Penguin Modem European Poets

Advisory Editor: A, Alvar~z.

Selected Poems: Giuseppe Ungaretti

Giuseppe Ungaretti was the son of Tuscan peasants who

emigrated to Egypt and ran a small bakery in a suburb
of Alexandria. He was born in rSSS. It was not until
1912 that Ungarctti left Alexandria. He went to Paris,
and on the way caught his first glimpse of Italy. The
war broke out, and Ungarctti went to Milan, where he
published his first poems in the magazine Larerba.
When Italy entered the war in I9Ij he joined up as a
private in the infantry and \Vas sent to the front line on
the Carso. There he was in the thick of some of the
worst fighting of the war. His first small volume was
written in the trenches and published in 1916. These
poems are included in Ailegria (1919).
Eack in Paris after the war, be brought out a volume of
poems in French (La Guerre), and married in 1920. He
went to live in Rome the following year, supporting
himself as a journalist. His second major volume,
Sentimento de! Tempo (The Feeling of Time), came out in
1933. In 1939 his nine-year-old son Antonietta died,
and Ungaretti's grief is clear in II Doiore (1947). The
most important of his subsequent publications have
been La Terra Prome11a (19~0), [Jn Grido e Pae1aggi
(19i2), and II Tar;cuino dei Vecchio (1960). In addition he
has 'translated works of Shakespeare and Elakc,
G6ngora, Mallarme, Racine and others.
Selected Poems
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Edited and translated with an Introduction
and Notes by Patrick Creagh

@ Penguin Boob
Penguin Books Ltd, Iiarmondsworth,
Middlesex, England
Penguin Books Inc., 7110 Ambassador Road,
Baltimore, Maryland 2rzo7, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia

The poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti were fitst

published in the following volumes: Alkgria
(1919), Smtimmto def Tampt; (-i933), II Dohn
(1947), II Taccuin~ d•I Ver:chio (1960)
Copyright© Arnoldo Mondadoti Edi tore, 1969

First published by Penguin Books 1971

Translations copyright© Patrick Creagh, 1971

Made and printed in Great Britain by

C. Nicholls & Company Ltd
Se tin :ri.lonotype Garamond

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Contents

Introduction by Patrick Creagh 7

Eternal 13 Envoi 49
Ennui 14 Gully at Night 5o
Levant 15 Solitude 51
Carpet 16 Distant 5 2
MaybeaRiver 17 Transfiguration 53
Agony 18 Pleasure 55
Memory of Africa 19 AnotherNight 56
InaTunnel 20 June 57
Chiaroscuro 21 Futility 60
APeople 22 ClearSky 61
In Memoriam 24 Lucca 62
The Burie<l Harbour 26 ONight 63
Clear Desert Gold 27 Landscape 64
Watch z8 SilenceinLiguria 65
OnLeave 29 Concerning July 66
Sunset 30 Juno 67
Annihilation, 31 Concerning August 68
SuspendedMoment 35 EachShadeofGtey 69
Silence 34 ItWillWakeYou 70
Burden 35 ABreeze 71
Awakenings 36 Stars 12
Brothers 37 SpringofWatel: 73
IAmAlive 38 Quiet 74
1.Jy Rivers 39 Evening 75
Monotony 42 The Captain 76
The Clear Night 43 Where the Light 78
Sleepiness 44 Pity 79
Clash 4l Death Meditated On 83
Nostalgia 46 Song 87
Why? 47 Weightless 88
DaybyDay 89
Bitter Chiming 94
YouWereBroken 95
InMyVeins 97
The Angel of the Poor 98
Cry Out No More 99
Variations on Nothing too
Last Choruses for the
Promised Land 101
Introduction

Giuseppe Ungaretti was the son of Tuscan peasants who

emigrated to Egypt and ran a small bakery in a suburb of
Alexandria, It was there that Ungaretti was born, on 10
February 1888. Two years later his father was killed while
working on the Suez Canal diggings, but his mother kept
on the bakery until 1906. It was not until 1912 that
Ungaretti left Alexandria.
He went to Paris and, on the way, caught his first glimpse
ofltaly. Paris Was still in its heyday, so his introductic~n to
the European cultural scene was a characteristically inten-
sive one.
The war br.oke out and Ungaretti went to Milan, where
he.published his first poems in the magazine Lacerba. W'hen
I~ly entered the war in 191 j he joined up as a private in the
infantry and was sent to the front line on the Carso. There
he was in the thick of some of the worst fighting of the war.
His first small volume, Ii Porto Sepolto (The Buried Har-
bour), was written in the trenches and published (eighty
copies) in 1916. These poems are included in Allegria
(1919).
Back in Paris after the war, he brought out a volume of
poems in French (La Guerre), and married in 1920. He went
to live in Rome the following year, supporting himself as a
journalist. His second major volume, Sentimento de/ Tempo
(The Feeling of Time), came out in i933 and in 1936 he
V.'ent to Brazil as Professor of Italian at Sao Paolo. In 1939
his nine-year-old son Antonietto died of appendicitis. II
Do/ore (Grief), published in 1947, must he read in the light
of this tragic personal event. The most important of his
subsequent publications have been La Terra Promessa

7
(1950), Un Grir/() e Pae.raggi (19i2), and II Taccuino de/
Vecchio (1960), In addition he has translated works of
Shakespeare and Blake, G6ngora, MallarmC, Racine and
others.

This kind of summary can scarcely touch on the life of a

poet, let alone such a one as Ungaretti, who referred to his
early war poems - the ones that made him famous - as 'a
kind of diary', and gave his poetry as a whole the collective
title of Vita d'IJIJ uomo. But there are circumstances and
events that any reader of his poetry must bear in mind:
Ungaretti's birth and upbringing in Egypt and an education
that was more French than Italian; the experiences of the
First World War in which he fought and wrote; the death of
his son. From his earliest printed. works to the latest in-
cluded here, we feel that whenever Ungaretti mentions a
desert it is more to him than a metaphor. Desert scenes and
feelings arise spontaneously in him, part of his whole
apprehension of the world, Alexandria, for Ungaretti, was
a city that 'time is forever carrying away, at all times. It is a
city where the feeling of time, of time the destroyer, is
present before and above all.' He is speaking of Alexandria
as t?ough it were his own poetry.
Another, if less profound, effect of his foreign birth was
felt in his earliest literary influences. He spoke French as a
mother tongue, and \Vas drawn to the French poets he read
as a schoolboy, particularly Baudelaire and Mallarme. When
he started writing in Italian he was free of the literary
squabbles of Italian poetry and did not need to commit
himself to any current, or even think of doing so. He
started clean of slavish and modish ways that would have
blunted the immediacy of his talent.
And it was nothing, if not immediate. The earliest work
of most poets is imitative, because poets are self-taught,
8
and only with maturity do they sometimes find their own
unmistakable idiom. Ungaretti is a teasing exception. In his
first book he was already totally himself, making an
entirely new sound in Italian.
During the war, with not much time to spare in the
trenches, Ungaretti came out with a poetry that was minia-
ture, simple, stripped to the feeling bone. It was based
on a magic touch with language and unabashed truthful-
ness to the experience. A famous and untranslatable
example is 'Mattina' (Morning):
M'illumino
d'immenso

