My Account      Basket

Featured Item

Cesare Pavese

Disaffections

Complete Poems 1930-1950

"Until now, Pavese's poetry hasn't been available in English translation that carries both the colloquialness of his language and the haunting rhythms of his verse. Geoffrey Brock's fine new translation has met this need so that. . .American readers can have the pleasure of getting to know him in some depth."
—LA Times Book Review

“An exemplary volume. As a poet-translator, Brock has brought Pavese’s poems to English without a loss of defining rhythm and meaning, and with an attention that indicates the translator’s profound understanding of another writer’s poetics.”
—Judges’ Citation, PEN USA Translation Award

"Pavese’s poems are gentle, soaring, and defiantly musical as they build toward the larger human truths he uncovered in writing about his beloved Italy."
—Bloomsbury Review

"The translation itself is a massive undertaking, and Brock has created a touchstone for understanding Pavese."
— The Santa Fe New Mexican

"…it is a joy to welcome a new translation by Geoffrey Brock."
—The Progressive

"[I]n this new translation, Geoffrey Brock has captured Pavese's unique timbre of sound, clarity of vision, the flesh of a poetic life. The immediacy of impression and emotion, the starkness of the image, Brock's versions do nothing to blunt Pavese's powerful vision."
—Virginia Quarterly Review

"Geoffrey Brock's translation captures well the springiness and tempo of Pavese's lines and conveys the original's sensitivity for nuance."
—Harvard Review

Brock manages to capture the rustic grit of these speakers, while also conveying the measured restraint of the original Italian. The result is that even when the poems downshift into understatement they maintain a mysterious apocalyptic tension, a poised balance between the metaphysical and the real that is the hallmark of Pavese’s mythic power…. Brock is scrupulously faithful to the Italian text, consistently expressing in English the authentic sense and spirit of Pavese’s poems. As a result, we have been given access to a body of startlingly original poetic work.” — The Literary Review

“Geoffrey Brock's ‘hard labor’ in translating Pavese’s poetry has paid off in true poems in English: poems that have the density, the grit, the obdurate presentness hewn from silence for which Pavese fought so hard in Italian. Pavese’s poems remain vitally original in Italian a half century after their first appearance; in Brock’s English, they have the startling power of poems that will always be new.”
—Rosanna Warren

“Pavese’s appeal has on the reader an immediate and emotional hold. To return to these texts today is to confirm the power of an utterance that sends us back to something beyond poetry, but without which poetry could not exist.”
—Valerio Magrelli

“This translation by Geoffrey Brock is a rare convergence of ambition and skill. Pavese’s weird, hard grace suffuses these impressive renderings.” —Henry Taylor

"Superb translations of a major poet. Brock does the impossible: He keeps the letter and spirit of the originals and creates poems in an American voice.
—Phillip Levine

The Copper Canyon Press Catalog

Welcome