Giuseppe Ungaretti

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Giuseppe Ungaretti (between 1915 and 1918, unknown photographer, copyrights unclear)

Giuseppe Ungaretti (born February 10, 1888 in Alexandria , † June 2, 1970 in Milan ) was an Italian writer .

Life

Ungaretti was born in Alexandria, Egypt , as his father was involved in building the Suez Canal . From 1912, Ungaretti studied in Paris at the Sorbonne , and in the meantime also in Italy itself. During this time he got to know various artists ( Apollinaire , Max Jacob , Derain , Picasso , Braque , Peguy , Bergson ). In 1914 he returned to Italy for the country in the First World War to fight.

In 1916 he wrote his first texts, Il porto sepolto (Allegria di naufragi, Sentimento del tempo). In these texts he was clearly influenced by the French futurists . After the First World War, Ungaretti initially worked primarily as a journalist. From 1937 he was professor of Italian literature in São Paulo and from 1942 to 1959 in Rome . After the death of his nine-year-old son in 1942, he wrote "Giorno per giorno". His affinity for fascism gave him a position as press spokesman in the Foreign Ministry in the 1930s .

With his dark poetry, Ungaretti was a leading exponent of literary ermetismo . His poems have been translated into German by authors such as Ingeborg Bachmann , Hilde Domin and Paul Celan . "M'illumino / d'immenso" is the shortest and most famous poem with which Giuseppe Ungaretti reached a high point of minimalism on January 26, 1917 in Santa Maria La Longa, initially under the heading "Cielo e mare", later "Mattina". Ingeborg Bachmann's translation of these four words is: "I enlighten myself / through the immeasurable". Christoph Wilhelm Aigner did not include this poem in his edition with translations of Hungarian poems. Aigner justified his decision that "from such a compressed structure, which is strongly nourished by the vowels and the rhythm of its language, there is little more than an assertion left over in any translation into German".

Ungaretti translated William Blake's poetry into Italian. In 1970, Ungaretti was the first recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature .

Works (selection)

  • The buried harbor. (1916)
  • Joy of shipwrecks. (1919). Poems. Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1977
  • The war. (1919)
  • Sense of time. (1933)
  • The pain. (1947)
  • Dialog. (1968)
  • Vita d'un uomo. Collected Works. (1942)
  • Notes from the old man. Il Taccuino del vecchio. Poems. Italian and German. Transfer from Michael Freiherr Marschall von Bieberstein. Ars Librorum, Frankfurt am Main 1967.
  • The promised land. La terra promessa. The old man's notebook. Il taccuino del vecchio. Italian and German. Transferred by Paul Celan . Insel, Frankfurt am Main 1968
  • The late poems. Italian and German. Transmission and afterword by Michael Freiherr Marschall von Bieberstein. Piper, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-492-02079-8 .
  • I am looking for an innocent country. Italian and German. Transmission and afterword by Michael Freiherr Marschall von Bieberstein. Piper, Munich 1988
  • Cheerfulness. L'allegria. Poems 1914-1919. Italian and German. Transferred by Hanno Helbling . Hanser, Munich 1990, ISBN 978-3-446-16043-9 .
  • A human life. Edited and translated from Italian by Angelika Baader and Michael von Killisch-Horn. Work edition in four volumes:
    • Volume 1: The Joy. Poems 1919–1934. P. Kirchheim, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-87410-047-2 .
    • Volume 2: Sense of Time. Poems 1919–1946. P. Kirchheim, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-87410-048-0 .
    • Volume 3: The Promised Land. Poems 1933–1970. P. Kirchheim, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-87410-049-9 .
    • Volume 4: The desert and beyond. Travel prose 1931–1946. P. Kirchheim, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-87410-050-2 .
  • Time tracking. Poems. Selected and transferred by Christoph Wilhelm Aigner . DVA, Munich 2003, ISBN 978-3-421-05692-4 .

literature

  • Manfred Lentzen: Italian poetry of the 20th century. From the avant-garde of the first decades to a new inwardness. Analecta Romanica series, issue 53. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-465-02654-3 , pp. 92-109.
  • Tobias Wyss: Dialogue and Silence. Max Jacob . Giuseppe Ungaretti. Fernando Pessoa . Dissertation University of Zurich 1969. Juris Druck und Verlag Zurich, Zurich 1969.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Leone Piccioni (ed.), Giuseppe Ungaretti. Vita d'un uomo. Tutte le poesie, Milan 2005, p. 65. ISBN 88-04-55083-X .
personal data
SURNAME Ungaretti, Giuseppe
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 10, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Alexandria
DATE OF DEATH 2nd June 1970
Place of death Milan