That's the lot. And this is one of Ungaretti's war poems,

which have in them less bitterness and more love of life
than most poets could manage if they were basking at ease
in Eden, instead of under gunfire.
Spontaneous, simple, very condensed but without pre-
tension, Ungaretti's poetry cut rhetoric dead. All the
emphasis was on the word itself, each word, its sound,
meaning, resonance, and the space it could be made to fill.
Ungaretti at this time was not ignorant of Italian
literature: Leopardi and Petrarca were tvlo of his most
revered masters. But he came to it with an unscholastic
freshness and an eye for what he wanted. It was their song
he was after: cercavo in /oro ii canta.
The impact of the tradition on Ungaretti can be seen in
the 'very slow distillation' that '\Vas his second volume,
Sentimenta de/ Tempo (1919-33). The measure is now the
phrase, not the single word, The verse is far more sensuous
and complex. In almost everything he writes there is a land-
scape, a real landscape (usually that of the Roman campagna)
that is also an image of a state or movement of feeling. The
verse has the weight and heat and also the languor and

9
 savagery, of summer. Summer is 'everywhere in these
poems: 'During those years I only managed to grasp nature
when it was at the sun's mercy and the travertine was
burning,.,'
W'hat 'summer' means to Ungaretti is not entirely sen-
suous. July 'goes stripping the earth's skeleton', In much
the same way, when Ungaretti begins to write on religious
themes ('Pity',p.79)itisnot on the comforting, sensuous or
ecstatic aspects of piety that he dwells, but on the empti-
ness, the deprivation, the absence of God in us. At the
same time he was discovering Rome, where he was now
living. 'This discovery meant coming to terms with the
baroque, and 'the baroque arouses the sense of the void'.
Such themes run through the poems of Sentimento de/
Tempo. With this book, all the critics agree, Ungaretti had
moved into a new phase, and he was climbing the ladder
of invention as neatly as any of them could have wished.
But the thing broke under him. His young son died and
he felt guilt as well as sorrow. 'The poems of II Do/ore (1947)
remained especially personal and painful; they had unique
value for him, but he was unable even to comment on them.
'The war and the tragedy of Italy that coincided with their
composition reinforced the note of desperation in them.
'The first inklings of La Terra Prome.r.ra came in about
19~5. but this work was interrupted by the experience of II
Do/ore and was published unfinished in 1950. Here it was
autumn that Ungaretti wished to celebrate: 'a late autumn,
from which the last signs of youth, of earthly youth, and
the last appetites of the flesh, are departing for ever'.
'There is nothing strained or conventional about
Ungaretti's identification of the phases of his life with the
seasons of the year. He simply followed his moods, in this
as in all things, trusting in his instincts to find fit language.
When he cannot find it, he knows and laments the fact ('In
My Veins'). Though far from ingenuous, he was a genuine
innocent. You will find sorrow and suffering, guilt and
remorse in his works, but not bitterness or cynicism. He
was as incapable of bearing a grudge against life as against
an individual, and incapable of hate. In spite of proclaiming
himself uomo di pena, man of sorrows, he was a poet of joy.
Eternal

Between one flower picked and the other given

the inexpressible nothing

IJ
Ennui

Even tonight will pass

This wandering solitude

wavering shadow of tramwires
on the damp asphalt

I watch the heads of cabbies

ina doze
lolling
Levant*

The line of smoke

dies out upon
the distant ring of the sky

Clatter of heels clapping of hands

and the clarinet's shrill flouxishes
and the sky is ashen
trembles gentle uneasy
like a dove

In the stern Syrian emigrants are dancing

In the bow a young man is alone

On Saturday evenings at this time

Jews
in those parts
carry away
their dead
through the shell's spiralling
uncertainties
of alleyways
of lights

Churning of water
like the racket from the stern
that I heru: within the shadow
of
sleep
*Ungaretti !s leaving his biuhp\ace of A!exa.ndrla on his way to
France. 'ln those parts' tef'ci:s to Alexandria.

"
Carpet

Each colour expands and stretches out

into the other colours

'To be the more alone if you look at it

lffqybe a Iliver*

There is the mist that blots us out

Maybe a river is born up here

I listen to the Sirens' song

from the lake where the city was

*Ungaretti explains that the mist had changed Milan into a lake that
'like a mirage' reminded him of the lake of Mareotis, near Alexandria.
Ago~

To die like thirsty larks

upon the mirage

Or as the quail
the sea once past
having no more
will to fly
dies in the first thickets

But not to live on lamentation

like a blinded goldfinch

,,
_ .. ~
Memory of Africa
'!'he sun snatches the city away

We can no longer see

Not even the graves hold out for long

19
In a Tunnel

An eye of stars
peers at us from that pool
and filters down its icy benediction
to this aquarium
of sleep-walking boredom

•o
Chiaroscuro

Even the graves have vanished

Black infinite space draped

from this balcony
down to the graveyard

And it occurred to me to visit

my Arab friend
who killed himself the other evening

Day again

The graves return

crouching in the dismal green
of the last darkness
in the troubled green
of the first light

"
A People*

I fled from the lonely herd of palms

and the moon
infinite over barren nights

The most enclosed of nights

lugubrious turtle
gropes

No colour lasts

The drunken pearl of doubt

already moves the dawn and
at its momentary feet
embers

The cries of a new \Vind

are already swarming

Stream-beds are hidden in the hills

of vanished fanfares

Return you ancient mirrors

you hidden water's edges

And
while the sharp young shoots
of the high snows border
the view my fathers used to sec
the sails align
in the clear calm
*On his way to France, Ungaretti caught his lint glimpse of Italy.

