«Raccontare è monotono» : il ritmo della prosa in "Feria d'agosto" di Cesare Pavese

Starting with the twenty-five short stories which constitute August Holiday, the paper attempts to analyse the rhythmic and prosodic structures in pavese’s prose works: the study initially tries to show the main metric structures subtended by each text (principally various length anapaestic verses, seven-syllable lines, octosyllables, decasyllables and hendecasyllables). The prosodic examination also shows a clear formal division between the first parts of the work and the third one: the number of anapaestic structures increases remarkably from the first to the last section. this stylistic evolution can be explained through a passage from The Business of Living written in 1944, where pavese states that his previous prose works lack a «rhythmic support». To discover the functional reason of this prosodic style, it is necessary to consider that in this period of his life the writer is searching for a type of writing able to «raise reality to the mythic sphere». pavese’s myth is fundamentally the “repetition” of an element in reality. in fact, from a lexical point of view, the words «monotony», «obsessive recurrence», «emphatic cadence» are those he uses the most to describe the dynamics of myth. Analyzing the passages where pavese talks about his metric style, a surprising lexical correspondence can be observed: the writer describes the anapaest exactly as «monotony», «rhythm», «cadence» and «recurrence». therefore, it is possible to sup- pose that Pavese, in the final part of August Holiday, uses the anapaestic structures as a way to operate the raising of reality to the mythic sphere.