Sad Wine (II)

By Cesare Pavese 1908–1950 Cesare Pavese

Translated By Geoffrey Brock

The hard thing’s to sit without being noticed.

Everything else will come easy. Three sips

and the impulse returns to sit thinking alone.

Against the buzzing backdrop of noise

everything fades, and it’s suddenly a miracle

to be born and to stare at the glass. And work

(a man who’s alone can’t not think of work)

becomes again the old fate that suffering’s good

for focusing thought. And soon the eyes fix

on nothing particular, grieved, as if blind.

If this man gets up and goes home to sleep,

he’ll look like a blind man that’s lost. Anyone

could jump out of nowhere to brutally beat him.

A woman—beautiful, young—might appear,

and lie under a man in the street, and moan,

the way a woman once moaned under him.

But this man doesn’t see. He heads home to sleep

and life becomes nothing but the buzzing of silence.

Undressing this man you’d find a body that’s wasted

and, here and there, patches of fur. Who’d think,

to look at this man, that life once burned

in his lukewarm veins? No one would guess

that there was a woman, once, who gently touched

that body, who kissed that body, which shakes,

and wet it with tears, now that the man,

having come home to sleep, can’t sleep, only moan.

“Sad Wine (II)” from Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 by Cesare Pavese. Published in 2002 by Copper Canyon Press. Used by permission Copper Canyon Press.

Source: Dissaffections: Complete Poems 1930-1950 (Copper Canyon Press, 2002)

Biography

Cesare Pavese is widely regarded as one of the foremost men of letters in twentieth-century Italian cultural history, and in particular as an emblematic figure: an earnest writer maimed by fascism and struggling with the modern existentialist dilemma of alienated meaning. Little known in the United States, Pavese was profoundly influenced by American literature, and, when official censorship closed his mouth, he would use his . . .

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