__,u.&1
0 my country every age of you.rs
wakens in my blood

Confidently you advance and sing

over a starving sea
In Memoriam
Locvizza, 30 September 1916

He was called
Mohammed Sheab

Descendant of nomad emirs

a suicide
because he no longer had
a country

He loved France
and changed his name

Became Marcel
but was not French
and had forgotten how
to live
in his own people's tent
where they listen to the sing...song
of the Koran
as they sip coffee

He did not know

how to release
the song
of his unconstraint

I followed his coffin

I and the manageress of the hotel
where we li.ved
in Paris

'4
number j rue des Carmes
steep decrepit allryway

He rests
in the cemetery at I vry
a suburb that always
looks
like the day
they dismantle a fairground

And perhaps only I

still know
he lived

"
 The Buried Harbour*
Mariano, z9 June 1916

The poet goes there

then retums to the light with his songs
and scatters them

Of this poetry
there remains to me
that nothing
of inexhaustible secrecy

*This is the title poem of a small but very important book, published
in 1916. It contained the poems wtittenin Ungarettl's first year of wu.
 Clear Desert Gold*
Cima Quattro, z.1 December, 1915

Sway of smoking wings

cuts short the eyes' silence

The wind snaps off the coral buds

of a thirst for kisses

I gape at dawn

Life is poured out for me

in a whirlpool of nostalgias

Now I mirror those corners of the world

I had for companions
and sniff out my way

Even unto death at the mercy of our journey

We have the truces of sleep

The sun dries tears

I cover myself with a warm cloak

of clear gold

Prom this shelf of desolation

I lean into the arms
of the good weather

*Original title - 'Lindoro di deserto'. Ungarctti explains: 'Lindoro

is one of the characters of the Venetian masques; the word indicates
both the poet himself and the effect of sun described in the poem.'
'This shelf of desolation'; the poem was written on 'Ci.ma Quattro',
i.e. 'Hill 4' - on the front line,

'7
Watch
Cima Quattro, z.3 December 191s

A whole night through

thrown down beside
a butchered comrade
with his clenched teeth
turned to the full moon
and the clutching
of his hands
thrust
into my silence
Ibave written
letters full of love

Never have I
clung
so fast to life

,,
On Leave
Versa, z.7 April 1916,

Who will come with me through the fidds

The sun scatters itsdf in diamond

drops of water
on the pliant grass

I fall in with
the pleasure
of the calm-hearted universe

The mountains swell

in draughts of lilac shadow
and row along with the sky

In the light vault above

the spell has broken

And I plummet into myself

And hide in a nest within myself

Sunset
Versa, 2.0 May 1916

The sky's fl.ushedface

wakens oases
for love's nomad

30
Annihilation
Versa, i1 May 1916

The heart has been prodigal of fireflies

has flared and died
from green to green
I have numbered the pulses

With my two hands I mould the soil

scattered with crickets
I tune myself
to a heart
subdued and steady

She loves me she loves me not

I have enamelled myself
with daisies
I have put do\vn roots
into the rotten earth
I have grown
like a poppy
on its twisted stem
I have gathered myself
in the fall
of hawthorn

Today
like the Isonzo
river of blue asphalt
I settle down
in the ashes of its gravd bed
bared by the sun
,,
and change
into a flight of clouds

Fully at last
unleashed
the usual self surprised
no longer beats the rhythm of the heart
has neither time nor place
is happy

On my lips I have
the kiss of marble
Suspended Moment*
Mariano, 2.j June 1916

March on march on
I have found the well
of love again

In the eye
of a thousand-and-one-nights
I have rested

In the abando·ned gardens

she came in to rest
like a dove

In the fainting
midday air
I picked
for her
oranges and jasmine

*Original title- 'Pase'.

lJ
Silence
Mariano, z 7 June 1916

I know a city
that every day fills to the brim with sunlight
and in that instant everything is enchanted

I left one evening

In my heart the rasp of the cicadas

went on

From the white

painted vessel
I saw
my city disappear
leaving
an embrace of lights
for a while
in the troubled air
hanging

l4
Burden
Mariano, 29 June 1916

That peasant
trusts in his
St Antony medal
and walks lightly

But bone-naked
on its own
without mirage
I bear my soul

ll
Awakfnings
Mariano, z9 June r916

Each moment
I have lived
once before
in a deep epoch
outside myself

I am far off with memory

following those lost lives

I awake in a bath
of cherished accustomed things
surprised
and sweetened

I chase clouds that

softly dissolve
with watchful eyes
and I remember
some dead friend

But what is God?

And the terrified

creature opens
wide its eyes
and welcomes
drops of stars
and the dumb plain

And feels
restored
Brothers
Mariano, Ij July 1916

What regiment are you from

brothers?

Word trembling
in the night

A leaf just opening

In the racked air

involuntary revolt
of man face to face with his own
fragility

Brothers

l7
I Am Alive
Valloncello di Cima Quattro,' August 1916

Like this swne

of Monte San Michele
as cold as this
as hard as this
as dried as this
as stubborn as this
as utterly
dispirited as this

Like this stone

is my unseen
weeping

Death
we discount
by living

,.
My Rivers

I cleave to this mutilated tree

forsaken in this hollow
that is as lifeless
as a circus
bet\veen performances
and I watch
the clouds pass
quietly across the moon

This morning I stretched out

in an urn of water
and like a relic
rested

The Isonzo polished me

in its current
like one of its own stones

I hoisted myself
up and went
like an acrobat
over the water

I squatted down
near my clothes
foul with war
and like a bedouin
bowed down to receive
the sun

39
 'This is the Isonzo
and here I have
best known myself to be
an obedient nerve
of the universe

My torture is
not to believe myself
in harmony

But those hidden

hands that knead me
give tome
the rarest
happiness

I have reviewed
the ages
of my life

These are
my rivers

'This is the Serchio*

which has given water
for two thousand years maybe
to my peasant people
to my father and my mother

'This is the Nile

that saw me
born and growing
burning with ignorance
in the wide plains
*The Serchio flows neat Lucca,
This is the Seine
and in its turbulence
I have been stirred
and come to know myself

These are my rivers

summed up in the Isonzo

This is my nostalgia
that shines through to me
in each of them
now that it is night
that my life seems to me
a corolla
of shadows

4'
Mono!Of!Y
Valloncello dell' Albero Isolato, %2. August 1916

Halted at two stones

I weaken
beneath this
blurred vault
of sky

The tangle of paths

crowds my blindness

There is nothing meaner

than this monotony

At onetime
I did not know
that even
the way the sky
fades at evening
is just an
ordinary thing

