Cesare Pavese

These two poems are taken from Cesare Pavese’s last sequence, “Death will come and look at me with your eyes,” written a few months before his suicide in 1950 (he was born in 1908). They come out of an unhappy love affair with an American movie actress. Constance Dowling; Pavese was better known in his lifetime for his novels, (the Strega Prize, 1950), than for his poetry. His most celebrated work of poetry, Hard Labor (translated into English by William Arrowsmith), was written in the 1930s when he was in village exile under Mussolini. Pavese also wrote journals, and he translated many English and American works into his native tongue. The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese, translated by R.W. Flint, was published in 1968 by Farrar Straus & Giroux.