Translation: As war was about to break out in Iraq, a TV camera zoomed in on an American soldier reading Dante's Inferno. It was an irresistible image, reminding us that some of the greatest lines of poetry have originated from places, as Ted Hughes has phrased it, of "ultimate suffering and decision". This is certainly true of the Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, writes Marco Sonzogni
The birth of his life as a poet coincided with his first day in the trenches on the Carso Mountains in northern Italy, home to some of the bloodiest battles of the first World War. Daily, for two years, Ungaretti translated war into poetry on "postage-exempt postcards, margins of old newspapers and white spaces in cherished letters".
"I had to speak quickly because time was limited," he recalled years later. Ungaretti was desperately trying to express the "extreme precariousness of the human condition". So, the revolutionary form and imagery - paroles en liberté in analogical associations - of his poetic début reflect his effort to impart renewed "virginity" to the "abused" language of poetry, as they convey the foreboding and unforgiving contingencies of conflict.
Despite the poignancy of such renowned "war poets" as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and Francis Ledwidge, no poet writing in English has matched the combination of spiritual intensity and verbal economy characteristic of Ungaretti's war poetry (some of the poems in Breaking News suggest that Ciaran Carson may be a worthy successor).
Never intended for publication, Ungaretti's first poems were edited and printed by a fellow soldier in a limited edition of 80 copies in 1916. As Andrew Frisardi writes in the introduction to these new translations of Selected Poems, Ungaretti's first full-length collection, Joy of Shipwrecks (1919), "established his reputation overnight as one of the leading poets of his generation".
Until his death in 1970, Ungaretti remained one of the most accomplished and celebrated European writers of the last century. His collected poems, pointedly titled Life of A Man (1969), testify to his moral and artistic stature. Poet, critic, bureaucrat, academic and translator (of, among others, Racine and Shakespeare), Ungaretti was born to Tuscan parents in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1888 - the same year as T.S. Eliot, who would come to regard him as "one of the few authentic poets" of his time.
In 1912 - after secondary school and involvement in leftist associations of Italian emigrants (while reading Baudelaire, Leopardi and Nietzsche) - Ungaretti left Alexandria for Paris to discover, Frisardi points out, "his ancestral roots in Italy and his cultural and intellectual roots in Paris".
Influenced by Bergson at the Sorbonne and by prominent members of the French avant-garde, Ungaretti strove to combine the silence and spareness of his nomadic North African childhood with European Modernism. Each collection that followed his début - the most significant were A Sense of Time (1933), Affliction (1947), The Promised Land (1950) and The Old Man's Notebook (1960) - would continue to reflect life's ineluctable interaction between the individual and the collective.
Prompted by coming to terms with traumatic personal and public events (the death of his son Antonietto, the outbreak of the second World War, the occupation of Rome and even his religious conversion), Ungaretti's thoughts and feelings were henceforth expressed in more traditional forms and language.
Frisardi highlights that Ungaretti's aim as a poet was precisely "to find a modern idiom, cadence and metre" to bring together the present and the past of the Italian patrimony. His intense reading of Jacopone, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Leopardi and other poets was guided by his determination to find "the song of the Italian language" by assimilating the Italian poetic tradition.
"It was my heartbeat," he famously remarked, "that I wanted to feel in harmony with the heartbeat of my betters from a desperately loved land."
The most controversial aspect of Ungaretti's involvement with his desperately loved land - his adhesion to Mussolini's regime (the Duce prefaced his second collection and was instrumental in securing him employment) - has naturally been the subject of intense criticism. Although critics have now contextualised and re-interpreted it, many still seethe over Ungaretti's fascism, seeing it as an indelible stain on his otherwise admirable career.
An inspired and inspiring teacher, he was affectionately called "Ungà" by colleagues and students at the University of Rome, where he was professor of Italian literature from 1942 until retirement. Although Ungaretti, unlike Salvatore Quasimodo and Eugenio Montale, never won the Nobel Prize, for many readers and critics in Italy and elsewhere - including this reviewer - he was the greatest of the three.
Frisardi, perceptive and accurate in his solutions, has carefully maintained, as academic Rosanna Warren has highlighted, the "delicacy, mystery and incantation" of the originals. His translations - which follow previous selections by Patrick Creagh (1971) and Allen Mandelbaum (1975) - are a welcome and fresh addition to Ungaretti's voice in English.
His autobiographical poem, The Rivers (in which different rivers mark different stages in his life), and his best-known war poems - Vigil, Brothers, I Am a Creature (surprisingly excluded from this selection), Pilgrimage and San Martino del Carso - are among the best poems written in Italian and, arguably, in any language.
Marco Sonzogni is faculty fellow in Italian at University College Dublin and the editor of Translation Ireland
Selected Poems. By Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Andrew Frisardi. Carcanet, 318pp, £14.95