Pavese’s Hard Labor: On the Risks and Afterlives of Translation

Hard Labor by Cesare Pavese, trans. William Arrowsmith. 160 pp. NYRB Poets, 2025. $22.00.

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Few poets are as plain as Cesare Pavese—and few as difficult to carry from Italian into English. His poems march with prosaic clarity, yet beneath them runs a pulse of reflection on history and culture, transfigured into allegory. To read him is to be lulled by apparent simplicity, only to feel tremors beneath each line. His Hard Labor (Lavorare stanca) remains one of the strangest debuts in modern poetry: a book of long narrative poems, written under Mussolini’s Fascism, that speaks in the voice of peasants, prostitutes, and outsiders, yet is haunted by a mythology of Pavese’s own making. “Each poem is a story,” he insisted, and his yarns draw us in with plain speech, becoming myth the way fog becomes river.

Born in 1908 in the Piedmont hills, Pavese made his name as a novelist (The Moon and the Bonfires), a diarist (The Burning Brand), and a critic and translator of Whitman, Melville, and Faulkner. Translation for him was not apprenticeship but survival. Italian Fascism throttled expression; through translation he imported voices of freedom. He once called America “barbaric and innocent,” an antidote to Fascist academism, and devoted himself to American literature as a companion at the elbow. The charge came quickly: that he had “brutally Americanized” Italian letters, flattening its lyric tradition into Yankee plainness. Italo Svevo even dismissed him as “vulgar” for his attention to commoners, prostitutes, and unvarnished sex. What critics saw as vulgarity was, of course, his rebellion: an earthiness aligned with Whitman’s democratic idiom. Yet Pavese departs from Whitman’s romanticism, choosing instead a muted clarity edged with myth. For Pavese, as he wrote in This Business of Living (1942), myth “is a word, a gesture, which has value as a symbol, and not only as a fact. It is the world, the whole of reality, caught in a single moment, a single act.”

In 1950, shortly after winning Italy’s Strega Prize, Pavese ended his life in a Turin hotel. His notebooks record despair but also stubborn craft. “Endless attempts at poems,” he wrote, “preceded ‘The South Seas’ . . . Simultaneous experience in writing narrative or merely discursive prose removed all joys.” Strangely, he carried that prosaic strain into poetry itself. A modern classic though Lavorare stanca may be, the unusual length of Pavese’s poems remains a stumbling block; he could be dismissive of brevity, mistrusting lyrics’ “ecstatic outpouring” and characterizing poetry’s purpose as “essential expression of essential facts.” Plainness was his weapon against rhetoric, even where it risked monotony.

For English readers, Pavese has always arrived through translation. Margaret Crosland’s 1971 Penguin Modern European Poets was pioneering, introducing him to a British audience with essays that situate him among postwar existentialists. Her versions of the poems, however, cling to literal meanings, often at the expense of Pavese’s tone. William Arrowsmith’s Hard Labor, first published in 1976, was a revelation: colloquial, risk-taking, full of American cadences. It made Pavese sound modern in English. Kenneth Rexroth called it “about as good as could be imagined.” NYRB Classics has now reissued Arrowsmith’s translation, together with the Italian originals and Pavese’s accompanying essays. Theirs is not just a republication but a reframing of Pavese for our time.

The stakes of translation become clear in the smallest shifts. Crosland’s “Landscape VI” reads: “This is a day when mist rises from the river / into the lovely city, between the fields and hills, / and clouds it over like a memory.” Arrowsmith’s rendering: “Today’s the day when the fog lifts from the river / in the beautiful city among its fields and hills, / blurring it like a memory.” One verb changes—“rises” to “lifts.” One adjective—“lovely” to “beautiful.” One phrase—“clouds it over” to “blurring.” The differences are tonal, yet everything depends on them. Crosland’s “lovely” carries a slightly antiquated softness; Arrowsmith’s “beautiful” is unforced. “Clouds it over” is blunt; “blurring” is continuous, musical. Pavese’s muted lyricism emerges through such calibrations.

The same is true in “The South Seas.” Crosland: “One evening we walked along the side of a hill / in silence.” Arrowsmith: “Late one afternoon we walked along the flank of a hill / in silence.” “Side” is in itself neutral; “flank” is bodily, charged with cadence, and it lets the sonic emphasis shift to the assonance of “hill” and “in.” “Evening” drifts visually to dusk; “late afternoon” catches a slope of light. These choices are not trivial. They are the poem itself.

Arrowsmith was never afraid of liberty. Most translators, for the title of the poem “Fumatori di carta,” have settled on “Smokers of Paper.” Arrowsmith dares “Workers of the World,” capturing Pavese’s political timbre if not his words. Translation here is interpretation—sometimes proposition, sometimes invention. He admitted to veering “between a realism which obscured the mystery it intended, and a mystery which engulfed the object being observed.” That balance is the translator’s paradox: when to choose prose and clarity, when to allow mythic resonance, a balance the translator can never fully hold.

