Salvatore Quasimodo

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Salvatore Quasimodo (born August 20, 1901 in Modica , Ragusa Province , Sicily , † June 14, 1968 in Naples ) was an Italian poet and critic . In 1959 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature .

Life

Salvatore Quasimodo, son of a railroad worker, spent his childhood and youth in Sicily. After school, from 1919, he studied in Rome at the Polytechnic, also dealt with classical philology , but took an exam as a civil engineer . Until 1938 he worked as a surveyor and came to several regions and cities of Italy such as Palermo , Messina , Reggio Calabria , Rome, Florence , Imperia , Sardinia and Sondrio . During this time he discovered his talent for poetry and in 1930 published his first volume of poetry Acque e Terre (in German water and earth ).

His subject is the Sicilian homeland, which he presents in melodic but not rhyming verses. Experts refer to the Quasimodos style as Hermetism , which often contains difficult-to-understand webs of words, but also very lyrical and at the same time mystical. The book of poems was a great success in Italy.

He also tried his hand at this time as a theater critic and journalist for the magazine Il Tempo . In 1941 he was appointed professor of literary history at the Milan Conservatory . During World War II , Quasimodo joined the Communist Party and participated in the resistance struggle against fascist Italy under Mussolini . The confrontation with the harsh reality led to the fact that the following poems dealt with reality, a departure from the earlier transfigurations can be noted.

With his work, Quasimodo is on an equal footing with Giuseppe Ungaretti or Eugenio Montale . His poetry comes from symbolism and addresses his homeland Sicily with its traditions.

He has also distinguished himself as a translator of the ancient Roman poets Catullus , Ovid and Virgil , the ancient Greek poet Sappho as well as Shakespeare , Pablo Nerudas and Pericle Patocchis .

Awards

For his poetic work, Quasimodo received the Nobel Prize for Literature on October 22, 1959 from the Nobel Prize Committee, which - after massive criticism - had just said goodbye to its Cartesian image of man in poetry . In the laudation of the chairman of the Swedish Nobel Prize for Literature Committee, it is said that Quasimodo was "a innovator of modern poetry", that his "human pathos irresistibly breaks the hermetic form in which he was first bound."

He had previously received the Etna-Taormina Prize for Poetry (1953) and the Viareggio Prize .

In 1962 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1967 he was awarded Oxford University , the honorary doctorate .

Works (selection)

  • 1930: Acque e Terre
  • 1932: Oboe Sommerso ( Sunken Oboe )
  • 1933: Odore di eucalyptus ( smell of eucalyptus )
  • 1936: Erato e Apollion
  • 1936: Poetry (1938)
  • 1942: Nuove Poetry
  • 1942: Ed è subito sera ( And suddenly it's evening )
  • 1947: day after day
  • 1955: Il falso e vero verde ( The false and the true green )
  • 1958: La terra impareggiabile ( The incomparable land )

Editions of works in German (selection)

  • Poems 1920–1965. Italian – German, selected and translated by Christoph Ferber , with an afterword by Georges Güntert and comments by Antonio Securea. Dietrich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Mainz 2010, ISBN 978-3-87162-071-3 .
  • Life is not a dream. Selected Poems. Italian – German, translated and afterword by Gianni Selvani. Piper, Munich, Zurich 1987. ISBN 978-3-492-10696-2
  • An open arch. Italian – German, translated and afterword by Gianni Selvani. Piper, Munich, Zurich 1989. ISBN 978-3-492-11111-9
  • Time dances imperceptibly. Poems. Edited by Thea Mayer. Volk & Welt, Berlin 1967

literature

  • Walter Aue : In the blue of the south, looking for traces in Italy. Anabas, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-87038-352-6 .
  • Manfred Lentzen: Italian poetry of the 20th century. From the avant-garde of the first decades to a “new inwardness” (= Analecta Romanica. Issue 53). Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-465-02654-3 , pp. 131-150.
  • Alessandro Martini: "Nell'occhio che riscopre la luce". Tempo, Storia e memoria nella poesia di Salvatore Quasimodo. In: Romance Studies . No. 2, 2015, pp. 137–146, ( online ).
  • Michele Tondo: Salvatore Quasimodo (= Civiltà letteraria del novecento. Profili. 20, ZDB -ID 419946-7 ). Mursia, Milan 1970.
  • Winfried Wehle : Identity “in absentia”. About the poetry of Salvatore Quasimodos. In: Angela Fabris, Willi Jung (ed.): Character pictures. On the poetics of the literary portrait. Festschrift for Helmut Meter (= Germany and France in scientific dialogue. 2). V & R Unipress et al., Göttingen et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-89971-794-5 , pp. 511-528, ( digital version (PDF; 644.1 kB) ).
  • Giuseppe Zagarrio: Quasimodo (= Il Castoro. 33, ISSN  0008-753X ). La Nuova Italia, Florence 1969.

Web links

Commons : Salvatore Quasimodo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Brockhaus. Nobel Prizes. Chronicle of outstanding achievements. , FA Brockhaus Verlag, Mannheim / Leipzig 2001, ISBN 3-7653-0491-3 ; Pp. 546/547.
  2. ↑ Review and epilogue to Life is not a dream on planetlyrik.de; accessed on March 16, 2015.
  3. ↑ Review and epilogue to An open arch on planetlyrik.de; accessed on March 16, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Quasimodo, Salvatore
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian lyric poet and critic; Nobel Prize Winner
DATE OF BIRTH August 20, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Modica , Ragusa Province , Sicily
DATE OF DEATH June 14, 1968
Place of death Naples