Brothers: I read this on the London Underground on Monday night, and wrote it down.
(Maniaro 15 July 1916)
What regiment are you from
brothers?
World trembling
in the night
A leaf just opening
In the racked air
Involuntary revolt
Of man face to face
With his own fragility
Brothers
Guiseppe Ungaretti
While still thinking of the beauty of Roberto’s life in Genoa (see previous post), here we go – ‘God loves simple things’ (Simple Song – Bernstein Mass) I sing.
The ‘Brothers’ poem was printed on one of the hoardings to be found at head height above the carriage windows (alongside dating and other ‘dot.com’ adverts etc), and also the Italian original. Here it is -
Fratelli
Di che reggimento siete
Fratelli?
Parola tremante
Nella notte
Foglia appena nata
Nell’aria spasimante
Involontaria rivolta
Dell’uomo presente alla sua
Fragilità
Fratelli
From Guiseppe Ungaretti, Selected Poems (Carcanet, tr AndrewFrisardi). I have now seen several different versions of the poem in English.
Guiseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) – “The Life of a Man”
Modernist poet: family came from Lucca, and grew up influenced by D’Annunzio, the Futurists, and others. In 1915 enlisted with the infantry after Italy entered the First World War and was sent to the front line in northern Italy.
Terrors and Horrors: began to write and his first collection of poems Il porto sepolto (“The Buried Port”) was published in 1917.
Ups and Downs: spent a brief period as a member of the Fascist party in the 1920′s after the war, then (re)discovered his spiritual faith. Thereafter lived a life of beauty overcoming nothing and being broken up between travelling, teaching, losses and writing.
Il Mattino:
M’illumino
d’immenso
This is his most famous poem and is frequently to be found on T shirts. Of course it defies translation, and Ungaretti is altogether difficult to translate* into English. The Carcanet book gets bad reviews and I am inclined towards Bastianutti’s bilingual work (mainly because I like the look of b-diego blogspot).
Allegria (published in 1931) is Ungaretti’s most highly rated work, and his collected works Vita di un uomo came out around the time of his death in 1970.
* SEE: Walter Benjamin ‘The Task of the Translator’ – asking how the imaginative life of the source text has been prolonged, what has been done by the translation, what it points to, throws light on, or mimes (from LRB review of GU 2003).