Giuseppe Ungaretti

A monumental new translation of Giuseppe Ungarettis poetry, now available in a bilingual edition, reveals the literary strengths of the inventor of the modernist movement in Italy. Reprint.

Ungarettis poesi var starkt influerad av de franska symbolisterna och filosoferna och bidrog till en omvälvande förändring av den traditionsbundna italienska lyriken. För Ungaretti var livet och poesin tätt sammantvinnade och hans diktning utgick alltid från hans egna existentiella funderingar.

"Trench warfare and lyric poetry are an unusual-pairing. Some readers would doubtless even recoil at the notion of linking the two. After all, the former shows the ugliness and bestiality that mankind is all too capable of inflicting on the world. The latter, on the other hand, shows the beauty and humanity to which the genius of the human mind can aspire and the lasting beauty that it can produce. And yet there are artists who find, if not beauty, then at least eternal verities in cataclysmic events that can inspire them to creative heights. One such artist was the Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970), whose collection L'Allegria was composed while the poet himself was engaged in the brutal, dehumanizing, life-and-death combat of the trench warfare of World War I." (Frank Hugus, University of Massachusetts Amherst) Wally Swist has published over forty books of poetry and prose. This skillful and faithful translation of L'Allegria exposes Swist's love and ardor for the poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti, most especially, L'Allegria, his "cheerfulness" in the face of adversity.

Geoffrey Brock, whose translations have won him Poetry magazine's John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, finally does justice to these slim, concentrated verses in his English translation, alongside Giuseppe Ungaretti's Italian originals. Famed for his brevity, Ungaretti's early poems swing nimbly from the coarse matter of tram wires, alleyways, quails in bushes, and hotel landladies to the mystic shiver of pure abstraction.

This volume of poetry includes the work inspired by Guiseppe Ungaretti's experience in World War I. This dual language edition is accompanied by his own essays and notes. Giuseppe Ungaretti was born in Alexandria in 1888. In 1912 he left Egypt to study in Paris where he was influenced by the French avant garde. Moving to Milan in 1914, he became a central figure of Italian modernism. His sense of poetic vocation and language was further shaped by his experience of the fierce fighting on the Austrian front during World War I. After the war, Ungaretti lived near Rome until 1936, when he was offered a professorship at the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil. The death of his young son, the outbreak of the World War II and the occupation of Rome had a profound effect on his poetry at this time. He returned to Rome in 1942 and taught at the university there until his retirement. He died in Milan in 1970.

Tolkning: Pierre Zekeli och Marianne Sandels. Efterord av Anders Olsson.Giuseppe Ungaretti är en klassiker inom den poetiska modernismen och en av de absolut största inom italiensk 1900-tals poesi. Nu kommer för första gången på svenska hans krigspoesi som revolutionerade den samtida dikten. Här är dikttolkningar ur L'Allegria (Glädjen) 1914-1919 och ur Sentimento del Tempo (Tidskänsla) 1919-1935.Tvåspråkig utgåva, på varje uppslag står det italienska originalet på vänster sida, tolkningen på höger sida. Boken har även en kronologi."En av de största italienska modernisterna" bildar ingress till Mikael van Reis recension i Göteborgs-Posten där han skriver: "Hans tidiga poesi äger en precis lätthet, en plötslig klangstyrka i det till synes enkla. Han skriver en satsens poesi som förvandlar de enskilda orden till element i en konstellation. Den spelar i minimala former med ofta vertikala relationer. Jord, gräs. himmel, ljus... Han är inte hermetisk i meningen gåtfull. Morgon är en ofta citerad kortdikt som lyder:"

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.