The great Italian poet, Cesare Pavese, has finally found an able translator in poet William Arrowsmith. The translations in Hard Labor are direct and emulate Pavese's flatness of style and diction. Arrowsmith's critical introduction is simultaneously scholarly and informal, providing as substantial a critical overview of Pavese the man and poet as we are likely to get for some time to come. Based on the provided selection of poems, however, Arrowsmith has a tendency to overpoliticize Pavese's work; no doubt Pavese's opposition to fascism and his exile played a central part in his life and concerns, and there are a few poems from the collection "Green Wood" which are explicitly political, but for the most part Pavese's work centers rather on the austere Italian landscape and its effect on the people:

and, from "People Who've Been There": "Sun and rain are only kind to weeds, nothing else. And now, of course, / now that the wheat's dead, the frost is over."

Pavese's real strengths lie in his supreme powers of description, his attention to narrative, and his praise of the senses.

There comes a moment when everything stands still and ripens. The trees in the distance are quiet, their darkness ripens, concealing a fruit so ripe it would drop at a touch. The occasional clouds are swollen and ripe.

—"Grappa in September"

The creaking wagon shakes the street. Dawn.
Somebody's lying there in the sacks of grain, sleeping,
dreaming of night. No lonelier bed than this.
Under the wagon a lantern dangles, night and day.
The light's out, you can tell from the sky.
—"The Teamster"

The characters who appear in Pavese's poems could almost have come from the paintings of Millet or early Manet: farmers, peasants, prostitutes, drunkards, workers, people who have either experienced the necessity and futility of work or who have been outcasts from the social world. In illuminating their lives, Pavese makes his real political contribution. Given the history of Italian poetry, its dedication to elegance of form and subject matter, Pavese's poems are daring indeed, as daring as Delacroix's paintings must have seemed to the classicists. "The peasants fed / their fields manure, and now their crops are nothing / but manure. No use looking. Everything will be black / with rot…."

Most essential to Pavese's vision, however, is his dialogue with solitude: on the one hand he loves the purity, the meditative expansiveness of solitude; on the other, he is totally overwhelmed by feelings of endless wandering, of loneliness and disconnection. "Here, in the dark alone, / my body rests and feels the master of itself," he says, and in a persona poem titled "People Who Don't Understand," he writes:

And, on the other hand, he writes, "I'll wander around the streets till I'm dead tired," and "We were born to wander and ramble around these hills, / with no women, our hands folded behind our backs."

No discussion of Pavese's work would be complete without mentioning his concern with, and his ambivalence toward, women. A bachelor, Pavese in his work often reflects a strong feeling for male community and views women as "the other," always out of reach, incomprehensible, having no part in the communion of labor: "The outsider was stuffy, / tightfisted, cruel: a woman." When women are not criticized, they are often idealized, either mythically (compared to the sea or land) or archetypically (the angel or whore). But Pavese also devotes considerable attention, usually in persona poems, to women's plight, their suffering and victimization. Speaking of "The Country Whore," he says, "No man can see, beyond the body lying there, / the need, the anguish, of those fumbling adolescent years." And later, more ambivalently:

In our family women don't count…
they just don't matter, and we don't remember them.
but there's one disgrace we've never known:
we've never been women, we've never been nobodies.

If Hard Labor suffers a weakness, it is that Pavese's sameness of flat style and diction tends to make many of the poems indistinguishable from one another, to diffuse the individual power of the poems. But in this remarkable volume there are probably a dozen inexhaustibly powerful poems which create unforgettable emotional experiences, and no one can ask for more than that from any poet.