"Jardines": un poema juvenil de Cesare Pavese

Abstract

This article explores Cesare Pavese’s importance in Italian literature and his labor as a poet, critic and editor. Some aspects of his interesting poetics founded on his
personal view of the myth are highlighted. Also, his human contradictions are examined, as well as his healthy vein, “apollonian”, and his insane counterpart,
and how both produce a hopeless poetic world, endowed with great beauty and depth, in which Pavese’s inability to approach women (which appears in all his male characters) prompted the poet to commit suicide. This article also presents a translation and commentary of one of his early poems, “Giardini”, as a precious and rare example of the evolution of his poetics, still far away from the maturity and formal perfection of Pavese’s subsequent poetry included in Lavorare stanca, but that already shows formal features and the quality that distinguishes the author who became the best poet of his generation.