in note to I Mari del Sud, Italo Calvino emphasizes how evident is that “first very troubled little one”, when we see the word ‘instinctive’ take over, at a time when the poet is looking for his own verse and destiny as a writer. In some respects, this penalty of doing, of softening, is revealed in the marking of the works. Here the following themes have been portraited: detachment, nostalgia, emigration, the land of belonging, the peasant civilization where “silence” becomes “virtue”, and from which every folkloric pigment has been excised (it does not sprout, here, the anthropological vitalism of I mé by a Davide Lajolo). Poetry appears to be crossed, in the alternation of the lasses, by a body empathy reflected by troubled spiritual display cases, and, at the same time, dressed in a slight contemplative stocking, lowered into a realistic grid. Not before.” I mari del Sud, incipit of “ Lavorare stanca” in the section ‘Antenati’, dedicated to Augusto Monti (his master at the Turin High School ‘Massimo D’Azeglio’, the collaborator of Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, Gaetano Salvemini, Piero Gobetti, and author of I Sansôssí (“ The Carefree“), occupies an ideal position for his immediate expressive tests, a manifesto of evident aesthetic importance. He declared with obvious emotion: ” I started to know my world as I created it. Pavese, also in the dialytic segment of 15 October, reiterates that before the writing of I mari del Sud he felt “lost”. The phase of individual confession was overcome with momentum, reaching the opposite end of a narrative object, in which poetry populated with characters, countries and figures: poetry of epic dimension, therefore. When Pavese read us I mari del Sud, nothing but tie! We were young then, and among us were those who seriously asked for Homer’s name. Massimo Mila, in preface to Poesie, recalling the “band of alumni of Augusto Monti” and the rankings that then, boys, operated (“equal merit”) for those pieces with a sweet confessional taste, states: In fact, it emerges a wandering dragging force, nothing but the matter of the sleepy life, gathered in its coming forward. In many respects they avail themselves in the text I mari del Sud. In this last one, the writer noted, on 15 October 1935, about the “new atmosphere” perceived around his poetry, as it should be: “to transform the material and the means in order to be faced with new problems.” Moreover, he concluded, “having had the starting point, it is understood that the spirit will resume all its play.” The mood of such thought seems to rotate on three words: ‘matter’, ‘spirit’, and ‘play’. This scenario is expressed, with vivid clarity, in Lavorare Stanca, then in the posthumous diary Il mestiere di vivere. We are therefore witnessing the assumption of a kind of fuel necessary to start, if not to continue, the game of existence, immediately felt in all its roughness, in all its naturalistic rigor. They are quickly placed in synergy with the expansion of a spiritual urgency, capable of collecting, in its entirety, such vital parameters and making the most proper use of them. Then the processing of real, objective data takes shape. It traces the cocoon of that existence, which is subtly unfolding, grasped, rather than out of alert awareness, almost by instinct. An emergence, after all, of his most archaic biological drive, which Pavese makes manifest by elaborating on his sheets a sudden luminous circle, a shiny omen, a dazzle around the words pushed all the way into the narrative fabric. In creative secretions, as well as in many statements of poetics, Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) passes on that predominantly organic part of his ideal matter. An incontrovertible fact is in the words that reveal him, those dissolved among the amniotic waters of the South Seas.
And it was precisely the facts that acted both on his existence, and on his death. Those which are inside, are verses, words, and with these, thus recalling Saint Augustine, facts. However, remembering Pavese, as Pavese would have liked, exempts us from facing problems that, after all, are outside Pavese. Today it would be easier to enter the fence of chatter. Seventy years have passed since the death of Cesare Pavese. Some notes, on the occasion of poet’s 70 th anniversary of his death