Do not leave me, suffering, stay! - later Ungaretti poems

I find that Giuseppe Ungaretti becomes more cryptic as he gets away from his war poems.  Images, or perhaps the associations of specific words, seem more arbitrary to me.

A DOVE

I hear a dove from other floods.

UNA COLOMBA

D’altri diluvi una colomba ascolto.

That is a complete poem from 1925.  A narrative can be pulled from this line, with the poet on some kind of ark, metaphorical, I suppose, soon after a catastrophe, like, say, a world war.  But past the Noah reference, it could mean anything, private or public.

In 1939, Ungaretti lost his nine-year-old son to appendicitis.  The poems in his 1947 book Il Dolore (The Grief), at least the examples translated by Mandelbaum, are impossible to separate from that event, or from the second war that surrounded Ungaretti.

OUTCRY NO MORE

Stop killing the dead,
Outcry no more, do not outcry
If you would hear them still.
If you would not die.

Their whisper is imperceptible.
They are no louder
Than the growing of the grass,
Happy where man does not pass.

Ungaretti may be referring to a stanza of his 1935 “Greetings for His Own Birthday,” from before his public and private tragedies:

Yet and yet I would outcry:
Swift youth of the senses
That, in the darkness, keeps me from myself,
Allowing images to the eternal,

Do not leave me, suffering, stay!

What a terrible irony or bit of fate-tempting.  I believe the verb Mandelbaum translates as “outcry,” “gridare,” is more commonly translated as “shout” or “cry,” neither of which must have seemed anguished enough.

Ungaretti’s poems are on the miserable side.  The 1953 “Secret of the poet” begins “Alone I have the night as a friend,” which sounds practically Goth in English.  A companion poem is titled “Variations on Nought”:

This null-and-nought of sand that flows away
Within the silent hourglass and settles,
And, fugitive, the imprints on the flesh,
Upon the flesh that dies, of a cloud…

Ellipses in the original, but in the original original, there are so many repetitions of words across the three stanzas that I wonder if there is some kind of system to the poem, as if it is a relative of the sestina.  As so often with Ungaretti, the emphasis turns out to be on individual words rather than images or even sense.

I’ll leave Ungaretti with a song, one full of life, until the end:

BEDOUIN SONG

A woman wakes and sings
Wind follows and entrances her
And stretches her upon the earth
And the true dream takes her.

This earth is nude
This woman is warm
This wind is strong
This dream is dead.

Una donna s’alza e canta
La segue il vento e l’incanta
E sulla terra la stende
E il sogno vero la prende.

Questa terra è nuda
Questa donna è druda
Questa vento è forte
Questa sogno è morte.

Ungaretti / man of pain - resurrecting the cadaver of literary Italian

Giuseppe Ungaretti is a poet I meant to read back when I was poking around in Italian poetry.  Now I’ve read him, in the Selected Poems translated by Allen Mandelbaum.

Mandelbaum writes that “the problematic, terrible task of every modern Italian poet, the task that takes its toll in silence” was “to resurrect or to bury the cadaver of literary Italian” (p. ix).  Eugenio Montale chose to bury the corpse, while Ungaretti resurrected it.  I have no idea what any of this means, but it sounds grisly and exciting!

MATTINA
Santa Maria La Longa il 26 gennaio 1917

        M’illumino
        d’immenso

“This poem is often cited as an example of untranslatability,” Mandelbaum says in a note (p. 208).

MORNING
Santa Maria La Longa, January 26, 1917

       Immensity
       illumines me.

Ungaretti was on the path to be an Italian version of a French avant-gardist – he was close friends with Apollinaire – when the war and military service intervened.  His first books were all war poems, meaning poems written at the Italian-Austrian front.   “Mattina” is one of them, however oblique.  They are often oblique:

SOLDIERS
Forest of Courton, July, 1918

        We are as –
        in autumn
        on the trees –
        leaves

Short lines – often a single word, an isolated image.  In one poem, he even singles out the word as his goal, or unit, or something like that:

from LEAVETAKING

When I find
in this my silence
a word
it is dug into my life
like an abyss

That poem is directly addressed to the lieutenant who noticed that Ungaretti was writing poems in the trenches and who published them, in an edition of eighty copies, without Ungaretti’s knowledge.

The poems have occasional rhymes and endless assonance, but I wonder if the latter – maybe even the former – is an artifact of Italian, all too beautiful Italian.

from VANITÀ

E l’uomo
curvato
sull’acqua
sorpresa
dal sole
si rinviene
un’ombra

How lovely, I think, however I am mangling the pronunciation.  It means something like:

And the man
bent
over the water
startled
by the sun
awakes
as shadow

Less lovely.  Pretty plain stuff until the last three words.  But I am an English-speaker, and an ignoramus, and Italian is inherently beautiful.  I remember the gorgeousness (in Italian) of a weirdo like Dino Campana.  Maybe this reader is just a sucker for Italian.  Surely Italian readers are not such saps.

PILGRIMAGE
Vallonvello dell’Albero Isolato, August 16, 1916

        In ambush
        in these bowels
        of rubble
        hour on hour
        I have dragged
        my carcass
        worn away by mud
        like a sole
        or like a seed
        of hawthorn

        Ungaretti
        man of pain
        you need but an illusion
        to give you courage

        Beyond
        a searchlight
        sets a sea
        into the fog

The middle stanza (“Ungaretti / man of pain”) is a statement of purpose for Ungaretti’s entire long career, for the next five decades of poems.  Part of his pain is biographical, or existential, and part is from his incantation of resurrection, recovering Italian from Romantic excess one word at a time.