Selected Poems: A Bilingual Edition

From Publishers Weekly
This edition, well-translated and annotated by poet-essayist Frisardi, brings the modernist achievement of Ungaretti (1888-1970) to light. Most searing here are the WWI poems, "Up in the light vault/ the spell is broken// And I plummet into myself// And go dark in my nest." Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
The eldest and many say finest modern Italian poet, Ungaretti (1888-1970) was born to Tuscan parents in Alexandria. Hence, he was at once a birthright heir of the Renaissance and the child of a quintessentially international city within sight of an ancient culture's desert-bound remains; lush Tuscan hills and empty Egyptian desert are his poetry's mental as well as physical landscapes. He saw action in WW I, endured a dear friend's suicide in Paris, and participated in the postwar birth of modernist French and Italian poetry and art. He eventually settled in Rome, decamping only for an academic appointment in Brazil, during which first his brother and then his nine-year-old son died. With so much tragedy in a life lived largely in a crucible of twentieth-century calamity, that he wrote frequently about death is unsurprising, nor is it wonderful that he became engaged in a profoundly tenuous search for God. His spare poetry, beautiful in two languages in this edition, is the difficult but deeply engaging and affecting record of his quest. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Washington Post Book World, November 10, 2002, Page BW12
"I am delighted to recommend . . . Andrew Frisardi's splendidly fresh and definitive new translation of Ungaretti's Selected Poems." --Edward Hirsch


The New Republic, March 10, 2003
"An exceedingly valuable book . . . the ideal introduction . . . [to] Ungaretti's uncommonly beautiful verse." --Bernard Knox


Review
"If any modern poet can be said to have found the song of the Italian language, it is Giuseppe Ungaretti. [He] creates a verbal music that will continue to enchant and to resound wherever Italian is spoken and poetry is read." --*Bernard Knox, The New Republic



Book Description
A major new translation of one of Italy's greatest modern poets

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was a pioneer of the Modernist movement in Italian poetry and is widely regarded as one of the leading Italian poets of the twentieth century. His verse is renowned and loved for its powerful insight and emotion, and its exquisite music. Yet, unlike many of his peers, Ungaretti has never been adequately presented to English readers. This large bilingual selection, translated with great sensitivity and fidelity by Andrew Frisardi, captures Ungaretti in all of his phases: from his early poems, written in the trenches of northern Italy during World War I, to the finely crafted erotic and religious poetry of his second period, to the visceral, elegiac poetry of the years following the death of his son and the occupation of Rome during World War II, to the love poems of the poet's old age.

Frisardi's in-depth introduction details the world in which Ungaretti's work took shape and exerted its influence. In addition to the poet's own annotations, an autobiographical afterword, "Ungaretti on Ungaretti," further illuminates the poet's life and art. Here is a compelling, rewarding, and comprehensive version of the work of one of the greatest modern European poets.



About the Author
Giuseppe Ungaretti was one of Italy's greatest modern poets.

Andrew Fisardi's poems, essays, and translations have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and other periodicals. A native of Massachussetts, he lives in Orvieto, Italy.



Excerpted from Selected Poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, Andrew Frisardi. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Sample poems from first chapter: IN MEMORY OF Locvizza, September 30, 1916 His name was Mohammed Sceab Descendant of emirs of nomads a suicide because he had no homeland left He loved France and changed his name He was Marcel but wasn’t French and no longer knew how to live in his people’s tent where you hear the Koran being chanted while you savor your coffee And he didn’t know how to set free the song of his desolation I went with him and the proprietress of the hotel where we lived in Paris from number 5 Rue des Carmes an old faded alley sloping downhill He rests in the graveyard at Ivry a suburb that always seems like the day a fair breaks down And perhaps only I still know he lived RESTING Versa, April 27, 1916 Who will come with me through the fields The sunlight is scattered in diamond drops of water over the supple grass I am surrendered to the leanings of the limpid universe The mountains open out in deep draughts of lilac shadow and row with the sky Up in the light vault the spell is broken And I plummet into myself And go dark in my nest (The poems "In Memory Of" and "Resting" appear in Giuseppe Ungaretti, "Selected Poems," Farrar Straus Giroux. Translation copyright © 2002 by Andrew Frisardi.)


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This edition, well-translated and annotated by poet-essayist Frisardi, brings the modernist achievement of Ungaretti (1888-1970) to light. Most searing here are the WWI poems, "Up in the light vault/ the spell is broken// And I plummet into myself// And go dark in my nest." (Dec.) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.


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