Death will come and will have your eyes -
this death that accompanies us
from morning till evening, unsleeping,
deaf, like an old remorse
or an absurd vice. Your eyes
will be a useless word,
a suppressed cry, a silence...

'Verrà la morte e avrà I tuoi occhi -'

Italian/English facing text

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) is one of the essential writers of the twentieth century, and Disaffections is the first complete collection of his poetry in English. Included in this facing text edition are all the poems Pavese published during his lifetime, as well as a few suppressed by the Fascist censor and several discovered after his death. Many of these poems appear here for the first time in English.

Disaffections opens with Pavese's ground-breaking début volume, Work's Tiring (1936). In its 'poem-stories', farmers and factory workers, thieves and drunks, lonely prostitutes and lonelier men, are evoked with a fellow-feeling that imbues them with austere dignity. His later poems, composed after a long period in which his creative energies were turned to fiction, form a haunting coda to his career. They become at once more lyrical and more darkly personal, addressing a female figure who dominates the mysterious and harrowing landscape of desire.