Complete Poems E-Book

Salvatore Quasimodo

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Classics
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959. The citation declares, 'his lyrical poetry with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our time'. Jack Bevan's authoritative translation of Quasimodo life work fills a great gap in our knowledge of twentieth-century European poetry. 'The poetry is textured like shot silk, yet the elegance and syntactical lucidity with which Jack Bevan has worked to bring these poems to English readers enables them to stand as poems in their own right,' wrote Peter Scupham of Bevan's translation of Quasimodo's last poems, Debit and Credit.Quasimodo's strong and passionate writing continues to testify to the human – and inhuman – realities which have created our modern world. The Italian critic Giuliano Dego wrote, 'To bear witness to man's history in all the urgency of a particular time and place, and to teach the lesson of courage, this has been Quasimodo's poetic task.'

Leseprobe

COMPLETE POEMS OF SALVATORE QUASIMODO

CARCANET CLASSICS INCLUDE

Dictator/Gilgamesh adapted by Philip Terry

Gilgamesh Retold by Jenny Lewis

Pearl translated by Jane Draycott

Edmund Blunden, Selected Poems edited by Robyn Marsack

Catullus, The Books of Catullus translated by Simon Smith

Rebecca Elson, A Responsibility to Awe: Collected Poems

John Heath-Stubbs, Selected Poems edited by John Clegg

Walter Pater, Selected Essays edited by Alex Wong

Propertius, Poems translated by Patrick Worsnip

Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations translated by John Ashbery

George Seferis, Collected Poems translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Charles Tomlinson, Swimming Chenango Lake: selected poems edited by David Morley

William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems, volumes I and II edited by Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan

FOR COLLEEN

costei per fermo nacque in Paradiso!

J. B.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My acknowledgements are due to West Midlands Arts for their award to me of a bursary. My thanks also to Christopher Whelen for his helpful comments; it was he who drew my attention to the last poem. “How Brief the Night” was published in Corriere della Sera to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the poet’s birth. It is claimed in the accompanying article as perhaps his last poem, and the date given is August 1967.

Some of these versions were first published in Selected Poems (Penguin Modern European Poets, 1965) and in Debit and Credit, Quasimodo’s last book, published by Anvil Press Poetry in 1972. Individual poems from this collection have appeared in London Magazine, Stand and the Times Literary Supplement.

Four of the poems were set for voice and instrumental groups by Elizabeth Lutyens in a work entitled And Suddenly It’s Evening, commissioned by the BBC for the inaugural concerts at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1967 and later included in the Promenade Concerts at the Albert Hall.

J. B.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Translator’s Note

Prologue: To Salvatore Quasimodo

AND SUDDENLY IT’S EVENING (1920–1942)

WATERS AND LANDS (1920–1929)

And Suddenly It’s Evening

Wind at Tindari

Angels

And Your Dress Is White

Tree

Aries

Deadwater

Earth

Day Stoops

Space

Ancient Winter

Sorrow of Things I Do Not Know

There Was a Sound of Airy Seasons Passing

The Dead

No Night So Clear Ever Vanquished You

You Call on a Life

Cool Seashore

Mirror

No One

Alleyway

Greedily I Spread My Hand

Homecomings

Night Birds’ Refuge

Even My Company Forsakes Me

Every Form Waylost in Me

SUNKEN OBOE (1930-I932)

Sunken Oboe

The Eucalyptus

To My Land

Birth of Song

Rest of the Grass

In the Ancient Light of the Tides

Word

Young Woman Lying Back in the Midst of the Flowers

Lesser Curve

One Buried in Me Declares

Playmate

Lament of a Friar in an Icon

Without Memory of Death

Prayer to the Rain

Autumn

Mouth of the River Roja

Woods Sleep

To Night

My Patient Day

Metamorphoses in the Saint’s Urn

Came Down to Me Through New Innocence

Island

Where the Dead Stand Open-Eyed

Give Me My Day

Convalescence

The Angel

Hidden Life

Changeful with Stars and Quiet

Become Darkness and Height

Water Decomposes Dormice

Seed

First Day

Green Drift

Roads of Rivers in Sleep

Hermaphrodite Earthworm

Suffered Forms of Trees

Living I Sicken

Amen for Sunday in Albis

ERATO AND APOLLYON (1932–1936)

Syllables to Erato

Song of Apollyon

Apollyon

The Ànapo

Dead Heron

On the Hill of the “Terre Blanche”

In Your Light I Am Wrecked

Insomnia

Often a Coastland

Island of Ulysses

Salt-Bed in Winter

Sardinia

In Light of Skies

Quarries

For My Mortal Smell

In the Right Human Time

Alien City

In the Feeling of Death

Of the Sinner of Myths

NEW POEMS (1936–1942)

The Magpie Laughs Black in the Orange Trees

Street in Agrigentum

The Gentle Hill

What Is It, Shepherd of Air?

