The Leucothea Dialogues

Winner of the 2026 PEN Translation Prize

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

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.