Giuseppe Ungaretti, the Interpreter of Poetry ‘Left with the Emptiness of an Endless Secret’
Giuseppe Ungaretti died on the night of June 2, 1970, after spending an intense life between Alexandria, France, the Karst front line, Brazil and Italy. He was first Catholic, then atheist and then Catholic again while, politically, he sympathised with and later moved away from Fascism. Ungaretti’s literary education was based on French literature. He read the poets of Decadentism and Symbolism, including Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire and then Apollinaire, and later came into contact with the Italian Futurists and Dadaists. Ungaretti should be credited with formally and profoundly renewing the traditional Italian verse. For this ability, he was considered by the poets of Hermeticism as one of their forerunners, and by many poets of the second half of the 20th century he was seen, together with Umberto Saba and Eugenio Montale, as a reference point.
Whether it is while reading his verses inspired by his experience at the front – where he constantly witnessed war and death – or his reflections expressing a desire for harmony within the cosmos, the reader is left breathless, as Ungaretti’s poetry embodies the "essential". Ungaretti has the ability to express himself briefly and with strength, creating snapshots of timeless moments. Behind the brevity and incredible incisiveness of many of his lyrics, however, there is great stylistic attention to the value of the word and of the poetic verses, which must be able to save man from despair and ‘universal shipwreck’.
What is most striking about his rich poetic tradition, considering that Ungaretti was a leading figure in the 1930s both as a writer and as an intellectual and prominent literary figure, it is the scarcity of the English translations of his works. Perhaps we should not be surprised. His most famous poem,
Mattina
Santa Maria la Longa 26 gennaio 1917
M’illumino
d’immenso
is almost impossible to render in English, despite the various translations (from "I flood myself //with the light of the immense" to "I grow radiant//in the immensity of it all"). We find again, in the two ternary verses with alliteration (illumino/ immenso) and in the repetition of the two geminate consonants (ll-mm), Ungaretti’s care for words. This musical effect, evocative and symbolic, is masterfully rendered by the Italian language and loses power and charm in any translation. ‘Mattina’ takes on an even more prophetic meaning if we think of the circumstances during which it was written, in the trenches. The discovery of a morning radiating light transports the poet – and the reader – into another dimension, which transcends the horror of war and death and offers what each new day brings: the brightness of the morning as a continuity of life, hope.
This aspect of writing is reminiscent of the immediacy of Japanese haiku (a poetic form of three verses with a 5/7/5 syllabic pattern), which indeed influenced Ungaretti’s earlier works, and we find it, in part, also in the poetry of William Carlos Williams who, like Ungaretti, wanted to purge the rhetorical essence of his immediate predecessors, removing from poetry what was unnecessary and created ‘disorder’.
The ability of Ungaretti's instantaneous description appears not only through short poems but also in the images the poet creates and disseminates in his work. Let us think of these verses taken from “Dormiveglia” (“Half Asleep”)
concealed
in trenches
like snails in their shells
In Ungaretti we don't find struggle, disgust, scenes of horror and blood, characteristic of the British World War I poetry (think about Owen, Graves, Sassoon), but rather restraint, avoidance of details (that are, indeed, more reminiscent of Pound’s earlier poems), and the discovery of something unexpected, of men, the universe and one's own soul.
Death does not appear to mow down souls and soldiers but takes on naturalistic traits, which convey the poet's message —the desire for a life that has a meaning, despite the daily challenges.
Agony
To die like the thirsty skylarks
upon mirage
Or like the quail
crossed the sea
in the first shrubs
having lost
the will to fly
But not to live bewailing
like a blinded goldfinch.
We can, therefore, define his poems as 'lyrics of a man at war', of a soldier able to note down what is happening around him and to search his soul through observation. This allows him to cling to beauty and love, to appreciate life, and therefore to turn to the deepest sense of existence and Creation, as happens in the 1933 collection “Sentimento del tempo” (“The feeling of Time”), to which this poem belongs
Vigil
Peak Four, December 23, 1915
A whole night long
thrown near
the body
of a slain comrade
his mouth snarling
at the full moon
his clawed fingers
ripping
into my silence
I wrote
letters
full of love
Never did I
so
cling to life
From a portrait of war and death, we move on to love letters, the only anchors for survival, the only lights in a night of desperation.
The short verses belonging to the collection "L'allegria" (“Joy”), published in 1931, evolve in subsequent works. The verse lengthens and the landscape changes. In the collection "Il Dolore" (“Pain”), published in 1947, the poet adopts traditional metrics and uses punctuation. Ungaretti has witnessed the collapse of the Fascist State, in which he had believed, and the horrors of Nazism. He takes refuge in the personal tragedy of the loss of his son and in the ordeal of the Italian people. But even here, despite the suffering, something remains: it is the timid shadow of a presence that comes alive, also thanks to his regained Christian faith, as expressed in these verses, taken from "Day by Day" and dedicated to his son, prematurely deceased:
How can I stand such night?...
The years will bring me
Who knows what other horrors,
But I felt you next to me,
You would have consoled me...
Never, you will never know how
The shadow that stands beside me, shy,
Brightens me
When I no longer hope...
Ungaretti does not give in to suffering, but he transfigures it, transforming it into an occasion for a bright and redeeming encounter.
Let us not forget that the poet is the one who lives the pain of the world through his own pain. He is the one who explores and descends towards the unknown with the desire, however, to ascend towards the light, as so well expressed in one of his first lyrics,
The Buried Harbour
Mariano, June 29, 1916
The poet docks there
and then to the light rises with his songs
and scatters them
Of this poetry
I'm left with the emptiness
of an endless secret
Link to the article in Italian, published in ‘Ciao Magazine’ here