the wild
animal is solitude. Her caresses are like the caresses
one gives a dog or a tree. But, stranger, she looks at
me, looks at me - a lean girl in a short tunic, like a
girl from your own village.

In the Earth and Death cycle of nine poems, it is this gaze, along with the frightful sea, where these mythical elements recur again and again. From the first couplet of the opening poem "Red earth black earth /you come from the sea" or the opening stanza of "You Always Come from the Sea":

You always come from the sea,
you speak with its hoarse voice.
You always have secret eyes
of living water in the brambles,
and a low forehead, like
a sky heavy with clouds.
Each time you live again
like something ancient
and savage that the heart
already knew and encloses.

In Dialogues with Leucò Pavese inverted Endymion's seductive dream into a nightmarish vision, where daily life becomes an extension of the night's restless fight against sleep. Rather than a coda to his poetry, these last poems are a struggle made all the more poignant for their intensity and brevity:

Like good enemies
who've given up their hate
we share a single voice
and a single pain,
we live face-to-face
under a meagre sky.

"You Always Come from the Sea" concludes:

As long as our heart trembles.
They spoke a name of yours.
Death begins again.
Savage, unknown creature,
you are reborn from the sea.

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