The Leucothea Dialogues - by Cesare Pavese (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 2026 PEN Translation Prize

A shifting, primordial work by Cesare Pavese, plumbing the netherworlds of philosophy, myth, human feeling, and mortality

"Above all [Pavese's novels] are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings . . . Each one of Pavese's novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say." -- Italo Calvino

Cesare Pavese's The Leucothea Dialogues is peopled with gods, centaurs, clouds, poets, hunters, snakes, and nymphs. These are the beings who spoke to him through the ancient plays and poems he read in primary school. Here they speak again in the twenty-seven dialogues that form the novel. Pavese calls mythology a "hothouse of symbols." His hothouse is liveliest at night, in the peculiar clarity of darkness. Pavese's characters are more than "characters," they play like the dreams of earliest childhood, they pose questions that seem to travel through the minds of the dead to the minds of the living and back again. Through reeds, shadows, glens, fields of blazing straw, homes and villages on the edges of valleys, and over cliffs, we follow their harried stories. In Minna Zallman Proctor's radiant translation, The Leucothea Dialogues is an expression of an exhilarating intelligence.

Review Quotes

"Minna Zallman Proctor's vigorous retranslation from Italian of Cesare Pavese's singular yet multiplicitous The Leucothea Dialogues stands out from a superb shortlist as a brilliant meditation on, as well as in, translation... [Proctor] makes the book come alive for readers today. Her introduction is especially remarkable for soaring beyond the usual necessary context about author and book into its own mythological register." -- PEN Translation Prize Judges

"The experience of reading The Leucothea Dialogues is much like being told a set of stories one assumed one had already forgotten, only to be reimmersed in their alien but undeniably familiar contours . . . There was, for Pavese, no escapism in a return to mythology. That ancient well allowed him to step outside himself . . . at which remove the distinctions between pain and pleasure, exhilaration and suffering, were dissolved." --Adam Krasnoff, House House Magazine

"The Leucothea Dialogues is rendered in resplendent prose . . . It offers English audiences a work as mournful and human as it is symbolic . . . Pavese's dialogues engage with questions about humanity's relationship to the divine, to violence, sexuality, and the sacred, all themes that are central to the mythic imagination he so hauntingly revives." --Elena Borelli, Reading in Translation

"What is it to be in love, to be cursed, to be lost, to lose one's love, to remember, to smile? . . . Brief instants of animation, in the hands of Pavese and Proctor, are miraculous. The characters in these dialogues are both in and out of time, both mobile and static. That dialectic and its uncanniness clearly fascinated Pavese, whose smiling gods are trapped within a continuous present." --Alec Mapes-Frances, The Paris Review

"This elliptical 1947 work from Pavese, comprising 27 existentialist scenes with characters from Greek and Roman mythology and commentary from the author, is revived in a lively translation by Proctor . . . Throughout, Proctor ably captures the tension between Pavese's conversational tone and harrowing themes." --Publishers Weekly

"These dialogues transform mythology, our oldest stories, into a new and unique form. Combining poetry and prose, they are crucial to understanding Pavese's themes--his preoccupation with antiquity, with silence, and with time. Proctor's enchanting English version honors the author's profound engagement with translation with precision, modernity, and wit." --Jhumpa Lahiri

"Pavese's Leucothea Dialogues stirs the settled soil of the mind. Minna Proctor uncovers new ground in her astonishing translation of this primal novel."--Idra Novey

"There can be no excuse for not reading Pavese, one of the few essential novelists of the mid-twentieth century." -- Susan Sontag

"This is how writers in our ever-worsening world should write." --Saul Bellow

"Pavese's nine short novels make up the most dense, dramatic and homogeneous narrative cycle of modern Italy, and are also . . . the richest in representing social ambiances, the human comedy, the chronicle of a society. But above all they are works of an extraordinary depth where one never stops finding new levels, new meanings . . . Each one of Pavese's novels revolves around a hidden theme, something unsaid which is the real thing he wants to say." -- Italo Calvino

"There is something about Pavese . . . that is insinuating, haunting and lyrically pervasive." -- The New York Times Book Review

"One of the word's great creative depressives." -- Tim Parks, The Daily Telegraph

"There is nothing with quite this passionate intensity and purity in American poetry . . . Hard Labor shows us Pavese at the outset of his own ultimately tragic career, writing poetry of courageous originality, intelligence, and power." --Jonathan Galassi, The New York Times

"Cesare Pavese is one of those singular, disruptive poets, like Blake or Lawrence, who go against the grain--or the flow--of their culture, and for whom precedents would be as hard to find as successors . . . His marvellously peopled poems not only document the time--what Calvino called 'the Pavese era'--but also bear witness to a unique and restless intelligence." --Jamie McKendric, The Guardian

About the Author

Cesare Pavese (1908-1950) was born in the countryside near Turin in northern Italy. His translations of Hermann Melville, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Daniel Defoe influenced his contemporaries, and the wider reading public. Pavese also worked at the Turin publisher Einaudi, where he went on to become the editorial director. He wrote poetry, essays and fiction, and kept diaries. In 1950, Pavese won the Strega Prize, Italy's most prestigious award for literature, for The Moon and the Bonfires. Later the same year, he committed suicide.

Minna Zallman Proctor is the author of Landslide: True Stories (2017) and the editor of The Literary Review. Her essays have appeared in Bookforum, The Nation, and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications. Proctor's translation of Love in Vain, Selected Stories of Federigo Tozzi won the PEN Poggioli Prize. Her translations include Fleur Jaeggy's These Possible Lives, Natalia Ginzburg's Happiness, as Such, Bruno Arpaia's The Angel of History, and essays by Umberto Eco, and Pier Paolo Pasolini.