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  • Published: 6 January 2021
  • ISBN: 9781939810649
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 204
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Allegria




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 Ungaretti's Italian originals.

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 Ungaretti's Italian originals.

Famed for his brevity, Giuseppe 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. These are the kinds of poems that, through their numinous clarity and shifting intimations, can make a poetry-lover of the most stone-faced non-believer. Ungaretti won multiple prizes for his poetry, including the 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He was a major proponent of the Hermetic style, which proposed a poetry in which the sounds of words were of equal import to their meanings. This auditory awareness echoes through Brock's hair-raising translations, where a man holding vigil with his dead, open-mouthed comrade, says, "I have never felt / so fastened / to life."

  • Published: 6 January 2021
  • ISBN: 9781939810649
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 204
  • RRP: $35.00
Categories:

Praise for Allegria

"In their comparative abstraction, melancholy timbre and interest in the passing of time, Ungaretti's early poems are in the tradition of Leopardi ... his decisive novelty in Italian - the tiny lines, the absence of punctuation, the consequent focus on each individual word - owes more to the stimulus of Mallarmé and Apollinaire ... His crystalline poems often emerged from a process of cutting; in his work ... the placing of words has an almost pictorial suggestiveness." -Matthew Reynolds, London Review of Books
"Ungaretti's poetry, born in the ordeal of World War I and its trenches ... marked a turning point in modern Italian literature." -Glauco Cambon
"Ungaretti purged the language of all that was but ornament, of all that was too approximate for the precise tension of his line. Through force of tone and sentiment, and a syntax stripped to its essential sinews, he compelled words to their primal power." -Allen Mandelbaum
"One of the most authentic poets of Western Europe." -T. S. Eliot

"In their comparative abstraction, melancholy timbre and interest in the passing of time, Ungaretti's early poems are in the tradition of Leopardi ... his decisive novelty in Italian - the tiny lines, the absence of punctuation, the consequent focus on each individual word - owes more to the stimulus of Mallarmé and Apollinaire ... His crystalline poems often emerged from a process of cutting; in his work ... the placing of words has an almost pictorial suggestiveness." -Matthew Reynolds, London Review of Books
"Ungaretti's poetry, born in the ordeal of World War I and its trenches ... marked a turning point in modern Italian literature." -Glauco Cambon
"Ungaretti purged the language of all that was but ornament, of all that was too approximate for the precise tension of his line. Through force of tone and sentiment, and a syntax stripped to its essential sinews, he compelled words to their primal power." -Allen Mandelbaum
"One of the most authentic poets of Western Europe." -T. S. Eliot

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