Cesare Pavese: mutual understanding in the teenage years

Abstract

«My first access to Pavese was the final sentence in his diary “no more words, a gesture, I will write no more”. It circulated around the underground of the universities in the time of Franco as an excellent self-epitaph. So much so that as a student and adolescent would-be writer for me it represented the maximum splendor of the cultural explosion in democratic post-war Italy. From that sentence, which reached me by word of mouth, I bought some of Pavese’s novels in translation in Argentina because in Spain they were banned».