Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Hard Labor

Hard Labor

Pavese, Cesare
Arrowsmith, William
Olson, Ted

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $22.00

ISBN10: 1681378787
ISBN13: 9781681378787
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: Jun 17 2025
Pages: 272
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.70 Depth: 8.20
Language: English
A landmark translation of passionate, fiercely intelligent poetry about coming of age by one of the most influential Italian writers of the twentieth century.

In the spring of 1935, the young Cesare Pavese was sentenced, for antifascist activities, to three years of detention in a small seaside village in Calabria. Far away from his familiar life in the city of Turin and forced to rely on his own resources, he began to write poems of tremendous power, in terse lines and unsentimental language, giving voice to country people and hard country lives untainted by the propaganda of Fascism. When I found my friends, I found my real home-- / land so worthless a man's got a perfect right / to do absolutely nothing.

Though Pavese is now most famous for his fiction, he was a poet first of all, and Hard Labor was the work for which he hoped to be remembered. It is a book, he once said, that might have saved a generation. William Arrowsmith's translations--with their strong lines and bold American diction--marvelously convey the spirit and complex vitality of the original.

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