And upon my soothed

African soil
with an arpeggio
lost in the air
I was renewed
The Clear Night
Devetachi, z4August 1916

What song has risen tonight

to weave
the heart's crystal echo with
the stars

What feast has risen

from rejoicing heart

I have been
a pool of darkness

Now like a child at the nipple

I bite at
space

Now I am drunk with

universe

43
Sleepiness
From Devetachi to San Michele, 25 August 1916

These hump-backed hills

have gone to bed
in the darkness of the valleys

Now nothing reaches me

there is nothing left
but a rattle of crickets

That keeps step

with my troubled thoughts

44
Clash
Locviz.za, 23 September 1916

With my wolf's hunger

I pull down
my lamb's body

I am like
the helpless boat
and like the !etching ocean

45
Nostalgia
Locviz.za, z8 September 1916

Wh'n
night is almost over
a little before spring starts
and people
seldom pass

A dark colour
of weeping
thickens over Paris

At the comer
ofa bridge
I contemplate
the boundless silence
of a slender girl

Our two
maladies
run together

And as if carried somewhere else

there we stay
W6'?
Carsia Guilia, r9x6

My dark lost heart

needs some relief

In the muddy clefts of rocks

like a grass-blade belonging here
it wants to tremble gently in the light

But lam
in the sling of time
only the chips of crumbling stone
on the makeshift road
of war

Ever since
he looked into the immortal
face of the world
this madman
falling into the labyrinth
of his vexed heart
has longed to know

My listening heart
has been packed down
like a wheel-rut
but found that it was following
the wake
of a dead journey

I watch the horizon

scabbed with craters

47
My heart wants to fl.are
at least as tonight does
at least with the jet of rockets

I carry a heart
that thunders underground
and shatters
like a shell
on the plain
but does not leave me with
even a hint of flight

Poor heart
stunned
with unknowing
Envoi*
Locvizza, 2. October 1916

Dear
Ettore Serta
poetry
is the world the human race
my own life
all flowered from the word
the transparent wonder
of a delirious ferment

When I find
one single word
in this my silence
it is hewn into my life
like an abyss

*This is the last poem in II Porro s~pg/Jo and is addressed to Ettore

Serra, who published the book.

49
Gul(y at Night
Naples, 2.6 December 1916

Tonight's
faoe
is dry
as a piece of
parchment

This nomad
bent
softened with snow
lets go
like a cuded up
loof

Unending time
makes use of me

"'
rustle
Solitude
Santa Maria LaLonga, 26 January 1917

But my cries
strike
like thunder
on the faint vault
of the sky

They fall back

terrified

"
Distant
Versa, 15 February 1917

Distant into a distant land

like a blind man
they have led me by the hand

"
Transfiguration*
Versa, 16 February 1917

I srand
my back to a stack of
bronzed hay

An acrid spasm
breaks and swarms
from the rich frurows

Well-born I feel myself to be

sprung from people of the soil

I feel myself behind the eyes

of the man as gnarled
as the bark
of the mulberry-trees he lops

Eyes attentive to
the phases of the sky

Feel myself
in the children's faces
like flushed fruit
burning
among the naked trees

Like a cloud
I am clarified
in sunlight
*Ungaretti's emotional discovery of his roots in It8J.y, and cspcclally
•mong the Tuscan peasantry, is a theme he returns to several timca.
I feel dispersed
ina kiss
that conswnes me
and calms me
Pleasure
Versa, 18 February 1917

I bum with the

fever
of this spate of light

I welcome this
day like
a sweetening fruit

Tonight
I shall feel
remorse like a
howl
lost in the
desert

''
Another Night
Vallone, 20 April 1917

In this dark
with frozen hands
I make out
my face

I see myself
adrift in infinite space
June*
Campolongo, s July 1917

Wh=
will this night
die for me
and I like any other
be able to look at it
and go to sleep
to the hush
of the waves
that make their last
somersault
under the mimosa wall
around my house

When again will I wake

in your body
various
as the voice of the nightingale

It stretches out
like the shining
colour of ripe wheat

In the translucency
of water
the tissued gold
of your skin
will be frosted with blackness
*Images of Alexandria are mixed with those of the battlefieJd.

l7
 Poised
on the ringing
flagstones
of the air
you will be
like a panther

In the shifting
edges
of the shade
you will shed your leaves

Raging
dumbly in
that dust
you will smother me

Thon
you will half close your eyes

We shall see our love lie down

like evening

Calm again
I shall see
your pupils die to me
on the bitumen horizon
of your eyes

Now
the sky has closed
~

at this time
in my home in Africa
the jasmine does
,,
I have lost the way to sleep

I waver
at a street·comer
like a firefly

Will tonight
die for me

l9
Futility
Vallone, 19 August 1917

Suddenly
high
above the rubble
spreads the crystal
wonder
ofboundless space

And the man

bent
over the water
startled
by the sun
comes back to his senses
as a shadow

Cradled and
gradually
crushed

60
Clear Sky
Bois de Courton, July 1918

After so much
mist
one
by one
the stars
unveil

I breathe in
the cool air
that the colour of the sky
gives me

I know I am
a passing
image

Caught in an immortal
circle
 Lucca*

At my home in Egypt, after dinner, when we had said the

rosary, my mother used to teJl us about these places.
My childhood was enchanted by them,
Life in this town is pious and fanatical,
One is never inside these walls except in passing,
'The aim here is to get away.
I sit outside the restaurant door with people who
speak Of California as if it were their farm,
I am terrified at discovering myself in the features of
these people.
Now I feel the blood of my dead run hot in my veins.
I too have swung a mattock.
In the steaming thighs of the earth I find I am
laughing.
Farewell desires, nostalgias.
I know of past and future as much as a man can know.
Now I know my destined end, and my beginnings.
'There is nothing left for me to desecrate, nothing to
long for.
I have enjoyed everything, and suffered.
There is nothing for it but to come to terms with
death.
I shall therefore quietly raise a progeny.
When a malignant hunger forced me into mortal
loves, I praised life.
Now that I, even I, think of love as a guarantee of the
species, I have death in mind.
"'In this poem Ungaretti openly shows the ibfluenee of his friend
Apollinaire. (The line beginning 'I know of past and future' is
virtually copied f.rom Lajob6 trmS/$). But he soon dtopped this manner.
0 Night
1919

The vast anxiety of dawn

Reveals the web of branches,

Sorrowful awakenings.

Leaves, sister leaves,

I listen to your lamenting.

Autumns,
Dying sweetnesses.

