In his introduction to his translation of Cesare Pavese’s journals, which I edited, the translator Julian Sachs wrote that translating this book presented two major challenges. First, translating it into English presents “the singular task of transposing Pavese’s eloquent thoughts about life and literature into the language that inspired many of his points of view in the first place.” Pavese was indeed one of the most prominent of the 1930s americanisti, Italian intellectuals deeply affected by American literature and culture, which they took for inspiration in comparison with the limited horizon of Italian literature and politics. This American myth – which Pavese articulated by rendering into Italian, often for the very first time, authors such as Melville, Anderson, Steinbeck, Stein – characterized Pavese’s literary style and life until his last novel, La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires, 1950), in which he finally elaborated his debit with that country. Despite this fascination, Sachs added, this text will not present the reader “the frictionless prose of The Moon and the Bonfires” or the “clear and simple sentences” he inherited from American writers; rather, this is an opportunity “to peek behind the scenes of Pavese’s entire career.” Which posed the second challenge: the style of the text is not consistent, shifting between philosophical questions and personal outbursts.
These challenges were not easy, but I believe that Sachs brilliantly faced what he called “the daunting task of translating such a difficult text” with the necessary competence. Not only was he able to render the different styles of Pavese’s notes, but he also rendered the many quotes from languages other than Italian, such as English, French, German, and – most difficult of all – Piedmontese dialect (neither Sachs nor I are from Piedmont). Also, he provided the best way of translating the original title, Il mestiere di vivere: among the many meanings of the Italian word “mestiere,” which means “job,” “skill,” “profession,” we believed that “craft” was the best one. It allowed us to emphasize the deep, almost existential connection that Pavese found in his work as an intellectual and a writer.
My contribution consisted in providing a general context for this fundamental translation, connecting it not only to Pavese’s life and literary production, but also – more generally – to his time (for which I provided an introductory list of world’s events, compared with the one happened during Pavese’s life). Pavese was born in 1908 in the small town of Santo Stefano Belbo, in the Langhe region of Northwestern Piedmont, and spent all his life in Turin. In that city, he attended the prestigious liceo D’Azeglio and the university, surrounded by classmates and professors who would become some of the most important Italian intellectuals: Augusto Monti, Leone Ginzburg, Massimo Mila, and Giulio Einaudi. The last of them founded the publishing house in 1933 where Pavese worked his entire life, becoming after the Second World War its editorial director. In 1936 he published his first book, the collection of poems Lavorare stanca (Hard Labor), and in 1941 his first novel, Paesi tuoi (The Harvesters), which was followed by La spiaggia (The Beach, 1942) and – after the war – by an eclectic list of books, from the mythological Dialoghi con Leucò (Dialogues with Leucò) to the politically committed Il Compagno (The Comrade), both published in 1947, and Prima che il gallo canti (Before the Cock Sings, 1948), in which he summarized his non-participation in the partisan struggle against Nazi-Fascists during the war. 1949 was the year of the trilogy of La bella estate (The Beautiful Summer), for which he was awarded the prestigious literary Strega Prize. Although he had finally reached the literary fame that he always longed for, a series of personal events deepened his depression: among them, his affair with the American actress Constance Dowling, with whom he had wanted to start a family. For this and other reasons, Pavese took his life in 1950, at 42.
As we tried to convey with the title, the journals of Pavese represent the best way for readers to penetrate his life and his literary career. For him, literature embodied a deep ethical power: not as a way to represent life, but rather as a way for him to justify his presence among other human beings. For this reason, he chose for this text – a combination of mainly handwritten pages, which often presents connections between different entries – the title Il mestiere di vivere: living, for him, was a very difficult task, which he had to acquire with hard practice, day after day. For this reason, Julian and I are deeply thankful to Emeritus Professor Luigi Ballerini who, together with Professor Gianluca Rizzo, manages the Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library at the University of Toronto Press; they engaged us in this work.
