Military history

SIXTEEN

Starlight from Violence

Poetry in the War Zone

As the Sixth Battle peters out, a soldier on Mount San Michele makes his way over boulders, through foliage and insect-buzz down to the turquoise river. Off comes his woollen tunic, lousy, rank with sweat; he unwinds his puttees, unlaces his heavy boots. That night, back in his trench above the valley, he shelters near a tree stump. Moonlight on the river: silver in the distance. The artillery has thumped all day, somewhere to the east. The sector is quiet and his body, relaxing, remembers its sensations in the water. He finds a pencil, tears the corner off a cartridge box and scribbles on it:1

This morning I lay back

in an urn of water

and like a relic

took my rest

The Isonzo’s flow

smoothed me

like a stone of its own

I hauled myself, this

bonebag, up

and off I went

like an acrobat

on water …

The writer was Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970), a private in the 19th Infantry, Brescia Brigade. A dozen of his poems are still the best- known Italian literature of the Great War. They broke the mould of poetry in his language, freeing it from late romantic rhetoric.

This poem, called ‘The Rivers’ and dated 16 August 1916, has been an anthology piece for decades. After setting the scene, the poet tells how the water of the Isonzo restores him to himself, bearing him back to other rivers in his life. He names the Serchio, a Tuscan river that watered the farmland where his ancestors lived. Then the Nile, from his birthplace in Egypt, and lastly the Seine, for it was Paris that awoke his vocation.

These are my rivers

summed up in the Isonzo.

The mood is blissful, almost anthemic. Rivers are ancient symbols of life, and Ungaretti feels his existence being affirmed. The rocks in the riverbed are no harder than his bones. His life is a river, the war is not strong enough to stop it. Why, he can walk on water.

This is the Isonzo

and here I best

recognise myself:

a yielding fibre

of the universe

My torment’s

when I

don’t believe myself

in harmony

But those hidden

hands

that soak and blend me

regale me with

rare

happiness

Finally the poem circles back to the hillside, alights like a barn-owl on that ‘mutilated tree’, folds its wings and gazes at us:

now that it’s night

and my life looks to me

a corolla

of darkness

Soldiers stripping off to bathe recur in English-language poetry of the Great War. The men’s pleasure moves the watching officer to pity, sometimes flushed with yearning. Ungaretti’s poem evokes a little of this pathos, but with a difference: he is his own spectator. The poet’s participation is complete, like his body’s immersion in the river.

In a British front-line poet, this focus on himself would seem strange. It cuts against the idea that good poetry from the Great War bore witness to monstrous inhumanity, the epic betrayal of civilised ideals. The scholar Jon Stallworthy has said that well-made poems from the Great War ‘move us (as Aristotle said) to pity and terror; also, I suggest, to a measure of fury’. While this is true of Sassoon’s and Owen’s work, it is much less true of the good poems in Italian. By any standard that emphasises dissent or indignation, Ungaretti’s work hardly counts as war poetry at all. For the war is largely the backdrop in a drama about identity and endurance. One of his first critics drew this distinction by observing that Ungaretti had written not war poems but a soldier’s poems. In the Italian context, poetic self-absorption need not be an escape from the reality of war. In Ungaretti’s case, it opens a private vista onto a wider truth. For identity was at the heart of Italy’s war. The nation was taken to war in the name of political claims that flowed from Italy’s history and values, beyond mere politics. The more cynical motives stayed in the shadow, behind the patriotic rhetoric. The interventionists appealed to a highly coloured version of Italy’s recent past and its immemorial ‘Latin’ culture.

The Italians were told by their leaders in spring 1915 that they should not be happy in their own skin – the skin formed by the shape of their country on the map. They were told that it was right to seethe within those unjust confines, and burst through them with weapons. When Ungaretti avowed his happiness in his own skin as a soldier, massaged by the Isonzo, he was speaking about Italian identity as well as his own. If he was where he ought to be, then the Isonzo was the right place for other Italian soldiers. And if this was their proper place, the arguments that triggered their invasion were valid. There is no suggestion that ‘The Rivers’ points to an alternative way of being, a realm of nature that exposes the futility of war. If anything, the water refreshes the soldier for the struggle.