Geoffrey Brock, whose translation of Disaffection: Complete Poems offers a third voice, reveals yet another tonal register. The spectrum is stark in the poem “The Country Whore.” Brock, Crosland, and Arrowsmith each open it differently:

• Brock: “The big front wall that blocks off the courtyard / often catches the newborn light of the sun / like the side of a barn.”
• Arrowsmith: “The high wall around the courtyard catches the first / groping fingers of boyish sun, the way the barn once / caught the morning light.”
• Crosland: “The front wall of the yard / often reflects the early sun / as the cowshed did.”

Brock is pared back, his “newborn light” clear and familiar in its simplicity. Crosland’s “as the cowshed did” is unembellished. Arrowsmith mythologizes: “boyish sun” with “groping fingers.” Which is truest? Translation is never neutral; each choice bends tone, cadence, atmosphere. What critics once called Pavese’s vulgarity—his focus on peasants, prostitutes, barns—becomes, in translation, a test of how earthy or mythic his plainness should sound.

The poem “Deola Thinking” gives a further example. Brock writes: “Deola passes her mornings sitting in a café, / and nobody looks at her. Everyone’s rushing to work, / under a sun still fresh with the dawn.” Arrowsmith recasts it to: “Deola spends her mornings sitting in the café, / and nobody looks at her. In the city this is the time / when people are rushing around in the cool of morning.” Crosland: “Deola spends the morning in the café / and nobody looks at her. All the city folk / are rushing along in the still-cool sunshine of dawn.” Arrowsmith’s compression, while concise, slackens the rhythm, tilting the line toward prose. Brock restores rhythm with“under a sun still fresh with the dawn,” and a civic context with “Everyone’s rushing to work. . .” That one powerful detail transforms a generic morning scene into a specific social ritual. Such choices moderate our perception of Deola’s invisibility in these different translations: she is absorbed into Arrowsmith’s direct syntax, is overlooked within Crosland’s generic setting, or fades against the backdrop of Brock’s purposeful, sunlit city.

Pavese’s essays, included in this edition, clarify why such detail matters. He rejected lyric gush, “ecstatic outpouring,” the conventional “rhetorical”imagery. He sought plainness: “essential expression of essential facts.” That plainness is not naïve; it is a construct, shaped against the rhetorical inflation of his era. Translation must respect that construct—not over-embroider, not deaden into prose, but find the rhythm of simplicity.

Reading these versions side by side, my ear adjudicates. Arrowsmith’s risks sometimes verge on excess—“groping fingers of boyish sun” teeters toward sentimentality. Crosland’s literalism feels faithful but bland. Brock dignifies the poems with restraint, but at times his precision loses music. Each makes me hear Pavese differently. Each raises the unanswerable question: what should fidelity mean—fidelity to the words or to the pulse of the poem?

Translation matters, not just as a service but more fundamentally as an art. Pavese resisted Fascist rhetoric by stripping speech bare. His translators must resist another kind of rhetoric—that of equivalence. They must choose from among tones, rhythms, atmospheres, knowing they can’t be faithful to all of it at once. To translate Pavese is to accept that meaning lies as much in cadence as in sense, as much in silence as in image.

Why return to this poet in 2025? Because his poetry, with its calm narratives and allegorical shadows, feels startlingly modern. In an age of political bombast, his plainness remains resistance. At a moment when translation itself is understood as a critical act, his translators remind us that every classic is provisional, renewable. As an Indian poet, I think of the Ramayana, which has a history of oral reinvention. Even today it is performed as katha, continually reshaped before thousands of devotees. In that spirit, Daljit Nagra —with a line like this about Ravana: “But who was this scallywag, this goonda?”—has reworked the epic in a chirpy Cockney-inflected British-Asian vernacular, a hybrid lingo of street and diaspora. Vivek Narayanan’s version, too, takes purposeful liberties: After refracts the Ramayana through contemporary political experience, bringing to the surface episodes of state violence, surveillance, and coercion—as in “The police hung him from / the ceiling by his leg . . .”—in order to interrogate power within the epic itself.

Both of these projects show how translation—or re-creation—can shape a classic to fit a new moment. By comparison, Crosland, Arrowsmith, and Brock translate Pavese with particular respect for his idiom, less concerned with adapting, as Narayanan does, or updating the register of the language, like Nagra. They remind us that translation is interpretation, while striving to retain Pavese’s essence.

This new NYRB edition—with bilingual texts, Arrowsmith’s luminous versions, and Pavese’s own reflections—is the fullest yet in English. For newcomers, it is the best way in. For translators, it’s both a manual and a warning: the lines of a poet deceptively plain, and therefore infinitely difficult.

Pavese wrote, in his poem “Portrait of the Author”: “The window looking down at the pavement / is always empty.” This may describe the perfect translation: a window forever vacant, the view never wholly captured.