Giuseppe Ungaretti
(Alexandria, 1888-Milan, 1970) Italian poet.Linked in its beginnings to hermeticism, his work, in which an existential tension and a continuous inner journey towards memory are always noticed, also represents a singular recovery of the lyrical tradition, after the excesses of twilight and futurism.
Son of a bourgeois family emigrated to Egypt for work reasons, Giuseppe Ungaretti spent his adolescence in his hometown, near those desert landscapes that would become one of the most recurrent themes of all his work.In 1912 he went to Paris to complete his studies at the Sorbonne; There he met the greatest representatives of the European avant-garde, among them Guillaume Apollinaire, André Gide, Max Jacob and Pablo Picasso.
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Two years later he settled in Milan and enlisted in the army to take part in the First World War.After the conflict, he lived first in Paris, where he married, and then in Rome, to work as a correspondent for different newspapers, an occupation that allowed him to travel through Italy, Europe and Egypt.In 1936 he accepted the chair of Italian literature at the University of São Paulo, where he lived until 1942, the year in which he returned to Rome to work as professor of contemporary Italian literature at the city's university.
In his poetic production three stages can be distinguished, the first of which is linked to his experience in war.The lyrical immediacy, the desire for purity, the essential language and the avant-garde influences of his first compositions, Il porto sepolto (1916) and Allegria di naufragi (1919), le they became one of the initiators of hermeticism.Also part of this trend are the poetry that he published during those years in different magazines and that would be collected in Poesie disperse (1945), although he later denied them.
After the war, the theme of his poetry became more reflective and evocative of the mysterious and dramatic condition of man in front of nature, while rhythmically a greater complexity and a use of procedures is noticed technicians of modern European literature, especially symbolism.They belong to this time Sentimiento del tiempo (1933), El dolor (1947), which collects the poetry written in Brazil, many of them inspired by the death of his son Antonietto , and The promised land (1950), a reflection of the baroque spirit that his verses were acquiring.Significant are the translations of the great Baroque and Symbolist poets that he carried out in that period, including William Shakespeare, Luis de Góngora and Stéphane Mallarmé.
Finally, Un grido e paesaggi (1952) marked the beginning of his third poetic moment, marked by the solid effort to recover the Italian lyrical tradition, with special attention to Petrarca , Torquato Tasso or Giacomo Leopardi, and in which the metric structure becomes a basic part of his lyrical-dramatic discourse.They followed The Old Man's Notebook (1960), Apocalissi (1961), Morte delle stagioni (1967) and Dialogo (1968), collections especially of love poems in which his interest in classicism is manifested.
In 1962 he was elected President of the European Community of Writers; four years later he received the Taormina Prize for Poetry.His complete work was gathered in different volumes under the title of Life of a man , books that testify to his peculiar and rigorous concept of the creative process, since in them a huge number of variants and rewritings of his ancient poetry.
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