We are proud to finally present English-speaking readers with the text in its entirety: until now, English translations had been incomplete. This happened for two reasons: they were based on the first Italian edition of the text (1952), published by Italo Calvino and Natalia Ginzburg with some cuts; and the translator, when faced with difficult or controversial passages, did not translate them. By comparing the Italian text of the complete edition (1990) with the English one, I isolated and listed all the missing parts, which Julian later translated. Since our goal was to make this (often difficult) text available to a large audience, I provided an apparatus of footnotes: based on the 1990 Italian text, these notes – many of which I wrote for English-speaking readers – help to better understand Pavese’s references to other people, places, or works, as well as to explain the connections between different sections of the journals. Thanks to Professors Laura Nay and Chiara Tavella from the University of Turin, readers of the present edition can also see some of the original handwritten pages, which have been digitized and made available to scholars on the website Hyperpavese. Finally, the Italian artist Francesco Lopomo generously allowed us to use the portrait of Pavese he created for the Fondazione Cesare Pavese for the cover: it adds a colorful note, which I believe will be appreciated.
Included below is Julian Sachs’ “Translator’s Note” to The Craft of Living.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
By Julian Sachs
Translating The Craft of Living into English presents the singular task of transposing Pavese’s eloquent thoughts about life and literature into the language that inspired many of his points of view in the first place. By the time Pavese began publishing works in prose, in the early 1940s, he had already penned the Italian translations of works by Melville, Anderson, Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Joyce, Defoe, Dickens, Lewis, and Stein and was in the process of translating Faulkner. It is not surprising, then, that the ways of writing he spent so much time dissecting and studying in detail would end up influencing his own style so profoundly. Throughout his career, Pavese would be regarded by the Italian literary world as the author most affected by the realist spirit of twentieth-century American authors, avoiding long adjective-laden paragraphs in favour of clear and simple sentences focused on the conflicts between the individual and society.
Pavese fought back against such a label. In an essay that he included in La letteratura americana e altri saggi (published posthumously in 1951), he wrote: “In my own experience, translating teaches how not to write; at every step, it makes you feel how a different culture and sensibility were conveyed through a certain style, and the effort required to express such a style prevents any temptation one might still harbour to try out in one’s own work. Following an intense period of translating … , I knew exactly which were the forms and literary manoeuvres I wasn’t allowed, that are foreign to me and that leave me cold. As often happens when mixing and mingling with people who are quite exotic and remarkable, I ended up finding myself more isolated, more irritable, but also smarter, in the old Piedmontese sense of the term[,]” by which he meant “shrewd.”
Among the aspects that make The Craft of Living – as well as Pavese’s literary essays – so interesting is the lack of examples of his universally recognized debt to straightforward “American” syntax. When Pavese writes not as a narrator but as a theorist, his paragraphs begin to swell, and the text resembles an academic dissertation more indebted to the classical education of his upbringing than to the models he espoused for his works of fiction. Translating the journal’s entries often meant spending time reconnecting loose adjectives and adverbs to their subjects and verbs, which were to be found several lines away.
In short, the reader should not expect to find in this volume the frictionless prose of The Moon and the Bonfires but rather an opportunity to peek behind the scenes of Pavese’s entire career, to admire a complicated set of machinery as well as the hard work that went into getting it all to run smoothly to produce his many masterpieces.
For this reason, I chose not to be influenced by the style we most commonly associate with Pavese and to do my best to transpose the sense of discovery and experimentation that emerges from the Italian text, in which the author opts to ignore the artistic methods and rules he is delineating in real time for his works of fiction and, instead, lets loose his “inner intellectual” to theorize the literary revolution that he envisions for his writing.
This also means that the style of the journal is not consistent. Not only does it cover a span of fifteen years (a period that includes his entire literary output, except for a few youthful experiments), but its diaristic form also allows Pavese the freedom to expand, for pages at a time, on a philosophical question just as easily as to jot down a brief sentence on a personal matter. Not only that: the reader will also find the author constantly quoting from previous entries – often at a distance of several years – to reinforce or dismantle a theory or a technique, telling himself (usually in the second person) what worked and what did not.
