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.