There had been a vogue for incendiary verse since D’Annunzio published his ‘Laus vitae’ in 1903, a lurid vision of battle that champions the victors’ right to slaughter their foe, lay waste his cities and rape his women. ‘We shall ransack the mothers’ wombs with fire …’ Italy’s attack on Libya in 1911 inspired Italy’s unofficial laureate to pen odes to bloody Victory:

You smile upon the land that is your prey.

Italy! From the passion that devours me

a song arises fresher than the morn …

The start of war in 1914 and 1915 released a wave of patriotic poetry across Europe. In Italy, anthologies with titles like Songs of the Fatherland poured off the press. Among hundreds of examples, consider Corrado Govoni’s long poem, called simply ‘War!’ The entire world is turning into ‘a long cemetery of trenches’. How lovely to fertilise earth’s old carcass with guns! Let savage instinct be our only master! Disorder is order, destruction is being constructed. Half a dozen breathless pages of necrophile ranting lead to a final demented exhortation:

Burn, burn,

set fire to this world till it becomes a sun.

Devastate smash destroy,

Go forth, go forth, oh lovely human flail,

be plague earthquake and hurricane.

Make a red spring

of blood and martyrdom

bloom from this old earth,

and life be like a flame.

Long live war!

A more intellectual version came from Giulio Barni, a volunteer from Trieste, in verses written in 1914:

Liberty, liberty,

if you’re a woman

come, come to me:

come and sleep with me

for I want to kill

peace and lies for you

‘Peace and lies’: that angry pairing says everything about nationalist feeling – and thinking – as Italy geared up for war.

The vein of ecstatic belligerence did not dry up on contact with real horror. Again, examples are legion. A bersagliere called Luigi Granturco published a collection called Songs of the Bayonet in 1917.

O land of Italy, O first among all the lands on the globe,

here, I see you: the envy of the world …

It is the race created for mastery.

Such stuff was easier to write than to read – which explains why the copy in Oxford’s Bodleian Library was still uncut after 90 years. Sometimes the belligerence took a mystical colouring; Vittorio Locchi’s best-selling Sabbath of Holy Gorizia invoked the sacred mountains as witnesses at a festival of blood and song. Religious motifs were drafted to induce awe and deference:

all the bayonets

yield like ensigns

on the altars of the mountains,

on the sacred carnage of our dead.

British patriotic poetry was muted beside the Italian kind. On war as escape from tawdry peace, Britain had Rupert Brooke (‘To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, / Glad from a world turned old and cold and weary’). On the war in the air, Yeats imagined a pilot following a ‘lonely impulse of delight’ to ‘this tumult in the clouds’; for the Futurist poet Soffici, on the other hand, the firmament in battle reeked of thighs and armpits. Aloft, he could ‘kiss the noiseless vulva of the sky’. On war as renewal, there was Charles Hamilton Sorley (‘there has come upon the land / The curse of Inactivity’). On the intoxication of battle, Britain had Julian Grenfell (‘joy of battle takes / Him by the throat, and makes him blind’). Even these last lines seem reflective, partly regretful, beside the mad euphoria of the Italians. Squibs about hating the Boche are one thing, D’Annunzio’s hymning of bloodlust is quite another.

What Wilfred Owen called the pity of war is not much present in Italian war poetry. Perhaps it is the difference between belligerence welcomed as a vocation and martial courage felt as a duty. Yet there were Italian poets ready to record the worst that the war could show. After a long education, Clemente Rebora (1885–1957) had cast around for a direction in life and failed to find one. A religious vocation was stirring; he would eventually enter the Catholic Church and, twenty years after the war, be ordained as a priest. When war came, he was drafted and sent to the Isonzo. He likened military service to a ‘mission’, like pastoral care, and praised the soldiers’ ‘patient sweet humanity’. As a soldier and poet, he was determined to spare himself nothing amid the ‘seas of mud and freezing bora, and putrefaction’. He was tormented at having to send his men – who ‘loveme (that’s the right word!)’ – to almost certain death. ‘What a stench from our unburied dead, while our own artillery kills us off by mistake!’ he exclaimed, in a letter that slipped past the censor.

On 1 December 1915, shortly before he was invalided away from the front, Rebora wrote to his mother: ‘It is a blessing for your peace of mind and comfort that you know nothing about the moral mire, the pity and horror of what’s happening; and only know the news through the yellow press that deceives the fatherland – and you mothers!’ The physical suffering was awful, but the inward torment was much worse. His poetry excelled at conveying both kinds. One of his best-known poems relates an episode about a wounded comrade screaming for help from no-man’s land. Its title is ‘Viaticum’, the Catholic Eucharist for the dying.

