Hard Labor

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 langu...