Oyouth,
The time of setting out is scarcely over,

High skies of youth,

Unbridled onrush.

And already I am forsaken.

Lost in this stooping melancholy.

But night scatters distances,

Oceanic silences,
Star-nests of illusion,

Onight.
Landscape

Morning
She has a garland of fresh thoughts,
Shines in the flowered water.

Afternoon
The mountains have dwindled to thin wisps and the
encroaching desert sv,,arnis with in1patiences and even
sleep troubles and even the statues are troubled.

Evening
Catching fire she sees that she is naked, the flushed
complexion of the sea gone bottle green, it is nothing but
mother-of-pearl.
That pang of shame in things justilleshuman sorrow,
revealing for a moment the ceaseless wasting away of all
that is.

Night
Everything is stretched out, thinned out, confused,
Whistles of departing trains.
And here, now there are no longer witnesses,
my own true face appears, weary and disappointed.
Silence in Liguria

A sinuously receding plain of water.

Still out of sight the sun

Bathes in its urns,

A colour of soft flesh passes across,

And suddenly she opens

The great calm of her eyes towards the bays.

The sunken shadow of the rocks dies.

Sweetness budding out from joyful hips,

True love is a gentle kindling,

And I enjoy her

Suffused by the alabaster wing
Of an immobile morning.
Concerning Jufy
1931

When she hurls herself upon us

The brave foliage becomes
A sad rose colour.

She melts ravines, drinks rivers,

Mangles rocks, shines,
She is a rage that never weakens, she is implacable,
She scatters space, blinds purposes,
She is summer and throughout the centuries
With her calcinating eyes
She goes stripping the earth's skeleton.

66
Juno
1931

Round to that perfect ripeness that torments me,

One thigh rising from upon the other •.•

Scatter your fury through one pungent night I

Concerning August
19zi:

Hungry mourning buzz among the living,

Monotonous high·seas,
But without solitude,

Muffled fanfares from prostrated harvests,

Summer,

You strip the flints right to their dusky sockets,

You waken ashes in the colosseums. , ,

What Erebus shrieked you?

68
Each Shade of Grey
1 9 2s

From the snake's sloughed skin

To the timorous mole
Each shade of grey lingers on the cathedrals • , •

Like a gilded ship the sun

Takes leave of star after star
And frowns under the pergola , • ,

Like a tired forehead

Night has reappeared
In the hollow of a hand •••
Ii Will Wakf You

Beautiful moment, come back close to me.

Speak to me, youth,

At this engulfing hour,

Good thought, sit down a moment,

The hour of black light in the veins

And of dumb shrieks in mirrors,
Of the treacherous precipices of thirst, ••

And from the basest, blindest dust

Comes the promise of the golden age:

With the softness offirst steps

Wbenthemn
Has touched the night-earth
Disso/11ing every pall into freshness,
Returningpaler to the skies
A joyous boe!J will wakeyou.

,,
A Breeze
1927

Hearing the sky

Sword of morning,
And the hill that climbs into its lap,
I return to the accustomed harmony.

A weary clump of trees

Grasps the slope at its foot.

From the mesh of branches

I see Bights reborn, ••
Stars

The fables come to blaze again on high.

They will fall with the leaves at the .first wind.

But let the next gust come,

New lustres will return.

7'
 Spring of Water
19z7

The sky has already grown too pale

And now comes shining back
And sows the spring with eyes.

Awakened viper,
Slender idol, stripling river,
Soul, summer come back by night,
The sky is dreaming.

Pray then, I love to hear you,

Changeful grave.

7l
Quiet

The grapes are ripe, the field ploughed,

The hill severs from the clouds.

On summer's dusty mirrors

Shadow has fallen,

Between uncertain fingers

Their gleam is clear,
And distant,

With the swallows flies

The last anguish.

74

.•
Evening
1929

At the foot of the ravines of evening

Runs a clear
Olive-coloured stream,

And reaches the brief forgetful 6re,

Now in the smoke I hear crickets and frogs,

Where tenderly tremble the grasses,

7l
Tbe Captain*
1929

I was ready for any departure,

When you have secrets, night, you have pity too.

Has a child I woke

With a start, it calmed me
To hear stray dogs howling
In the absent street, They seemed to me
More so even than the lamp that burned
Always before the Madonna in that room,
Mystical company.

And by chasing echoes

From before my birth,
Was I not amazed at heart, a man?

But when, 0 night, your face was bare

And flung down on stone
I was nothing but an elemental nerve,
Maddened, manifest in every object,
Humility was crushing.

The Captain was serene,

(The moon came into the sky)

*Another poem in which memories of childhood and wai: ate

mingled. 'Echoes/From before my birth': the poet's ancc:stots from
Lucca. 'And flung down on stone' evokes the landscape of war. 'The
C.ptaln' may be given a legendary aura, but he really existed as one
Nazzareno Cremona, ofUngai:etti's regiment.
He WaJ tall and n~ver .rtaoped.

(A cloud passed across it)

No one saw him fall,

No ane heard him groan,
He reapptared stretched in afllr1'0w,
His hands were crossed on hi.r chest,

I clo'sed his rye.r.

(The moon is a veil)

He .teemed winged.

77
 Where the Light

Like a buoyant thrush

In the happy wind above young meadows,
My arms know you are light, come,

We will forget this world,

Its ills and curses and the sky,
And my blood that is quick to war,
Forget those passes mindful of shadow
In the flush of new mornings.

Where the light no longer moves a leaf,

Our dreams and troubles gone to othet shores,
Where evening rests,
Come I will lead you
To the hills of gold.

Pree from age, time being still,

In its lost halo
Will our sheet be.

78

...
'
I am a wounded man.

And I wish to leave this place

And arrive at last,
Pity, where that man is heard
Who is alone with himself.

I have nothing but goodwill and pride.

I feel in exile in the midst of men.

Yet I run suffering for their sake.

Am I unworthy to return into myself?

I have peopled the silence with names,

Have I cut heart and mind to pieces

Only to fall under a yoke of words?

I reign over ghosts.

0 dead leaves,
Soul wafted here and there •. ,

No, I hate the wind and its

Immemorial beast's voice.
*Ungaretti refers to this poem as the fust dclini.tc sign of his return
to the Chtistian faith,

79
God, do those who implore you
Only know you now by name?

You have driven me out from life.

Will you drive me out from death?

Man is perhaps unworthy even to hope.

Has even the spring of remorse dried up?

What does sin matter

If it no longer leads to purity?

The flesh scarcely remembers

'That once it was strong.