Before the Statue of Ilaria del Carreto

Now Day Is Breaking

The Rain Is Already With Us

One Evening, Snow

Piazza Fontana

The Tall Sailing Ship

On the Banks of the Lambro

Evening in the Màsino Valley

Elegos for the Dancer Cumani

Delphic Woman

Imitation of Joy

Horses of Moon and Volcanoes

Again a Green River

Beach at St Antiochus

The Meagre Flower Is Already Flying

Threshold of Puberty

DAY AFTER DAY (1943–1946)

On the Willow Boughs

Letter

19 January 1944

Snow

Day After Day

Perhaps the Heart

Winter Night

Milan, August 1943

The Wall

O My Gentle Beasts

Written, Perhaps, on a Tomb

This Pilgrim

Fortress of Bergamo Alta

By the Adda

Again I Hear the Sea

Elegy

Of Another Lazarus

The Ferry

Your Silent Foot

Man of My Time

* * *

LIFE IS NOT DREAM (1946–1948)

Lament for the South

Epitaph for Bice Donetti

Dialogue

Colour of Rain and Iron

Almost a Madrigal

Anno Domini MCMXLVII

My Country Is Italy

Thànatos Athànatos

Letter to My Mother

THE FALSE AND TRUE GREEN (1949–1955)

The Dead Guitars

Enemy of Death

The False and True Green

In a Distant City

From Sicily

How Long the Night

Beyond the Waves of the Hills

Near a Saracen Tower, for My Dead Brother

Temple of Zeus at Agrigentum

When the Walls and Trees Fell Down

Laude (29 April 1945)

To the Fifteen of Piazzale Loreto

Auschwitz

To the Cervi Brothers, to Their Italy

Epigrams

To a Hostile Poet

From the Web of Gold

THE INCOMPARABLE EARTH (1995–1958)

Visible, Invisible

Visible, Invisible

The Incomparable Earth

Today, the Twenty-First of March

From Disfigured Nature

An Open Arc

A Copper Amphora

To My Father

The Tombs of the Scaligers

An Act or a Name of the Spirit

Still of Hell

The Wall

In This City

Still of Hell

News Item

Almost an Epigram

Soldiers Weep by Night

From Greece

At Night on the Acropolis

Mycenae

Following the Alpheus

Delphi

Marathon

Minotaur at Knossos

Eleusis

Questions and Answers

To the New Moon

An Answer

Another Answer

Two Inscriptions

Inscription for the Fallen of Marzabotto

Inscription for the Partisans of Valenza

DEBIT AND CREDIT (1959–1965)

Debit and Credit

Varvàra Alexandrovna

Only If Love Should Pierce You

A September Night

Along the Isar

From the Shores of the Balaton

Tollbridge

The Negro Church at Harlem

Cape Caliakra

The Silence Does Not Deceive Me

Glendalough

Tuscan Crossbowmen

In Chiswick Cemetery

The Maya at Mérida

Words to a Spy

Love Poem

I Have Lost Nothing

On the Island

To Liguria

Imperceptible Time

Enough One Day to Balance the World

I Have Flowers and at Night Call on the Poplars

TWO UNCOLLECTED POEMS

Lines to Angiola Maria

How Brief the Night

DISCOURSE ON POETRY

Epilogue: To Salvatore Quasimodo

Bibliography

Index of Titles

Index of First Lines

INTRODUCTION

Salvatore Quasimodo was born in Sicily at Syracuse in 1901, the son of a station-master. His early days were spent in eastern Sicily, at Roccalimera, Gela, Acquaviva, Trabia and Messina. There, at the time of the earthquake, at the age of seven, he absorbed the images of death and disaster, and witnessed the shooting of thieves “caught in the rubble and executed in the dark / by firing squads from the landing parties.” At Palermo he began his studies as an engineer, and in the land of myth, sulphur and salt-mines, of peasant women in black, waters and Greek remains, the recurring themes of his later poetry were born – death, silence and solitude. They recur, as Carlo Bernari* has pointed out, in 84 of his 173 lyric poems. One could add to these the prevailing sense of deprivation and exile, the result of his “rupture” from “the incomparable earth” of the south.

