Like Leaves in Autumn

GUISEPPE UNGARETTI (1888–1970) is one of Europe’s greatest modernist poets. He was also a writer, literary critic, journalist and university professor in Italy and in Brazil. He was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, to an Italian family from Tuscany. At the age of 24, he moved to Paris, where he associated with prominent artists of the European avant garde. Ungaretti fought on the Italian front from 1915 to 1917, taking part in some of the bloodiest episodes of the Great War, during which time much of his greatest poetry was written. Ungaretti later worked as a correspondent for Il Popolo d’Italia, a political daily paper founded by Benito Mussolini. In 1936, he moved to Brazil, where he took up a teaching post at São Paulo University. He continued to teach, travel and write throughout his life.The 21 poems by Ungaretti in the present anthology were selected from the collection, L’Allegria (The Joy, 1931). The original title of the book was Allegria di naufragi (The Joy of Shipwrecks), first published in 1919. This collection in turn included, in one of its sections, a tiny group of lyrical poems entitled Il Porto Sepolto (The Buried Harbour) written in the trenches during the First World War on ‘scraps of paper salvaged from the packaging of bullets’. The latter had been published separately in 1916 in only 80 copies. The 1919 volume underwent many corrections and additions before the 1931 publication, which itself also underwent a series of small changes, until in 1942 a final text appeared. The Joy, like Ungaretti’s entire critical essays, prose and translations, is collected in several volumes published by Mondadori, entitled Vita d’un uomo (The Life of a Man).

Ungaretti’s war poetry expresses an intense feeling for life, that sense of the miraculous in which, as Cendrars puts it, ‘only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love the world. JOHN BURNSIDEEach of the poets was asked to respond to a poem by Ungaretti with one of their own, and to provide a commentary on the new work. Richard Price confesses to being "uneasy" about responding to Ungaretti's Levante, but comes up with a neat solution, creating a poem that celebrates the innovative structure of the original but is simultaneously in defiance of everything Ungaretti would come to stand for.- Roger Cox, Scotland on Sunday