Maddened and worn out, the soul.

God, look upon our weakness.

We would ask for something certain.

Do you no longer even laugh at us?

Lament us then, 0 cruelty.

I can no longer bear to stay walled up

In desire without love.

Show us some token of justice.

What is your law?

Bo
Strike with your lightning at my wretched feelings,
Free me from anguish.

I am sick of shrieking soundlessly.

'
Grieving flesh
That at one time teemed with joy,
Half-closed eyes of a tired awakening,
Over-ripened soul, do you see
What I shall be, once fallen into the earth?

Through the living runs the road of the dead,

We ourselves are the crowding shades,

They are the seed that bursts for us in dreams,

Theirs is the distance that is left to us,

Theirs is the shadow that gives weight to names.

The hope of a mound of shade

And nothing more, is that our destiny?

And are you nothing but a dream, 0 God?

Reckless as we are, we want you

At least to be like a dream.

That is born of clearest mildness.

It 'does not fl.utter in clouds of branches

,,
Like morning sparrows
At the eyelids' edges.

It remains and rots in us, a mysterious wound.

l
The light that pierces us
Is an ever finer thread,

Do you no longer dazzle, withoU:t killing?

Grant me this supreme joy.

4
Man, monotonous universe,
Thinks he is piling up his goods
And from his feverish hands
Only endings endlessly emerge.

Strung over the void

On his spider's thread
He fears nothing and attracts
Nothing but his own cry.

He makes good the v.'aste by raising tombs,

And to speak of you, Eternal One,
Has to use swearwords.

,,
 Death Meditated On

First Canto

1
0 sister of shadow,
The fiercer the light is, the more a thing of night,
You pursue me, death.

In a perfect garden
Innocent longing gave birth to you
And peace was lost,
Pensive death,
On your mouth.

Ever since that instant

I have heard you in the mind's flow
Probing distances,
You who copy the eternal one, but suffer.

Venomous mother of the ages

In the fear of the pulse
And of solitude,

Beauty tormented and laughing,

Io the drowsing of the flesh

A fugitive dreamer,

Unsleepingathlete
Of our greatness,

When you have tamed me, say:

,,
 Through the misery of living men
Will my shade's Bight be long?

Second Canto
The dark vigil of our forefathern
Gouges the inner lives
Of our unhappy mask
(Cloister of the infinite}
With fanatic flattery.

Death, dumb word,

Sand like a bed la.id down
By the blood,
I hear you sing like a cicada
In the tarnished rose of reflections,

Third Canto
The endless mockery of our forefathers
Cuts the secret furrows
In our unhappy mask.

You in the deep light,

0 troubled silence,
Persist like the irascible cicadas.

Fourth Canto
Clouds took me by the hand.

On the hill I burn up space and time,

Like one of your messengern,
Li,ke a dream, sacred death.

84
Fifth Canto
You have closed your eyes.

A night is born
Full of sham hollows,
Of dead sounds
As of the corks
Of nets dropped in the water.

Your hands become like a breeze

From inviolable distances,
Intangible as ideas

And the ambiguity of the moon

And its rocking, gentlest things.
If you lay those hands upon my eyes
'They touch my soul

You are the woman who passes

Like a leaf

And you leave the trees a blaze of autumn.

Sixth Canto
0 lovdy quarry,
Voice of night,
Your movements
Rouse a fever.

Only you, crazed memory,

Could have imprisoned liberty.

On your flesh, intangible

,,
And wavering in troubled mirrors,
What crimes, 0 dream, did you not
Teach me to consummate?

With you, my ghosts, I never have re;straint,

And when day comes my heart is full

Of your remorse.

86
Song

Again I see your slow mouth

(The sea flows to meet it in the night)
And the mare of your loins
Hurling you in agony
Into my singing arms,
And a sleep retrieving you
To coloured things and new deaths.

And the cruel solitude

That every lover finds within himself,
Now an endless grave,
Divides me from you for ever.

Dear one, distant as in a mirror •••

87
Weightless
1934

For a God who laughs like a child,

So many cries of sparrows,
So many dances in the boughs,

A soul makes itself weightless,

The meado\vs take on such a tenderrless,
Such modesty rekindles in the eyes,

The hands like leaves

Are spellbound in the air, ..

Who fears any more, who judges?

88
Dtry by Diry*
1940-46

'No one, mother, has ever suffered so. , • •

And the face already dead
But still the living eyes
Turned from the pillow towards the window,
And sparrows filled th~ room
Coming for the crumbs the father scattered
To distract his child •. ,

'
Now only in dreams will I be able
To kiss those trusting hands •..
And I talk, I work,
I've scarcely changed, I smoke, I am afraid •••
How is it I stand up to so much night? •••

l
The years will bring me
God knows what other horrors,
But if I felt you by me
You would console me •••

4
Never, you will never know how it fills me with light,
*A series of fragments written at various times after the death of the
poet's nine-yeat-oldson in 1939.
The shade that comes and stands beside me, shyly,
When I no longer hope, ..

Where is it now, where is the innocent voice

That running and resounding from room to room
Raised a tire.cl man from his troubles? •..
The earth has spoilt it, it is protected by
A past of fairytales •..

6
Every other voice is a fading echo
Now that one voice calls me
From the immortal heights,.,

7
In the sky I seek your happy fuce,
And may these eyes of mine see nothing else
When God wills it that they too shall close •. ,

8
And I love you, love you, and it isanendlessWrenchingl •••

9
Ferocious earth, monstrous sea
Divide me from the place where the grave is
Where that tormented body
Now \vastes away ...
It doesn't matter. , •. Ever more distinctly
I hear th&t voice of soul
That I failed to succour here below ...
More joyful and more friendly
As the minutes pass,
It isolates me in its simple secret ...

I have gone back to the hills, to the beloved pines,

And the homely accent of the -~rind's rhythm
That I will hear no more with you
Breaks me with every gust ...

The swallow passes and summer with her

And I too, I tell myself, will pass, ..
But of the love that rends me may some sign
Remain, apart from this brief misting..aver,
If from this hell I reach some kind of peace •.•

"
Under the axe the disenchanted branch
Falls with scarcely a complaint, less
Even than the leaf at the breeze's touch ...
And it was fury that cut dov.'n the tender
Form, and the eager
Compassion of a voice consumes me ...

