(
A major new translation of one of Italy's greatest mode...)
A major new translation of one of Italy's greatest modern poets
Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was a pioneer of the Modernist movement in Italian poetry and is widely regarded as one of the leading Italian poets of the twentieth century. His verse is renowned and loved for its powerful insight and emotion, and its exquisite music. Yet, unlike many of his peers, Ungaretti has never been adequately presented to English readers. This large bilingual selection, translated with great sensitivity and fidelity by Andrew Frisardi, captures Ungaretti in all of his phases: from his early poems, written in the trenches of northern Italy during World War I, to the finely crafted erotic and religious poetry of his second period, to the visceral, elegiac poetry of the years following the death of his son and the occupation of Rome during World War II, to the love poems of the poet's old age.
Frisardi's in-depth introduction details the world in which Ungaretti's work took shape and exerted its influence. In addition to the poet's own annotations, an autobiographical afterword, "Ungaretti on Ungaretti," further illuminates the poet's life and art. Here is a compelling, rewarding, and comprehensive version of the work of one of the greatest modern European poets.
A Major Selection of the Poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti: A Bilingual Edition
(
Ungaretti’s beautiful biography is a splendid poetic po...)
Ungaretti’s beautiful biography is a splendid poetic portrait of the spirit of the first half of this century, in Italy and in the whole of Europe. This is the first time anywhere that all of the poet’s verse has been presented in translation.
(
Il Porto Sepolto was written in the trenches of norther...)
Il Porto Sepolto was written in the trenches of northern Italy while Giuseppe Ungaretti was serving as a private in the Italian army; when the collection was published in Udine in 1916, it changed Italian poetry. Part of its impact was due to the influence of Japanese poetry, which Ungaretti had recently encountered in Italian translation. In his introduction, Irish poet and Tokyo resident Andrew Fitzsimons explores the nature and history of Ungarettis engagement with Japanese poetics; the book also includes sixteen vibrant illustrations by another Tokyo resident, the renowned Italian artist Sergio Maria Calatroni. This is the only complete translation into English of the Udine first edition: the poems of a man present at his own / fragility that spoke to their moment, and continue to speak one hundred years later.
Giuseppe Ungaretti was born on February 10, 1888, in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian parents who had emigrated from the countryside around Lucca. At an early age he lost his father, who had been working as a laborer on the Suez Canal project; his mother continued to run a baker's oven to maintain the family.
Education
Until 1905 Ungaretti frequented the Istituto Don Bosco and the École Suisse Jacot, and in 1912 he went to Paris to study at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne. There he met and befriended poets and artists such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Georges Braque, and Amedeo Modigliani.
Career
In 1915 his first poetry was published in the journal Lacerba. During World War I Ungaretti served as an infantry soldier on the Italian front and in the Champagne. After the war he settled in Paris.
In 1921, together with his wife, Ungaretti moved to Rome, where he held a job in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In the early 1930's he traveled as a special correspondent for the Gazzetta del popolo and also went on several lecture tours throughout Europe. During a congress of the Pen Club in Brazil in 1936, Ungaretti accepted the offer of the chair of Italian language and literature at the University of Sao Paulo. Upon his return to Italy in 1942, he was elected a member of the Italian Academy and took the chair of modern Italian literature at the University of Rome. After the death of his wife in 1958, he traveled extensively. He died in Milan on June 1, 1970.
While still in school in Egypt, Ungaretti became acquainted with French symbolist poetry, particularly that of Stéphane Mallarmé. The example of the French symbolists, and later that of Paul Valéry and Apollinaire, led him to adopt his particular hermetic "technique of obscuration. " Such a closed diction derives its characteristics from the basic symbolist beliefs in the magic qualities of the word and the conviction that the poet is the keeper of arcane secrets. Thus, as Ungaretti once said, true poetry must have the "obscure sense of revelation. " The technique avails itself of all possibilities to give the single word greater relief, be it through abolition of punctuation, typographical or stylistic isolation, or epigrammatic composition. Ungaretti always professed to be preoccupied with ultimate questions of man's existence, with the mysteries of life, and he gave his entire work the title Vita d'un uomo. Ungaretti's first collection of verse, Il porto sepolto (1916), was published in an edition of 80 copies and represented a definite break with traditional forms. The poems grew out of his first year's experience in the trenches of Monte San Michele. Allegria di naufragi (1919) is a testimony of self-revelation after the experiences of war. Typical is the long poem I fiumi, in which he tries to define his heritage. The central collection of Ungaretti's poetry, Sentimento del tempo (1933), appeared after an interval of 14 years, and he spoke of the "most slow distillation" of this work. Il dolore (1947) is a group of 17 poems written under the impression of the death of his son at the age of nine. With the sequence of the compositions contained in La terra promessa (1950) Ungaretti adopted more extensive poetic forms and also returned to a modified hendecasyllable. Un grido e paesaggi (1952) contains poetry written between 1939 and 1952.