Allegria

Allegria by Giuseppe Ungaretti. Translated by Geoffrey Brock. New York: Archipelago Books, 2020. 198 pp. $18 US, $24 CAD. (paperback) 

Just over a hundred years ago, Giuseppe Ungaretti upended Italian poetry. Think Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, or Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro.” With L’Allegria, written, scribbled on scraps, for the most part while he was in the trenches on Italy’s disastrous Isonzo Front—some half million dead and the concluding catastrophe of Caparetto—Ungaretti stripped poetry of all ornament, reducing the physical poetic unit—if there is indeed such a thing—to the single word, the syllable. We could easily argue that Pound and his fellow Imagists did the same with the English language, and a decade earlier than Ungaretti, but to my mind at least Ungaretti did something entirely different than Pound et al. The poems of L’Allegria do not just present, distilled and remade concrete in language, an impression, a moment, an insight. They do all this and they bear witness; they bear witness both to an objective, external reality, and to this reality as it is experienced, felt, lived by the poet—all this in a few dozen lines of three or five words, sometimes in as few as two or six lines and 12 or 20 words.

None of this is news to anyone who has read Ungaretti. After all, Jorge Guillén, one of the leading poets of Spain’s Generation of  ’27, wrote that Ungaretti’s poetry is that of “a voice both moved and moving.” Translating this voice both moved and moving, these poems both of life lived and witness to this life lived, is as daunting a task as any translator can face. Simply put: there is no room to move. The original is so precise, so sparse and so full that the translator has no leeway, no space to catch up, retrieve an image or a nuance passed over a few lines previously because the language of the translation required it. In fact, in the introduction to his own excellent translations, published in 1971 by Penguin as Ungaretti’s Selected Poems, singling out the notoriously concise “Mattina” (Morning), Patrick Creagh suggests that some of Ungaretti’s poems might simply be untranslatable.

Geoffrey Brock’s new translation of L’Allegria (1931), published in a bilingual edition by Archipelago Books and very aptly titled Allegria, is as faithful and rewarding as any English rendition of Ungaretti’s work could be. For example, Brock changes the title of “Nasce forse” to “Maybe a River,” a far more fitting title in English than, say, the literal but plodding and obscure “Is Born Perhaps.” The first lines of the poem confirm the exactness of the translator’s choice of title: “C’è la nebbia che ci cancella / Nasce forse un fiume quassù,” which in English Brock renders as “Fog is blotting us out / Maybe a river is being born up there.” Brock makes equally fortunate choices throughout. “Once Upon a Time,” which Ungaretti wrote on “Elevation 141, August 1, 1916,” that is to say, somewhere on the front, provides an excellent example of both Ungaretti’s sparkling concision and Brock’s skills translating this concision:

The Cappuccio Wood
has a green
velvet slope
soft
as an armchair

To drowse there
alone
in a distant café
in a light
as faint
as this moon’s

With “Half-Sleeping,” also from the front a few days later, “Gully below Peak Four, August 6, 1916,” Brock’s English captures perfectly Ungaretti the witness and Ungaretti the man living that which he is witnessing:

I hear the night raped

The air is riddled
like lace
by the gunshots
of the men
in trenches
like snails in their shells

It’s as if
a breathless
swarm of chisels
were beating
the lava-stone pavers
of my streets
and I were listening
unseeing
half-sleeping 

This, the poet as both participant and witness, also informs one of the finest poems of the last century, “In Memory,” a poem in which Ungaretti  remembers his friend, Moammed Sceab/Mohammed Shehab, who committed suicide. Ungaretti concludes thus:

He rests
In the graveyard in Ivry
a suburb that feels
always
like
the day
the fair gets taken
down

And maybe I alone
still know
he lived

For some 40 years I stubbornly carried with me as I moved across continents and oceans a very small number of books: the Epic of Gilgamesh, Saint-Exupéry’s Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars), and a thin, now very worn, Ungaretti. With Archipelago’s beautiful new edition and Bock’s fine translation, if ever I travel again I may just be able to leave my battered old Ungaretti behind.

—Reviewer Nicola Vulpe considers poetry an unfortunate habit, but has nonetheless published three collections of poetry, When the Mongols Return, Blue Tile, and Insult to the Brain, with a fourth, Through the Waspmouth, forthcoming in 2021.