,,
Summer brings me no more furies,
Nor spring its forebodings;
,,
You can go your way, autumn
With your idiot splendours:
For a desire stripped bare, winter
Extends the gentlest season I , , ,

'4
Already the drought of autumn
Has sunk into my bones,
But, drawn out by the shadows,
There survives an endless
Demented splendour:
The secret torment of the twilight buried
In an abyss •.•

,,
Will I always recall without remorse
A bewitching agony of the senses?
Blind man, listen: 'A spirit has departed
Still unharmed by the common lash of life •.. •

Will I be less cast down to hear no more

The living cries of his innocence
Than to feel almost dead in me
The dreadful shudder of guilt?

,6
In the dazzle blaring from the windows
Shade frames a reflection on the tablecloth,
In the faint lustre of a jar the swollen
Hydrangeas from the flower-bed, a drunken swift.
The skyscraper in a blaze of clouds,
A child rocking on a bough, return to mind •••
Inexhaustible thunder of the waves
Forces upon me then, invades the room
And, on the uneasy stillness of a blue
Horizon, all the walls dissolve •.•

,,
Mild weather, and perhaps you pass close by
Saying: 'May this sun and so much space
Calm you. In the pure wind you can hear
Time walking, and my voice.
Little by little I have closed and gathered
The mute impulse of your hope in me.
For you I am the dawn and the unbroken day.'

9l
 Bitter Chiming

Or else on an October afternoon

From the harmonious hills
Amongst thick lowering clouds
The horses of the Heavenly Twins,
At whose hoofs a boy
Had paused enchanted,
Over storm-water launched

(By a bitter chiming of memories

Towards shadows of banana trees
And of giant turtles
Lumbering between masses
Of vast impassive waters:
Under a different order of stars
Among ufJ.familiar seagulls)

Their flight to the level place where the boy

Rummaging in the sand -
The transparency of his beloved £ngers
Wet with driven rain
Turned to flame by splendour of the lightning-
Clutched all four elements.

But death is colourless and without senses

And ignorant of any law, as ever,
Already grazed him
With its shameless teeth.

94
 You Were Broken

'
The many grey, monstrous, scattered stones
Still shuddering in the hidden slings
Of stifled primal flames
Or in the terrors of virgin floods
Crumbling in implacable embraces,
-Don't you remember them, on a void horizon
Rigid above the dazzle of the sand?

And leaning, and spreading at the only

Meeting-place of shade in the whole valley,
The monkey-puzzle, breathless, overbloated,
Wound in the arduous flint of lonely fibres,
More stubborn even than the other damned,
Its mouth cool with butterflies and grasses
Where it tore itself from its own roots,
- Don't you remember it, delirious mute
Upon a rounded stone one foot across
In perfect balance
Magically there?

From branch to branch light firecrest

Avld eyes drunk with wonder
You reached its dappled peak,
Reckless one, child of music,
Only to see once more in the last light
Of a deep still sea-chasm
Legendary turtles
Stirring amongst the seaweed,

9l
Nature's utmost tension
And underwater pageants,
Funereal warnings.

'
You raised your arms like wings
And gave rebirth to the wind
Running in the heaviness of the still air,

No one ever saw you rest

Your light dancer's foot,

'
Grace, happy thing,
In such a hardened blindness
How could you not be broken?
You, simple breath and crystal,

A flash of light too human for the savage,

Pitiless, frenzied, throbbing
Roar of a naked sun.
In My Veins

Desire still riding hard in my veins

That by now are almost empty tombs,
In my freezing bones the stone,
In my spirit the dumb lament,
Invincible iniquity: dissolve them.

From remorse, howl without end,

In the unutterable daxk
Qaustral terror,
Redeem me, raise
Your merciful lashes from your long sleep.

Engendering mind, raise once more

Your rose-coloured unexpected sign,
And take me by surprise again.
Unhoped for, yet arise
0 unbelievable dimension, peace;

In the soaring landscape make it so

That I may once more spell out simple words,

97
Tbe Angel of tbe Poor*

Now that darkened minds are invaded by

Harsher pity of blood and of the earth,
Now at each heartbeat we are measured by
The silence of so many unjust deaths,

Now the angel of the poor awakes,

Gentleness in the soul, that has survived •••

With the undying gesture of the centuries

He comes do'\\'Il to lead his ancient people
In the thick of shadows ...

*One of the s~ies I Ri>ordi, dated r942-6. The ne:ii;t poem, 'Cry Out
No h1ore', also belongs to the series. Ungaretti returned to Italy in
1942, whea the country was about to pay the price of fascism.
Cry Out No More

Stop killing the dead,

Cry out no more, do not cry out
If you wish still to hear them,
If you hope not to perish.

Their whisper is imperceptible,

They make no more noise
Than the growth of grass,
Happy where no man passes.

99
Variations on Nothing

That nothing nothingness of sand that runs

Dumbly from the hourglass and sifts down,
And, momentary, the imprints on the flesh,
On the dying complexion, of a cloud ...

Then a hand that turns the hourglass over,

The return, the stirring, of the sand,
The unsounded silvering of a cloud
At the Erst brief glimmerings of dawn ...

The hand, in shadow, turned the hourglass over,

And that nothingness of sand running
Silently, is all we can still hear,
And that, being heard, does not go down to darkness.

mo
Last Choruses for the Promised Land*

'
Leeched upon today
All past days
And those to come.

For years and the length of centuries

Surprise at every instant
To know we are still alive,
That living still flows on as always,
Unexpected gifts and griefs
In the continual whirl
Of pointless changes.

Such by our destiny

Is the journey I am making,
In the winking of an eyelid
Unearthing, inventing
Time from top to bottom,
A refugee like all the rest
Who were, who are, who will be.

If at the point where one day meets the others

I come back still intent to find n1yself
And choose that moment,
It will make house in my soul for ever.
*Dated 1912-60, these ate included in II TMoui/11) tkl Ve;;hio (The
Old Man's Notebook). They do not really oonstitute a series. A
number of the poet's favourite themes - death, the desert, his dead
son, old age, etc. -will be 1eoognized in them,
,0,
The person, or the object or event
Or unfamiliar or familiar places
That roused that passion in me, or that ai:iguish,
Or mindless ecstasy
Or a firm friendship
Are now unchangeable, and part of me.

But will my life, now given to nothing else,

Growing from fear to fear,
Enlarging the emptiness, crowded with shadows
That stay to taunt it with the last
Desires of the pulse,
Will it be forced to watch
The desert spreading
Till it deprive me of
Even memory's savage charity?

'When one day leaves you, think

Of the next one coming.

For birth is full of promises

Though it is painful,
And the experience of each day reveals
That in binding, loosing or enduring
Days are nothing but a wisp of smoke.

