This was Pavese’s first successful poetic composition. In South Seas (I mari del Sud) are three qualities evident in many of his later poems: Pavese’s effort to create a “poem-story” (poesia-racconto); the poet’s choice of conventionally “unpoetic” subject matter (lower-class characters—many of whom are social outcasts—in rural and urban settings); and the poet’s approach to poetic language and meter.

Pavese crafted poems that possessed colloquial, often dialectical Italian phrasing built on a subtle, seemingly prosaic meter but versified in accentual-syllabic meters and frequently employing anapestic rhythms.

After writing a variety of formative poems, Pavese (in September 1930) composed South Seas, in which the narrator recounts a walk in the Langhe hills with his older cousin, whose stories from world travel intrigue the poet.

The storytelling aspect of South Seas—representing Pavese’s attempt to construct a short story in verse form—is realized through the juxtaposition of dialogue from various characters portrayed in the poem, with contextualizing commentary from the poem’s central consciousness (which is ostensibly Pavese’s own).

The poem refers to the cousin’s former employment on whaling ships (in part also an allusion to Pavese’s interest in American literature; notably, he translated Herman Melville’s novel of the whaling trade, Moby-Dick, into Italian). Nevertheless, South Seas exhibits more of the influence of Homer than of Melville, according to William Arrowsmith, in that Pavese’s poem offers a straightforward, unembellished depiction of the aforementioned walk in the hills, with the narrative’s action beginning in media res.

The one section of the poem to employ a distinctly modernist sensibility is the last stanza, which succinctly underscores the irony between the poet’s innocence—his naive interpretation of the meaning of the cousin’s adventurous life at sea—and the cousin’s realistic, even cynical perspective on the significance of his own experience.

South Seas is arguably the finest example of Pavese’s direct narrative style. Later he perfected two other types of poetry: poems constructed more upon images than upon narratives, and poems that are overtly erotic.

A quality distinguishing Pavese’s poetry from his Italian literary predecessors—a quality possibly developed from his extensive reading of American literature—is his celebration of things seen as significant in and of themselves, not solely for their possible allegorical references.

South Seas represents the first flowering of Pavese’s innovative poetic vision. Pavese recognized that it was his breakthrough work and positioned South Seas as the initial poem in Lavorare stanca (1936), the first and only volume of his poetry published during his lifetime.

Bibliography
Pavese, Cesare. Hard Labor. Translated by William Arrowsmith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.

Categories: Italian Literature, World Literature

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