Oh wounded man down there in the valley,

pleading so loud

that three comrades, no less,

perished for you who almost aren't there,

a legless trunk

between mire and blood,

and now the wailing again,

the pity stirred in us, lingering still

to breathe our last, and the moment won't end,

quicken your agony,

finish it – you can,

take solace

in the insanity that can’t go mad,

while time stops,

sleep shroud your brain,

leave us in silence –

Thank you, brother.

The space before the last line measures the man’s death, freeing the poet to mutter his gratitude for not causing more soldiers to lose their lives. Nothing in Ungaretti matches this agonised submission to the truth of

other men’s suffering. Nor does anything by Ungaretti resemble the extraordinary poem by Fausto Maria Martini, called ‘Why I didn’t kill you’, which describes the poet’s decision not to kill an Austrian soldier, a terrified boy cowering under his (Martini’s) bayonet. The reason was not cowardice; rather, the ‘unknown blond enemy’s face’ reminded him of his own ‘leaner, older’ face.

It was not, then, for fear

that I didn’t kill you: it was – not to die myself!

Not to die in you: you were my twin,

or seemed so in the twinned trench

Too prosy to be high art, the poem is deeply affecting, and may be unique in the language. Like Wilfred Owen’s great line, ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’, this recognition of self in the other dissolves the political arguments for organised murder.

Ungaretti’s route to the Isonzo was long and meandering. He was born in Alexandria, where his Tuscan parents had emigrated so his father could work on the Suez Canal. After his father’s death when he was only two, his pious mother raised Giuseppe in poverty. They visited his father’s grave every day. After school, he took menial jobs in Cairo. At 24, he left Africa, intending to study in Paris. He gravitated to avant-garde circles, befriending the poet Apollinaire and eating in the same bistro as Modigliani. Contemporaries recalled a warm, shambling loner with no particular direction; round-shouldered, tousled, with blue eyes half-closed and hardly visible when his face creased in an enormous grin; speaking expressive Italian larded with French. He went to Italy in 1914, perhaps influenced by meeting Italian writers at a Futurist event in Paris, who included some of the most radical propagandists for war. Settling in Turin, he trained as a schoolteacher of French, but soon plunged into the pro-war campaign, more from a sense of cultural solidarity with Paris, ‘città santa dell’uomo moderno’, ‘the holy city of modern man’, than for Trento and Trieste. Never a cautious man, he was arrested at one of the rallies where interventionists and neutralists clashed, and briefly jailed. ‘I don’t like war,’ he said much later, ‘and I did not like it then, but it seemed to us that that war was necessary. We thought Germany was completely to blame.’

He moved to Milan to concentrate on his exams, but political passion would not let him go. Europe’s crisis of nations had sparked a crisis of his own. Like other Italian émigrés at this time, he discovered a yearning to merge with the land of his forefathers, in his case Tuscany – the ‘promised land’ of childhood fables. ‘I’m a lost soul’, he confessed to a friend.

Which people do I belong to? Where am I from? I have no place of my own in this world, no neighbours. Wherever I draw close to anyone, I hurt myself. How to live like this, forever shutting myself up like a tomb? … Is this my fate? And who should take any interest if I’m suffering? Who could hear me? … I talk oddly, I’m a stranger. Everywhere. Am I going to destroy myself in the blaze of my desolation? And what if war ordains me an Italian?

The last question is so important that he rushes at it and stops short, as if hardly daring to hope.

He volunteered for the infantry only to be rejected for active service, being six years older than the first conscripts. Stuck behind a desk, he wrote despairingly to a friend that ‘everything is at stake’, for the prospect of getting to the front was his ‘only joy’. The army relaxed its standards after the first bloodbaths, and by Christmas he was at the front, near Mount San Michele. He would spend two and a half years there. Military service was the most emphatic way of affiliating with Italy, in whose uniform he could – as he wrote in another poem – lie down ‘as in my father’s cradle’. The war, he would later say, gave him his identity papers, and ‘The Rivers’ marked a moment when he felt sure of belonging. Much more often the sense of isolation was almost overpowering, perhaps held at bay by the act of composing poetry:

