Cesare Pavese’s Dialoghi con Leucò (1947) is a collection of twenty-seven dialogues among figures drawn from Greek mythology: gods, mortals, and characters such as Oedipus, Sisyphus, and the nymph Leucothea. Rather than retelling myths, Pavese uses them as a framework for meditations on fate, death, suffering, and the fraught relationship between gods and humans. Written in a spare and elliptical style, the dialogues transcend their classical setting to pose existential questions about mortality, love, and the meaning of human life.
Published by Einaudi, where Pavese worked as an editor, the book appeared in the immediate aftermath of World War II. At the time, it puzzled readers and critics accustomed to Pavese’s realist novels and poetry. Yet over the decades, Dialoghi con Leucò has come to be recognized as one of his most profound works, standing alongside La luna e i falò as a central expression of his literary vision. The collection reflects Pavese’s engagement with myth, Jungian archetypes, and existential philosophy, marking a decisive turn in his search for a language through which myth could articulate modern anxieties.
Critically, the dialogues are striking for their austere, ritual-like tone and for the way they distil myth into meditations on the inevitability of suffering and mortality, providing an accomplished fusion of classical myth and modern thought. The persistent tension between timeless gods and transient humans mirrors Pavese’s own struggles with despair and isolation, giving the work an unmistakably personal resonance. As Pavese notes in the foreword, framing his meditations as classical myths with which readers would be familiar from their schooldays (as it is still the case in Italy) adds to their uncanniness, since “disquiet is more real and pointed when stirring up the familiar” (Pavese 19). At the time it was published, the text would have conjured an uncanny feeling when the protagonists of Greek mythology speak in modern voices, expressing concerns and aspirations that remain resonant today: “that perfect moment when, miracle of miracles, that same object will seem like something we’ve never seen before” (19). Today, Dialoghi con Leucò is valued not only as a literary experiment but also as an existential testament where myth becomes a means of confronting the inescapable conditions of human life.
Minna Zallman Proctor’s English translation appears as a slender volume. Its cover features a medieval drawing from the Kupferstich Kabinett in the Dresden Art Galleries, depicting grotesque figures dancing around a female character on what might be a stage. The image aptly highlights one of the key aspects of Pavese’s work: its intrinsic theatricality. The myths in the book are not narrated but unfold through dialogues between characters, with only brief prefaces to orient the reader. Notably, the customary translator’s introduction takes the form of a one-act monologue spoken by Arachne. In Greek mythology and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Arachne was a gifted weaver who challenged Athena to a contest and, after embroidering scenes of the gods killing humans in her tapestry, was punished by the goddess, transformed into a spider and condemned to weave forever. The themes of suicide, weaving as a metaphor for writing, and the gods’ indifference or hostility toward mortals make Arachne an apt figure to introduce The Leucothea Dialogues.
Before Arachne takes the stage, the Translator briefly speaks in the third person, mentioning the Author and his suicide, of which Dialoghi con Leucò offers both an omen and a possible explanation. The book, in fact, was found on Pavese’s nightstand at the time of his death. The Translator soon withdraws, exhausted. Translating, Arachne remarks, is hard work. Rendering Dialoghi con Leucò into English required engaging with a fundamentally obscure, secretive text that resists disclosure. No explicit reason is given for translating a cryptic work by “a white European man” (14) because, as the Translator admits, “there was none” (ibidem). For Arachne, translation is re-creation, a work that dispenses with the Author and transforms the Translator into the Author: an Arachnean act of hybris.
The result of this hybris is a text that, while faithfully reproducing the Italian original, almost severs its ties to it. Devoid of footnotes, it delivers a stark message: that these myths and stories possess universal resonance, even for readers unfamiliar with the Western classical tradition. The one exception is the dialogue “The Flower,” whose reference to the poet Giacomo Leopardi (“those Leopardians,” 43) would be obscure to non-Italian audiences and perhaps merited clarification. Behind the masks of its many speakers, a central theme emerges throughout the book: that the bestial and the divine are two sides of the same coin, both capable of overwhelming and violating humankind. “The earth is crowned by both the divine and the awful, and we walk these roads” (54), says the Stranger in “Beast,” a dialogue Pavese himself, in a letter written days before his death, described as “the key to understanding who he truly was” ( 9).
The Leucothea Dialogues is rendered in resplendent prose that softens the austerity of the original while captivating readers with its rhythm and imagery. It offers English audiences a work as mournful and human as it is symbolic, as well as deeply attuned to the mid-twentieth century’s resurgence of interest in religion and myth. Written in the same years that saw the work of James Frazer, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, Pavese’s dialogues engage with similar questions about humanity’s relationship to the divine, to violence, sexuality, and the sacred, all themes that are central to the mythic imagination he so hauntingly revives.
Pavese, Cesare. The Leucothea Dialogues. Translated by Minna Zallman Proctor, Archipelago Books, 2025.
Elena Borelli is Lecturer of Italian at the Language Centre of King’s College London, where she teaches courses in Italian and Intercultural Studies. Her research focuses on the literature and culture of the European fin de siècle. She has co-translated Giovanni Pascoli’s Poemi Conviviali and published it in 2022 for Italica Press. She is a regular contributor of Journal of Italian Translation, and she is currently working on an English translation of Giovanni Pascoli’s Canti di Castelvecchio with US poet Stephen Campiglio.