1970 – Giuseppe Ungaretti

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970) was born into an Italian family in Alexandria, Egypt, where he was educated in French and began working as a journalist and literary critic. He moved to Paris in 1912 but enlisted in the infantry in World War I and fought in the trenches in northern Italy. World War I served as the catalyst for Ungaretti’s venture into poetry, and he published his first collection in 1916. Among the many literary affiliations that influenced his work were dadaism, hermeticism (which he helped to revolutionize in the 1930s), symbolism, and futurism. Ungaretti’s books of poetry include L’allegria (1931), Sentimento del tempo (1933), Un grido e paesaggi (1952), and Vita d’un uomo (1969; Eng. The Life of a Man, 1958).

 

In his essay subtitled “The Old Captain’s Last Voyage,” Ivar Ivask praises Ungaretti, saying: “The present issue praises the poet for his original achievement and mourns the disappearance of an extraordinary human being from our midst: an almost equally grave loss for those who had the privilege to have been his friends of a lifetime and for those who knew him but a few years, months, or even days. For future friends, the man will be the poetry” (Books Abroad, Autumn 1970).