Giuseppe Ungaretti
Giuseppe Ungaretti | |
---|---|
Born | Alexandria, Khedivate of Egypt | 8 February 1888
Died | 2 June 1970 Milan, Italy | (aged 82)
Occupation |
|
Nationality | Italian |
Period | 1912–1970 |
Genre | lyric poetry, free verse |
Subject | literary criticism |
Literary movement | Symbolism Futurism Dada Hermeticism |
Giuseppe Ungaretti (Italian:
During the interwar period, Ungaretti worked as a journalist with Benito Mussolini (whom he met during his socialist accession),[1] as well as a foreign-based correspondent for Il Popolo d'Italia and Gazzetta del Popolo. While briefly associated with the Dadaists, he developed Hermeticism as a personal take on poetry. After spending several years in Brazil, he returned home during World War II, and was assigned a teaching post at the University of Rome, where he spent the final decades of his life and career.
Biography
Early life
Ungaretti was born in Alexandria, Egypt into a family from the Tuscan city of Lucca.[2] Ungaretti's father worked on digging the Suez Canal, where he suffered a fatal accident in 1890.[2] His widowed mother, who ran a bakery on the edge of the Sahara, educated her child on the basis of Roman Catholic tenets.[2]
Giuseppe Ungaretti's formal education began in French, at Alexandria's Swiss School.
In 1912, the 24-year-old Giuseppe Ungaretti moved to Paris, France. On his way there, he stopped in Rome, Florence and Milan, meeting face to face with Prezzolini.[2] Ungaretti attended lectures at the Collège de France and the University of Paris, and had among his teachers was philosopher Henri Bergson, whom he reportedly admired.[2] The young writer also met and befriended French literary figure Guillaume Apollinaire, a promoter of Cubism and a forerunner of Surrealism.[5] Apollinaire's work came to be a noted influence on his own.[2] He was also in contact with the Italian expatriates, including leading representatives of Futurism such as Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Aldo Palazzeschi, Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici,[6] as well as with the independent visual artist Amedeo Modigliani.[7]
World War I and debut
Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Ungaretti, like his Futurist friends, supported an
By the time the
During that period in Paris, Ungaretti came to affiliate with the anti-establishment and anti-art current known as Dadaism. He was present in the Paris-based Dadaist circle led by Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, being, alongside Alberto Savinio, Julius Evola, Gino Cantarelli, Aldo Fiozzi and Enrico Prampolini, one of the figures who established a transition from Italian Futurism to Dada.[14] In May 1921, he was present at the Dadaist mock trial of reactionary author Maurice Barrès, during which the Dadaist movement began to separate itself into two competing parts, headed respectively by Tzara and André Breton.[15] He was also affiliated with the literary circle formed around the journal La Ronda.[13]
Hermeticism and fascism
The year after his marriage, Ungaretti returned to Italy, settling in Rome as a
In 1925, Ungaretti experienced a religious crisis, which, three years later, made him return to the Roman Catholic Church.[8] Meanwhile, he contributed to a number of journals and published a series of poetry volumes, before becoming a foreign correspondent for Gazzetta del Popolo in 1931, and traveling not only to Egypt, Corsica and the Netherlands, but also to various regions of Italy.[8]
It was during this period that Ungaretti introduced Ermetismo, baptized with the Italian-language word for "Hermeticism".[18] The new trend, inspired by both Symbolism and Futurism, had its origins in both Il porto sepolto, where Ungaretti had eliminated structure, syntax and punctuation, and the earlier contributions of Arturo Onofri.[18] The style was indebted to the influence of Symbolists from Edgar Allan Poe to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé and Paul Valéry.[18] Alongside Ungaretti, its main representatives were Eugenio Montale and Salvatore Quasimodo.[18]
Despite the critical acclaim he enjoyed, the poet faced financial difficulties.[8] In 1936, he moved to the Brazilian city of São Paulo, and became a Professor of Italian at São Paulo University.[9] It was there that, in 1939, his son Antonietto died as a result of a badly performed appendectomy.[8]
World War II and after
In 1942, three years after the start of World War II, Ungaretti returned to
At the close of the war, following Mussolini's downfall, Ungaretti was expelled from the faculty owing to his fascist connections, but reinstated when his colleagues voted in favor of his return.[8] Affected by his wife's 1958 death, Giuseppe Ungaretti sought comfort in traveling throughout Italy and abroad.[8] He visited Japan, the Soviet Union, Israel and the United States.[8]
In 1964, he gave a series of lectures at
Poetry