Pavese’s interest in foreign literature wasn’t limited to the works he translated for Einaudi. He was an avid reader, in French as well as English, and many of the volumes he came across are commented upon throughout his journal, often accompanied by snippets and quotes he felt would tie in with the theoretical discourse surrounding the writer’s craft. In this edition, I thought it best to have all quotes in English, accompanied by a footnote explaining in which language the original quote appeared. In those cases in which I decided to use an already-existing translation, I added the source to the note.
Pavese’s absorption of English and French literature also resulted in his using terms and phrases in those languages. These, too, I left in the original language, accompanied by a footnote. This was especially necessary in those cases in which Pavese misuses a phrase: for instance, he writes “at the back of my head” to mean “in the back of my mind.”
Beyond the occasional passage in English or French, Pavese sporadically wrote words and phrases – as well as two whole poems – in the Piedmontese dialect. Again, this edition presents those passages in English and accompanies them with an explanatory footnote. I could not, however, apply the same method to the entry of 23 December 1937, where I had to leave the common blasphemous expression Porco Dio in Italian, because English, alas, has nothing even remotely equivalent.
There are two people to whom I owe a great deal of thanks for making the daunting task of translating such a difficult text much less arduous. The first is Iuri Moscardi, who curated this edition and whose expertise on the subject I was able to rely on, on a daily basis, and the second is Anna Elizabeth Murch, whose 1961 translation of this book, in spite of its many shortcomings (some more unavoidable than others, as explained by Moscardi in his introduction), served as an additional voice when I was debating the correct interpretation of any given passage.
This edition is based on the 2020 reprint of the 1990 complete edition, and many of the footnotes match their Italian counterparts. We felt it necessary to add several new notes at places in the text that refer to people, locations, or events that would be common knowledge only for Italian readers.
I conclude this note by mentioning the two essays on literary theory that Pavese included in the 1943 edition of Hard Labor, his most important collection of poetry: The Poet’s Craft and Notes on Certain Unwritten Poems. Even though they make perfect companions to The Craft of Living, they belong to a different work and should not, therefore, be inserted into this text. I highly recommend that English-speaking readers discover them in the Viking Press’s 1976 edition of Hard Labor, in William Arrowsmith’s excellent translation.
Pavese, Cesare. The Craft of Living: Journals, 1935-1950. Edited, introduced, and annotated by Iuri Moscardi. Translated by Julian Sachs. University of Toronto Press, 2026.
Reprinted by permission of University of Toronto Press.
Iuri Moscardi holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, with an Italian Specialization and a Certificate in Critical Theory, from the Graduate Center, CUNY. His dissertation, “Twitteratura: Digital Social Reading and Active Reception of Literary Texts in the Context of Italian Contemporary Literature,” lies at the intersection of Contemporary Italian Literature, Digital Humanities, and the Reception Theory of the Literary Text. He edited Cesare Pavese’s The Craft of Living. Journals 1935-1950 with Julian Sachs (University of Toronto Press 2026) and Cesare Pavese Mythographer, Translator, Modernist (Vernon Press, 2023). A scholar of Pavese, he organized the conference Dreaming of the USA. The Writings and Translations of Cesare Pavese at New York University in 2023, with Jhumpa Lahiri and Brian Moore. On the Fondazione Cesare Pavese’s website, he created Dialogues with Pavese, a series of bilingual interviews (in Italian and English) with Pavese’s scholars around the world. He taught Italian language and literature at CUNY, Fordham, and Bryn Mawr College.
Julian Sachs is the Program and Media Coordinator for New York University’s Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, organizing hundreds of free events every year pertaining to Italian culture. He is an Adjunct Professor in NYU’s Department of Italian Studies where he teaches a course titled “A Night at the Opera”. He is the founder and leader of Opera to the People, a club for university students aimed at introducing them to the world and repertoire of opera by attending performances live at The Metropolitan Opera in New York, preceded by an introductory presentation of the work the night before. He holds degrees from the University of Siena in Music and the Performing Arts (2006) and Literature and Cinema (2008). His translation of Cesare Pavese’s The Craft of Living was published by University of Toronto Press in January, 2026.