Another night

In this gloom

with frozen

fingers

making out

my face

I see myself

abandoned in endlessness

In the trenches, he grew immune to nationalist passion. ‘There is no trace in my poetry of hatred for the enemy, or anyone else,’ he said later, truthfully. ‘There’s an awareness of the human condition, men’s brotherhood in suffering, the extreme precariousness of their situation.’ His prewar letters sometimes sound a Futurist note; he told a friend in 1913 that he was a Nietzschean, because he wanted ‘a more heroic humanity’ and a ‘new aesthetic’. In his writings from the front, this note is no longer heard. Although he was friendly with some of the most extreme nationalists, he did not lapse into the ranting that poisons so much Italian wartime writing. Like many artists, he was drawn to absolutes of experience; ideology was a means to emotion, not an end in itself. In fact, ‘The Rivers’ can be read as a humanist redemption of a nationalist motif – the Isonzo itself, named in a thousand bellicose speeches and articles. In May 1915, D’Annunzio told a crowd in Rome that Italian soldiers would soon turn the Isonzo red with barbarian blood. In Ungaretti’s poem, by contrast, it is the uniform that is ‘foul with war’, not the river, which washes the squalor away.

When Private Mussolini reached the Isonzo on 16 September 1915, he recorded the moment for his newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. ‘I have never seen bluer waters. Strange! I bent down over the cold water and drank a mouthful with devotion. Sacred river!’

Ungaretti met Mussolini in late 1914, admired him, and near the end of 1918 would become the Popolo’s erratic correspondent in Paris. Profoundly naïve about politics, he joined the Fascist Party in the 1920s, along with so many other disillusioned veterans. The admiration was mutual to some degree, as the Duce wrote an offhand preface for his poems in 1923, a single ambiguous paragraph, devoid of interest beyond its byline. Now and then he petitioned the dictator for favours, and in 1930 chose ‘Benito’ as his son’s middle name. An excruciating letter came recently to light, appealing to the ‘carissimo Duce’ for help in gaining election to a prestigious academy. He flattered the dictator’s revolutionary vitalism (‘life is what we need, not people who write to amuse the bourgeoisie’), hailed himself as the best of Italy’s younger poets, and signed off as ‘your most devoted warrior’. No reply has been found. Mussolini came good in later years, however, getting charges dropped after Ungaretti’s several run-ins with the police for criticising the regime and speaking up for a Jewish poet. Desperately chasing regular work, he took his family to Brazil in 1936. The self-styled anarchism of his later years was a twice-burned poet’s way of sending all politicians to blazes. His real politics were summed up in lines that end a poem from France in May 1918:

I seek an

innocent country.

In autumn 1915, Ungaretti would probably have read Il Popolo d’Italia when it came his way. To be sure, Mussolini’s banal veneration is very unlike Ungaretti’s private ceremony. For the poet, the river’s sacredness is inseparable from the feel of it flowing over weary flesh. For the future Duce, it is automatic, almost abstract. Where he bowed over the river to scoop up the holy water, Ungaretti crouched beside it after his dip, as if taking Holy Communion:

and like a bedouin

bent down to receive

the sun

By smuggling his Egyptian childhood into the scene, he dispels any nationalist atmospherics.

Other poems by Ungaretti come closer to our usual idea of war poetry.

Brothers

What’s your regiment brothers?

Word trembling in the night

Leaf barely born

In the tortured air

involuntary revolt

of man facing his

own frailty

Brothers

This conjures a situation with marvellous economy, far beyond the wordy poetic norms of the day. Columns of infantry swap greetings as they file past each other. These words hang in the air, defying the silence and the risk of drawing enemy fire as new leaves uncurl despite the risk of frost, and as his own words unfurl despite artillery and barbed wire.2 These tiny affirmations of shared humanity and common purpose, involuntary because instinctive, hinge on the title-word ‘brothers’, so rich in meaning for the poet. Politicians and demagogues boasted that the war was bonding Italians together for the first time. Ungaretti lived that process with a rare intensity. In a wartime elegy for an Arab friend who had taken his own life in Paris, Ungaretti suggested that the other man had destroyed himself by getting stranded between nations.

He loved France

and changed his name …

but he was no Frenchman

and no longer knew

how to live

in his family’s tent.

