Don’t you find it atrocious to remain still caught in the trap like that because of a single remaining moment and not to be able to free yourself?

He cannot think of his father who, seventy-six years ago, fixed him for death, which is so frightfully late in coming. But I, I can think about him, and I think about the fact that I am a germ of this man who can no longer move, and that if I am trapped in this time and not in another, I owe it to him!

He’s crying, see? He always cries like that … and he makes me cry too! Perhaps he wants to be freed. I’ll free him some evening together with myself. It’s now beginning to get cold. One of these evenings we’ll light a little fire … If you’d like to join us …

No, eh? You’re thanking me? Yes, yes, let’s go outside, let’s go outside, my friend. I can see that you need to see the sun again, on the street.

‘La trappola’

First published in the newspaper Corriere della Sera in 1912 (23 May). It was later part of the collection La trappola (Treves, 1915), in the fourth volume of Novelle per un anno (L’uomo solo) (Bemporad, 1922), and in the final edition of Novelle per un anno (Mondadori, 1937).

Cesare Pavese

1908–50

Pavese’s version of Moby Dick, translated at the age of twenty-three with a rudimentary knowledge of English, has come to be criticized by many for its errors, omissions and liberties. And yet it speaks volumes about Pavese, a tormented genius from Turin who was an obsessive student of the English language and wrote his university thesis on Walt Whitman. His visionary love for American literature, both aesthetically and politically motivated, opened a floodgate, forever altering the course of Italian writing. He spent time interned for anti-Fascist activity in Calabria, a setting for some memorable stories, and upon return to Turin, after the war, became a legendary editor at Einaudi, working alongside Vittorini (they were born in the same year), and mentoring Italo Calvino, whose writing career Pavese essentially launched. He turned to fiction only in the last creative phase of his life; it followed his prodigious activity as translator, poet, critic and editor. Much of his work, occupying sixteen volumes, is autobiographical, and has a primordial underpinning of nature, myth and sacrifice. Like Hemingway, he was a master of the lacuna, the unsaid. And again, like Hemingway, he had an ear for just how people spoke, with a particular penchant for slang. Pavese’s stories can be bleak, astringent. The selected story was written in 1936, but not published until after the author’s death. The first-person narrator, rueful and self-critical, sheds light on Pavese’s perpetually conflicted relationships with women. He set his final novel, La luna e i falò (The Moon and the Bonfires), published the year he died, partly in America, powerfully evoking the California landscape without having ever gone there. Until 1950, Pavese was a figure both aloof and at the very centre of post-war Italy’s literary world. In August of that year, two months after winning the Strega Prize, he killed himself in a hotel room; the note he left asked people to ‘not gossip too much’.