By the end of the First World War, having completed his intermediate studies, he left Sicily to study for an engineering degree at the Rome Polytechnic. Circumstances forced him to suspend his studies and take various jobs in order to live. He was employed as a technical designer, then as a shop assistant in a hardware store. During this period of casual employment, in 1921, he began to study Greek and to read Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Plato, St Augustine and Spinoza, all strong influences on his later development as a poet. In 1926 he returned to the south as an employee in the Ministry of Public Works at Reggio Calabria, having qualified as a surveyor. There, in company with old friends from Messina, every Sunday for the next three years he read, talked and wrote poetry. These were years of inspired apprenticeship. The group numbered among them Pugliatti, Natoli, Antò, La Pira, Saggio and Patti. The Sunday gatherings included trips to Tindari, and the fine “Wind at Tindari” (p. 30) was the result of one of these. Vittorini, who had married Quasimodo’s sister, introduced him to the Solaria, a cultural group based in Florence. It included Loria, Montale, Vittorini and Bonsanti. The latter published his first three poems in the Solaria magazine, and shortly after Waters and Lands was published in 1930.

In the next few years he lived at Imperia, near San Remo, where he was involved in building a military road with 1,500 workers, then in Sardinia, and in 1938 he moved to Milan. At this point, after trouble with his administrative superiors, he was forced into a period of exile in Valtellina. He finally gave up his job, abandoned the career he had trained for, and dedicated himself to his literary activities. Another volume of poems was published, and in the following year he joined the staff of Tempo. He was offered, and took up, the post of Professor of Italian Literature at the Milan Conservatory of Music in 1940. His Greek Lyrics was published, and this gave him national standing in the world of Italian letters. The publication in 1942 of And Suddenly It’s Evening set the seal on his pre-war opus.

He gained the San Babila Prize in 1950, shared the Etna-Taormina Prize with Dylan Thomas in 1953, and in 1958 he won the Viareggio Prize. In 1959 the award to Quasimodo of the Nobel Prize for Literature for his poetry “wh ch with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our time” indicated that an international audience was at last ready to acknowledge Italian poetic achievement. His poetic creed is outlined in an essay entitled “Discourse on Poetry” which was included in his 1956 collection of poems The False and True Green.

The award was greeted with mixed feelings in Italy; delight that it had been given to an Italian poet, and regret that both Ungaretti and Montale, the two “senior” poets of the triumvirate, had been overlooked. The award obviously focused on the post-war poetry, the “committed” poetry which followed the 1942 collection And Suddenly It’s Evening. Critics noted a change of voice, and preferred the hermetic verse of the pre-war years. Since his death in 1968, with the whole span of the work before us, the division which seemed to mark off his pre-war and post-war poetry seems illusory. The event of the war experience in Italy certainly produced new urgencies, undeniable pressures, and some of the “committed” poems have the declamatory shrillness of “public” poetry. But a close inspection of the whole output after the war indicates an absorption of that galvanic experience into the modes and themes which again characterize the poet at his best; a highly individual voice, and a personal experience universalized. It would be wrong to misunderstand the controversy and infer from it that Quasimodo has had less than his share of critical acclaim among Italian critics, though the poet himself, in the nine years following the award until his death in 1968, complained of neglect by his compatriots, and a sense of isolation. Annamaria Angioletti, his young mistress during the last eight years of his life, writes of the ceremony in June 1967 at Oxford University when Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor, presented the poet with an honorary degree:

“In June 1967, a year before his death, Salvatore Quasimodo had another moment of happiness after the Nobel. Yet again it was a foreign country which accorded him the tribute of recognition by men undivided by parochial faction or, worse, favouritism; men who accepted the international judgement, at peace with nature, science and God; men like Leonardo. His own country until the time of his death, and even on that occasion, showed him hostility, envy or malice.”

But the long list of poets and critics who have written about him, among them Solmi, Macri, Montale, Bo, Florae, Anceschi, Robertis, Contini, Antonielli, is testimony to the fact that his poetry has had due examination and recognition among his countrymen.

The distinction, then, between the earlier and later climate of his poetry should not be exaggerated. The poet’s own critical statements may, ironically, have falsified the perspectives through which his later poetry was viewed. He speaks of the growth of a “social poetry” which aspires to “dialogue rather than monologue”, towards the dramatic and epic rather than the gnomic. “Today, after two wars... he [the poet] must re-make man.” The poet’s own phrases suggest that he aimed at moving from a position of withdrawal to one of participation; admirable aims, sociopolitically orientated to a post-war age. But their terms are misleading, and emphasize a distinction which does not exist between the best of his earlier and later poetry. When I was invited to translate Quasimodo, and he suggested that we should meet, I declined the invitation precisely on these grounds; that I might be tempted to translate his intentions instead of his poems.