Identity, like war, is a matter of life and death. Ungaretti had swayed on the brink of losing this crucial knowledge. War was the crucible where he fused with his people.

When brutal details do enter his poetry, their purpose is not documentary.

Vigil

One whole night

thrown down nearby

a slaughtered

comrade his mouth

rigid and upturned

to the full moon

his swollen hands

delving into

my silence

I wrote

letters full of love

Never have I held

so hard to life

Many soldiers were haunted by the memory of dead comrades’ hands, particularly when they died clutching at barbed wire, and asCatholics readily saw such victims as Christ-like. Ungaretti revered the soldiers who, just by being their uncomplicated selves, soothed his insecurity. A letter to a friend, the writer Giovanni Papini, in March 1916 started cheerfully: ‘My comrades and I are writing, curled up in our dens in the midst of a racket that has simply become monotonous.’ A few months later he wrote, again to Papini: ‘The other night I had to march ten km or so in a downpour; I let myself go singing with the other soldiers; I forgot myself; what happiness.’ Their kindness moved him deeply (‘if my knapsack is hurting, they’ll take it off my back and try to take my rifle as well’). They would have thought the old man needed taking care of. He was amused when they called him ‘sir’, for he was a private like them and insisted on staying one. Many officers wrote about this bond with the men, inevitably with a paternalist awareness of their authority or other advantages over them. Ungaretti’s enjoyment of the bond was as free of condescension as it could be. When the army sent him on the officers’ training course in 1917, he flunked out; ‘unfit for command’ was the verdict. Which he was, and wanted to be. He needed anonymity in the ranks. ‘The least thing that would have distinguished me from the next soldier would have seemed a hateful privilege,’ he explained long after the war.

alt

Pilgrimage  

Stuck

in these guts

of rubble

hours and hours

I dragged

my bones

given to mud

like a boot-sole

or a seed

of hawthorn

Ungaretti

man of sorrows

an illusion’s enough

to make you brave

A searchlight

over there

makes a sea

in the fog

What was this illusion? Not the interventionists’ promise of rapid victory. (Even in his old age, when scathing criticism of the war was commonplace in Italy, Ungaretti preferred not to discuss the ‘humbug’ that was mixed with the ideals of spring 1915.) It was the beguiling distraction of a visual metaphor – those waves painted on the fog by a searchlight beam. A trick of the light, over in a moment, leaving the soldier no better off but enriching the poet.

Distrust of ‘literature’ was another lesson of life in the trenches. For if he owed his comrades his education in humanity, he must also have been indebted to them for his plain idiom and staccato rhythm, as well as to his beloved friend Apollinaire, who showed how to quit punctuation. These poems were written when Ungaretti’s ears echoed day and night with the speech of peasants and labourers. To Papini, again: ‘My dear comrades have looked death in the face without knowing why.’ Surely he wanted to write poetry that was true to the unquestioning acceptance that was, for him, the hallmark of his companions’ experience. True, that is, to the ‘community of suffering’ that he felt proud to join. While he shared their disgust at the politicking in Rome, he was no more inclined than they were to oppose the war. Ungaretti’s artistic courage was not matched by independent thinking about the calculus that turned so much slaughter into so little gain. His nationalism was conventional. Healing immersion in the life of the troops was what he wanted, and got.

Life at the front encouraged modernist concision; for ‘There was no time: the words you used had to be the decisive, absolute words, there was this necessity to express yourself with the fewest words, to cleanse yourself, not to say anything except what had to be said.’ With their startling lack of connective tissue, his poems measure a duress that threatens to cancel individuality altogether, drowning out the personal voice – the voice of poetry. They imitate the posture of the infantry, crouching to minimise their exposure. The wondrous musicality of Italian has been internalised, driven inside the word or phrase. Rhythms lie low until the pulse of speech releases them. Syllables are cherished like comrades’ lives, and spent reluctantly. These poems skirt the brink of silence: heroically minimal, revealing depth in paucity. Commitment to his material is gauged by devotion to its purity.

