Dialogues with Leuco - Cesare Pavese

Dialogues with Leucò by Cesare Pavese, translated by William Arrowsmith and D. S. Carne-Ross / 156-page paperback / ISBN 9781955190770 / published by Sublunary Editions

***

A series of philosophical dialogues between figures of Greek mythology, Dialogues with Leucò is, as its author called it, "a conversation between divinity and humanity". One of Pavese's final books, it was the one he was arguably most proud of, carrying a copy on the day he died from suicide in August 1950. This is a new edition of the 1965 translation of William Arrowsmith—translator of Aristophanes, Euripides, Eugenio Montale, and others—and Donald Carne-Ross, a noted professor of Classics, with whom Arrowsmith founded the National Translation Center at Austin in 1965.

Cesar Pavese (1908 – 1950) was an Italian writer of poems, short stories, and novels, as well as being known for the diary he kept between 1935 and 1950. He was an avowed anti-fascist during WWII, avoiding the conflict altogether and joining the Italian Communist Party after the war. Pavese was equally at home in the classics and American literature, having done his thesis on Walt Whitman and translated Moby Dick into Italian. He committed suicide in 1950.

More Praise for Dialogues with Leucò

"…perhaps the most touching effort made by Pavese to reconcile self and world, the artists' tower and the fields afire around it." — Gian-Paolo Biasin, Italica

"…the book which Pavese considered his most significant work and which is surely his most beautiful, his most achieved effort" — Leslie Fiedler, Kenyon Review

"an epic history of consciousness, the insinuation of death and blood-fear into the Western psyche, stretching from the Age of Cronos to the present." —W.S Di Piero "The Silence of Origins"

"Dialogues With Leuco, even in the translucent idiom of William Arrowsmith and Donald Carne-Ross, is a Gordian knot of a book, except that no stroke of the sword will solve it; one must work, slowly and patiently, drawing continually on what one knows of life. Only then comes a loosening of the cord, some understanding of the mysteries as mysteries, some grasp of the complexity of Pavese's vision." —Sven Bikerts, Partisan Review