L'Allegria, previously called L'Allegria di Naufragi, is a decisive moment of the recent history of Italian literature: Ungaretti revises with novel ideas the poetic style of the poètes maudits (especially the broken verses without punctation marks of Guillaume Apollinaire's Calligrammes and the equality between verse and a single word),[20] connecting it with his experience of death and pain as a soldier at war. The hope of brotherhood between all the people is expressed strongly, together with the desire of searching for a renovated "harmony" with the universe,[21] impressive in the famous verses of Mattina:
M’illumino |
I illuminate (myself) |
—Santa Maria la Longa, 26 January 1917 | —Flora, August 2010 |
A famous poem regarding the First World War is Soldati (soldiers), which emblematically and emotionally describes their feelings of uncertainty and fear:
Si sta come |
It's like being |
—Bois de Courton,[22] July 1918 | —M. Tanzy, November, 2015 |
In the successive works he studied the importance of the poetic word (marked by Hermeticism and symbolism), as the only way to save the humanity from the universal horror, and was searching for a new way to recuperate the roots of the Italian classical poetry.[23] His last verses are on the poem l'Impietrito e il Velluto, about the memory of the bright universe eyed Dunja, an old woman that was house guest of his mother in the time of his childhood. Here is the end:
Il velluto dello sguardo di Dunja |
The velvet in the bright gaze of Dunja |
—L'Impietrito e il Velluto, 1970 |
Legacy
Although Ungaretti parted company with Ermetismo ("Hermeticism"), his early experiments were continued for a while by poets such as Alfonso Gatto, Mario Luzi and Leonardo Sinisgalli.[18] His collected works were published as Vita di un uomo ("The Life of a Man") at the time of his death.[13]
Two of Ungaretti's poems ("Soldiers – War – Another War" and "Vanity") were made into song by American composer Harry Partch (Eleven Intrusions, 1949–50); and eleven poems were set by the French-Romanian composer Horațiu Rădulescu in his cycle End of Kronos (1999). Fragments of his poetry are set by composer Michael Mantler in Cerco un Paese Innocente, a work recorded in 1994.
Austrian-Hungarian composer
Published volumes
- Il porto sepolto ("The Buried Port", 1916 and 1923)
- La guerra ("The War", 1919 and 1947)
- Allegria di naufragi ("The Joy of Shipwrecks", 1919)
- L'allegria ("The Joy", 1931)
- Sentimento del tempo ("The Feeling of Time", 1933)
- Traduzioni ("Translations", 1936)
- Poesie disperse ("Scattered Poems", 1945)
- Il dolore ("The Pain", 1947)
- La terra promessa ("The Promised Land", 1950)
- Un grido e paesaggi ("A Shout and Landscapes", 1952)
- Il taccuino del vecchio ("The Old Man's Notebook", 1960)
- Vita di un uomo ("The Life of a Man", 1969)
Notes
- ^ Luigi Pacella, Profilo di Letteratura italiana, "Giuseppe Ungaretti: La biografia", on Novecento letterario.it Archived 7 September 2019 at the Wayback Machine, "...nel 1915 conobbe anche Benito Mussolini e ne divenne amico" ("...in 1915 he met also Benito Mussolini and became one of his friends").
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Picchione & Smith, p. 204
- ISBN 978-88-04-11459-8
- ^ Luigi Pacella. "Giuseppe Ungaretti: La biografia" Archived 7 September 2019 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Payne; Picchione & Smith, p. 204
- ^ Payne; Picchione & Smith, p. 204-205
- ^ Picchione & Smith, p. 204-205
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Picchione & Smith, p. 205
- ^ a b c Payne; Picchione & Smith, p. 205
- ^ Picchione & Smith, p. 205; Talbot, p. 128
- ISBN 0-19-820527-9
- ^ Picchione & Smith, p. 205; Talbot, p. 142
- ^ a b c Payne
- ^ Richter, p. 199
- ^ Richter, p. 183-184
- ^ a b c d (in Italian) Giorgio De Rienzo, "Ungaretti: 'Serve un Duce alla guida della cultura' ", in Corriere della Sera, 12 December 1996; but in this article Ossola explains also that Ungaretti is not a "constituent" intellectual of Fascism; and that he was not admitted, for many political reasons, in the Fascist Academy
- ^ Talbot, p. 128, 142
- ^ ISBN 0-87779-042-6
- ^ "Elio Filippo Accrocca". Oxford Reference. Oxford University Press.
- ^ Elio Gioanola, Storia letteraria del Novecento in Italia, SEI, Torino 1966, p. 186
- ^ Elio Gioanola, ibidem, p. 187
- ^ "Bois de Courton". geonames.org.
- ^ Elio Gioanola, ibidem, p. 188
- ^ Giuseppe Ungaretti, ibidem
References
- Alessandro Baruffi, in Giuseppe Ungaretti, the Master of Hermeticism, Translated in English, ISBN 9781387432561
- Roberta L. Payne, "Ungaretti, Giuseppe", in A Selection of Modern Italian Poetry in Translation, ISBN 0-7735-2697-8
- John Picchione, Lawrence R. Smith, Twentieth-century Italian Poetry. An Anthology, ISBN 0-8020-7368-9
- ISBN 0-500-20039-4
- George Talbot, "Alberto Moravia and Italian Fascism: Censorship, Racism and Le ambizioni sbagliate" Archived 29 May 2008 at the Wayback Machine, in Modern Italy, Vol. 11, No. 2, June 2006 (hosted by the University of Hull)
- Finding aid to Luciano Rebay collection of Giuseppe Ungaretti at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.