Between 1930 and 1938 Quasimodo was one of a number of poets whose poetry was described as “hermetic”. The Hermetic school, as it became known, had its roots among the French symbolists. It was a poetry of verbal ambivalence, achieving a direct impact by its emotive use of language. It aimed at evoking rather than describing, and avoided the merely decorative. This was poesia pura, image evoking object. With the war (Quasimodo insists that war changes the vital life of a people) his poetry became one of dedication to the moral experience of wartime Italy, and some of the poems show a change of tone and texture. His theme is the plight of man, his history, his fate in a disruptive universe. He measures his present against his past, probes his conscience. The poems are full of interrogatives. They speak of innocence, loss of innocence, animals and vegetation, the cosmos. They convey pride and shame, a sense of lost worlds, defeat, exile and violence. They represent a search for meaning at a time when meaning seemed to have vanished. In spite of their directness, the poems are sometimes obscure, enigmatic, complex. There is a power behind then which dissolves the surface incongruities and reveals a universe which remains unviolated.

One must surrender to these poems on their own terms. They are profound, but without cleverness, subtle without artifice. Though they derive from a highly personal experience, they achieve larger meanings. Even the sparse, explicit reporting of “News Item” (p. 186) does this. There is, throughout, the same unifying experience behind the austerity and passion. He is no product of a poetic movement, has absorbed influences but remained intact, firm in his own nature and form. The changes in his poetics, from the first books, are true reflections of his metabolism as a poet. The line of Italian poetry which leads in the nineteenth century through Carducci and Pascoli to D’Annunzio, seemed to look forward to a kind of poet par excellence who would fulfil the tradition of eloquence and bring it to maturity. The reticence, the refusal of this invitation offered by the past, is at the root of Quasimodo’s achievement on the ground prepared by Ungaretti. One is reminded of a similar break with tradition in England after the First World War. Like Ungaretti and Montale, Quasimodo absorbed French influences and evolved a language appropriate to his purposes, tuned to the exploration of new inner dimensions. It enables him to look directly both at and through his objects, to pursue his remoter searches and to identify his experience with strange ease. Objects become images without losing their identity, and speak with their own voices. Their latent power is released, so that they participate in the organization of language, giving word and word-pattern a resonance which is not mere eloquence. Quasimodo has outgrown classifications such as “Hermetic” or “Resistance”. In the war he wrote of human dignity, mortal aspiration, man’s inhumanity, both as general themes and as closely felt personal experiences. The ambivalence never becomes poetic obscurantism, and the poems make their demands on the whole personality, the heart-mind. Always the poems prevail, entire, as poems, and rarely subside into unresolved para-poems. His special capacity is to organize a complex, many-dimensioned experience into a poetry which renders that experience directly without losing any of its complexity or impetus.

The disunity of Italian history, and the nature of the language with its cadences, harmonies, arpeggios and pizzicatos may account for the rarity of this in Italian poetry. After Petrarch there is no John Donne. There are barriers beyond which poets did not reach out to their experience. It may be for similar reasons that Italy, so great an influence on the development of English drama in the Renaissance, produced no body of notable drama. It is as if the harmonies so abundant in the language predisposed its poets to manipulate rather than exploit it. So often the record has been of indulgence rather than abstinence. The signal achievement of Quasimodo and his two fellow poets seems to be not so much their renewal of language as the development of a new attitude to it, a wiser reticence. Quasimodo is concerned with speech, not song, organization, not symmetry.

Oracle, prayer, myth, Eden, exile, childhood, death, solitude, against a background of skies, lands, waters and people; these are his themes. The general becomes personal. A name of honour becomes a personal love, a personal love becomes an archetypal image. Dante, Donne and Blake achieve this kind of “through-shine” poetic transmutation. His incongruities, almost quaintnesses, indicate a freedom from his own technical accomplishment. He never betrays his experience by avoiding them. He is wary of the Italian heritage of eloquence from Petrarch down to the “Crepuscular” and Futurist poetry of his own day that “can not distinguish poetry from literature”. For Quasimodo poetry is man. The poet “modifies the world with his liberty and truth.” But we must turn to his poetry, not to his theories, to find his particular brand of truth, or we may find ourselves recalling Shelley’s Defence of Poetry and its passionate legislations. When he speaks of poetry since 1945 as dealing with “the real world, with common words” we are inclined to recall Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with its “language really used by men” and “incidents and situations from common life”, and to feel that theories about art are generally post facto justifications rather than prescriptions, and that we have heard them all before. “Experience” in Quasimodo’s best poems seems to be archetypal, anthropological, geological, vegetal as well as social and personal... a vast intergrowth reflected from the poet’s “underground”, where all the meeting streams with their sub-aqueous growths are catalysed. In this context of archetypal modes, the purely social or political was a passing guest, who shouted a word or two in a time of agony for man and left, leaving the sub-terrestrial, the aquatic, the voices of the air to speak, and continue their dialogue from the beyond. Quasimodo, a siculo greco, tuned finely by his translations from the poetry of several languages, imbued with a strong sense of race history and immanent being, may be best approached, for all his “poet of the common man” acclaim, as an oracle or a medium.