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WIKIMAG n. 9 - Agosto 2013
Giuseppe Ungaretti
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Giuseppe Ungaretti (Italian: [dʒuˈzɛppe
uŋɡaˈretti]; 10 February 1888 – 2 June 1970) was an Italian
modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic, academic, and
recipient of the inaugural 1970
Neustadt International Prize for Literature. A leading
representative of the
experimental trend known as
Ermetismo ("Hermeticism"),
he was one of the most prominent contributors to 20th century
Italian literature. Influenced by
symbolism, he was briefly aligned with
futurism. Like many futurists, he took an
irredentist position during World War I. Ungaretti debuted as a poet
while fighting in the
trenches, publishing one of his best-known pieces,
L'allegria ("The Joy").
During the
interwar period, Ungaretti was a collaborator of
Benito Mussolini (whom he met during his
socialist accession),[1]
as well as a foreign-based correspondent for
Il Popolo d'Italia and
La 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. His
Fascist past was the subject of controversy.
Biography
Early life
Ungaretti was born in
Alexandria,
Egypt into a family from the Tuscan city of
Lucca.[2]
As a child, he was nursed by a
Nubian
nurse named Bahita, and, as an adult, claimed that her influence
accounted for his own
exoticism.[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.[2]
It was there that he became acquainted with
Parnassianism and
Symbolist poetry, in particular with
Gabriele d'Annunzio,
Charles Baudelaire,
Jules Laforgue,
Stéphane Mallarmé and
Arthur Rimbaud.[2]
He also became familiar with works of the Classicists
Giacomo Leopardi and
Giosuè Carducci, as well as with the writings of maverick author
Giovanni Pascoli.[2]
This period marked his debut as a journalist and literary critic, with
pieces published Risorgete, a journal edited by
anarchist writer
Enrico Pea.[2]
At the time, he was in correspondence with
Giuseppe Prezzolini, editor of the influential magazine
La Voce.[2]
A regular visitor of Pea's Baracca Rossa ("Red House"), Ungaretti
was himself a sympathizer of anarchist-socialist circles.[3]
He abandoned Christianity and became an atheist. It was not until 1928
that he returned to the Catholic faith.[4]
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 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 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
irredentist position, and called for his country's intervention on
the side of the
Entente Powers.[8]
Enrolled in the infantry a year later, he saw action on the
Northern Italian theater, serving in the
trenches.[9]
In contrast to his early enthusiasm, he became appalled by the realities
of war.[8]
The conflict also made Ungaretti discover his talent as a poet, and, in
1917, he published the volume of
free verse Il porto sepolto ("The Buried Port"), largely
written on the
Kras front.[10]
Although depicting the hardships of war life, his celebrated
L'Allegria was not unenthusiastic about its purpose (even if in the
poem "Fratelli", and in others, he describes the absurdity of the war
and the brotherhood between all the men); this made Ungaretti's stance
contrast with that of
Lost Generation writers, who questioned their countries' intents,
and similar to that of Italian intellectuals such as Soffici,
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
Piero Jahier and
Curzio Malaparte.[11]
By the time the
1918 armistice was signed, Ungaretti was again in Paris,[8]
working as a correspondent for
Benito Mussolini's paper
Il Popolo d'Italia.[12]
He published a volume of French-language poetry, titled La guerre
("The War", 1919).[13]
In 1920, Giuseppe Ungaretti married the Frenchwoman Jeanne Dupoix, with
whom he had a daughter, Ninon (born 1925), and a son, Antonietto (born
1930).[8]
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
Foreign Ministry employee.[8]
By then, Mussolini had organized the
March on Rome, which confirmed his seizure of power. Ungaretti
joined in the
National Fascist Party, signing the pro-fascist Manifesto of the
Italian Writers in 1925. In his essays of 1926–1929, republished in
1996, he repeatedly called on the
Duce to
direct cultural development in Italy and reorganize the
Italian Academy on fascist lines.[16]
He argued: "The first task of the Academy will be to reestablish a
certain connection between men of letters, between writers, teachers,
publicists. This people hungers for poetry. If it had not been for the
miracle of
Blackshirts, we would never have leaped this far."[16]
In his private letters to a French critic, Ungaretti also claimed that
fascist rule did not imply
censorship.[16]
Mussolini, who did not give a favorable answer to Ungaretti's appeal,[16]
prefaced the 1923 edition of Il porto sepolto, thus politicizing
its message.[17]
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 confronted himself
with 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
Axis-allied Italy, where he was received with honors by the
officials.[8]
The same year, he was made a Professor of Modern Literature at the
University of Rome.[9]
He continued to write poetry, and published a series of essays.[8]
By then,
Hermeticism had come to an end, and Ungaretti, like Montale and
Quasimodo, had adopted a more formal style in his poetry.[18]
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
Columbia University in New York City, and, in 1970, was invited by
the
University of Oklahoma to receive its
Books Abroad Prize.[8]
During this last trip, Ungaretti fell ill with
bronchopneumonia, and, although he received treatment in New York
City, died while under medical supervision in Milan.[8]
He was buried in
Campo Verano (Rome).[8]
Poetry
L'Allegria 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),[19]
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,[20]
impressive in the famous verses of Mattina:
M’illumino
d’immenso
I illuminate (myself)
with immensity
(Flora, August 2010)
A famous poem regarding the First World War is
Soldati (soldiers):
Si sta come
d'autunno
sugli alberi
le foglie
(Here we are
like leaves on
trees, in Autumn)
(Flora, August 2010)
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.[21]
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
Fulmineo torna presente pietà
(The velvet in the bright gaze of Dunja
Rapid returns as present mercy)[22]
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.
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, "...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
l
Picchione & Smith, p.204
-
^
Giuseppe Ungaretti, Vita d'un
uomo – Saggi e interventi,
Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Segrate, 1974, p.681.
ISBN 978-88-04-11459-8
-
^
Luigi Pacella.
"Giuseppe Ungaretti: La biografia"
-
^
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
-
^
David Forgacs, "Twentieth-century
Culture", in
George Holmes (ed.), The Oxford Illustrated History of
Italy,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, p.300.
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
(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
"costituent" intellectual of Fascism; and that he was not
admitted, for many political reasons, in the Fascist Academy
-
^
Talbot, p.128, 142
- ^
a
b
c
d
e
f
"Hermeticism", entry in
Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature,
Merriam-Webster, Springfield, 1995, p.540.
ISBN 0-87779-042-6
-
^
Elio Gioanola, Storia letteraria
del Novecento in Italia, SEI, Torino 1966, p. 186
-
^
Elio Gioanola, ibidem, p.
187
-
^
Elio Gioanola, ibidem, p.
188
-
^
Giuseppe Ungaretti, ibidem
References
- Roberta L. Payne, "Ungaretti, Giuseppe", in A Selection of
Modern Italian Poetry in Translation,
McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal & Kingston, p. 198.
ISBN 0-7735-2697-8
- John Picchione, Lawrence R. Smith, Twentieth-century Italian
Poetry. An Anthology,
University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1993.
ISBN 0-8020-7368-9
-
Hans Richter, Dada. Art and Anti-art,
Thames & Hudson, London & New York, 2004.
ISBN 0-500-20039-4
- George Talbot,
"Alberto Moravia and Italian Fascism: Censorship, Racism and Le
ambizioni sbagliate", in Modern Italy, Vol. 11, No.
2, June 2006 (hosted by the
University of Hull)
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