Pavese's writing gives evidence of his desire to re-create in literary form the world of his era and, at the same time, to go against the tide. His first major publication, the poetry collection Lavorare stanca (1936; translated as Hard Labor, 1976), stands as a poetic tribute to Pavese's memories of Piedmont, the land of his birth and the region where he spent most of his adult life. This northern Italian province, bordering on the mountains and the sea, encompasses both Turin--in his time Italy's most sophisticated and "Northern European" city--and the rustic hills of the Langhe, with an ingrown rural culture steeped in the traditions of superstition, exhausting day-to-day labor, and the never-ending cycles of nature. Pavese's first volume of poetry also served to break with the dominant Italian poetics of the prewar decades (in which, due partly to Fascist censorship, the strongest poetic trend was that of opaque indirection and hermeticism) and to introduce a fresh new voice tending toward equal measures of linguistic and narrative realism, in a literary style that seemed objective and transparent.
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