4
We Ree towards our destination:
Who \vill know it?

ltis not Ithaca we dream of

Lost in a changing sea,
But our gaze goes to Sinai over the sands
That metes out tedious days.

We cross the desert with some last remains

Of a former image in our minds,

Of the Promised Land a living man

Knows nothing more.

6
If our journey lasted to eternity
It would not last an instant, death
Is here already, just before it.

An interrupted instant,
One life on earth can last no longer.

Ha man cease upon some Sinai's peak,

For those who stay the law will be renewed,
illusion become pitiless again.

7
If with one hand you skirt misfortune,
With the other you End
That this is not the whole, if not of ruins.

Surviving till you die: is that living?

One hand holds out against your destiny,

But look, the other tells you
That you can grasp nothing
But crumbs of memory.

8
I often wonder
What you and I were like before.

Were we perhaps thev.'anderingdupes of sleep?

Were those things that we achieved

Done in our sleep, in those times?

Far from each other, in an aurora of echoes,

And while you are reborn in me I hear
In the humming air, that you are waking from
A sleep that foresaw us Jong ago,

9
Each year, while I am finding out that February
Is sensitive, and dark from modesty,
With tiny flowers the mimosa bursts
Yellow. It is pictured in the window
Of that old house \vherc I used to live,
Also of this, where my last years are passing,

As I draw nearer to the enormous silence,

Will it be a sign that nothing dies
As long as its appearance keeps returning?

Or, at the end, will I learn that death

Reigns over nothing but appearances?
,0
Troubles you have hidden from me in your eyes,
So that I see nothing but the restless
Movement, in your lonely rest at night,
Of your remembering limbs,
Add still more shadows to my accustomed darkness,
More than ever they make me nothing but night,
In the dumb shriek, night.

"
It is mist, it drifts and flows, your absence,
It is hope th~t wears out hope.

Far from you, in the branches I no longer

Hear the whispers that lavish forth the leaves
With untried voices,
When you inflict upon my lifeless fibres
Scorches of spring.

"
To the turned back of a saddened man the west
Offers its spreading tarnishes of blood,
That from the bottom of nights of memory
When salvaged, in the void
Will soon be isolated,
They will bleed alone.

,,
Secret rose, you bud out over the abysses
Just as long as I am startled, remembering
As of a sudden, odours
While the lament is raised.

'05
The miracle evoked then blends that night
With that other night for me
When I pursued, to lose you and to .find you,
Dashed from the height of freedom
Down into scalding facts,
The dazzle and the rending.

'4
It is like the growing light
Or at the zenith: love.

If by a single instant
It moves beyond its noon
Then you may call it death.

,,
If sensuousness clutches them
In the desperate search for light,
He sees her as a cloud
Insatiably cutting through
A crush of storms, restraints.

,6
Between this star and that one
Night shuts itself away
In a measureless whirling void,

From this star-like solitude

To that star-like solitude.

__ ....
,,
To shine unseen
By the bewildered spaces where
The stars spend immemorial life
Maddened by the weight of solitude.

,,
To bear the light, the lash of it,
If the light appears,

To bear the light, to gaze

Unblinking at it,
I train you to suffering,
I expiate your guilt,

In order to bear the light

I set the lash against it,
And read an omen that, however terrible,
Ours will become sublime joy.

'9
Let sleep and waking end, from my tired flesh
Because of a healing touch of yours
May endless pang be absent.

,0
If you were once more ignorant of the hours,
May it not be that you will feel once more
The trembling that made you in an instant
Happy, rid of soul?
Could it be that you'll be once again
Without knowledge of evil, child?

With eyes that see nothing

Except, as it gushes into light,
The spring's chaste restlessness?

"
It is breathless, evening, unbreathable,
If you, my dead, and the few alive I love
Do not come to mind
To bring me good, when
Being alone, I understand, at evening.

,,
In this century of patience
And of anguished haste,
In the vaulted sky that is doubled down
And more, to make a husk, and that at will
Makes us minimal or limitless,
Flying at a height
Of eight miles you can see
'Time whiten and becon1e
A tender morning,
You can, no point of reference
In the space around you
Coming to remind you
'That you are being catapulted
At a thousand miles an hour,
Irrepressible curiosity
And fatal will
,os

_,J
Forgetting man
Who can never cease to grow
And has grown already to inhuman size,
You atn learn how it comes about that one
Man departs, with neither haste nor patience
Peering unQer veils
As far as the holocaust of the earth at evening.

'4
Let the kite grip me in blue talons
And at the sun's peak
Drop me on the sand
Food for crows.

No more I'll bear corruption on my back,

Spotless I shall be for fire,
For the croaking beaks,
For the reeking fangs of jackals,

Then will the bedouin

Rummaging in the sand
With his stick, discover
A pure white skeleton.

,,.
Moonless over Syracuse the night
Fell and the leaden waters
Reappeared unmoving in their channel,

Alone we passed inside the ruin,

A rope-maker moved from far away.

*In the ancient inhabited caves at Syracuse, there is one where the
rope-makers used to ply their trade, and which is called after them.

"9
,6
Choked with dying groans it disappears,
Returns, returns again, returns and raves,
And ever deeper within myself I hear it
Come more and more alive,
Clear, loving, beloved, and terrible,
Your dead voice.

'7
Love no longer is that storm
That in the glare of night
Not long ago still trapped me
Between insomnia and frenzy,

Flash from a lighthouse

Towards which the old captain
Calmly sails,
 Two 110!ume1 in thir rerier

Eugenio Montale
Selected Poems
Since the publication of 01.d di Seppia, his first volume
of poems, in 192s, Eugenio Montale has come to be
seen in Italy as 'the poet' of this century, His reputation
is now international.
Truth is the only star Montale has followed. Leaning
neither to the right nor the left, favouring neither the
Catholic Church nor the Communist Party, he has stood
on his own and kept his perception completely clear.
His poetry can be difficult, even obscure: but frequently
it reflects life in a strong, musical diction which bas
been compru:ed to that of T. S. Eliot.

Cesare Pavese
Selected Poems*
Cesare Pavese committed suicide in 19so at the height
of his liter.u:y career. Famous as a novelist, he will also
be remembered for his sympathetic poetry, which evokes
ttaditional., timeless Italian life and expresses profound
disquiet at the encroachment of soulless urbanization.
This collection illustrates his deepening preoccupation
with man's isolation and includes two of his most
important essays on poetry,

*Not for sale in the U.S.A.

...J