They might never have seen print. Ungaretti’s first collection was published thanks to a chance encounter. Ettore Serra, a lieutenant with literary interests, was strolling through Versa, ‘a fly-bitten, dusty little village’ where the 19th Infantry happened to be resting. His eye was caught by a ragged, insouciant soldier who was taking such pleasure in the sunshine that he failed to salute the passing officer. Serra wanted his name, which led to a conversation about a few early poems that Ungaretti had published in a magazine. Asked about his recent work, Ungaretti dug in his pockets for the scraps of paper. Serra took them away and turned them into a book that changed Italian poetry. Not that The Buried Harbour, privately printed in Udine late in 1916, made much impact at the time, even on the poet’s avant-garde friends in Florence and Rome, except Papini, who announced with relish that Ungaretti had ‘strangled rhetoric’. Slipping onstage without benefit of manifestos, the implications of this debut would have been hard to see even without the distraction of war. The poet himself may not have grasped them at the time. For he was not having a quarrel with poetic tradition when he wrote his ‘book of desolation’, as he called it; he was saving his sanity.

His poems still carry the charge of new expression, minted for new experience. Written as a sort of journal, not meant for publication, they have the self-communing quality of something kept for no one else’s eyes. Early in 1917, he wrote to a friend about an enthralling discovery: ‘liberty is in us’. Nothing can prevent him ‘marvelling at life’s marvels’, and this compensates for his woes.

I’ve lain down on muddy stones where mice the size of cats run over me as if I’m one of them, while the lice, charming creatures, tenacious as Germans, chewed on us contentedly. But my imagination had nothing to feed on except contemplation of itself, rejoicing that I’m still myself.

Perhaps Ungaretti kept his status as Italy’s foremost war poet because he proved that lyrical transcendence survived on the Carso, shrunken, introverted, but intact. He spared his readers from reflecting on Italy’s conduct of the war and imagining the horrors inflicted on the soldiers. More than this: by clinging ‘so hard to life’ in the midst of death, he partly redeemed those horrors. Half a century later, he identified ‘the almost savage exaltation’ in his war poems, powered by ‘the vital impulse and the appetite to live’. This is the source of consolation in his work. His poetry, he said, ‘burst like starlight from violence’. Starlight reaches the eye across gulfs of space and time, aeons from the explosion that creates it. Poetry like Rebora’s is more like phosphorus: searing and intolerable.

Ungaretti valued two kinds of calmness and found them both in the war. Away from the trenches, a receptive stillness of soul let him

yield

to the drifting

of the limpid universe

as he wrote early in 1916. The reprieve from danger cast a halo around sunlight on dewy grass, purple shadow thrown by mountains, the carnal pink of sunset, a green glade amid blitzed woodlands above the Isonzo. We hear the din of battle in the white silence around his words. There is a seven-syllable poem, ‘Morning’, written in the quiet village of Santa Maria la Longa. When the sky is clear, the mountains to north and east serrate the horizon: a glorious view.

M’illumino

d’immenso

became the best-known Italian poem since Dante.3 Today, it stands on signposts along the main road through the village.

Then there was the endless resignation of the men in the trenches. The word that linked these states of being was docile: docile, meek, yielding. After Caporetto, he described the soldiers in retreat: ‘They went in silence, meekly, as the Italians go, dying with a smile.’ Despite his ready grin, Ungaretti did not impress others as particularly docile himself. Explosive, rather; truculent; his own man. A friend was working at the Supreme Command when Ungaretti dropped by in June or July 1917. The poet was soon complaining loudly about the soldiers’ conditions and plummeting spirits. The friend told him to lower his voice: General Diaz was in the next office. But Ungaretti’s nerves were shot after a year and a half on the Carso. ‘I’d like to know what’s going on in your general’s head,’ he shouted. ‘What’s going on in all their heads, here? The soldiers are worn out, they’re at the end of their tethers, and as for morale, that’s been stagnant for a long time. Where’s this all leading? Where?’

Three months later, the Twelfth Battle supplied the answer.

Source Note

SIXTEEN Starlight from Violence

1 not war poems but a soldier’s poems: Cortellessa. Other poems cited in this chapter are from this superb anthology.

2You smile upon the land that is your prey’: Cortellessa. Laus vitae means ‘Praise of Life’.

3kiss the noiseless vulva of the sky’: Cortellessa, 142.

4 some of the most radical propagandists for war: Giovanni Papini, Giuseppe Prezzolini and Ardengo Soffici.

5the holy city of modern man’: Piccioni [1979], 79.

6I don’t like war,’ he said: Ungaretti [1981b].

7I’m a lost soul’, he confessed: Ungaretti [1981b].

8everything is at stake’: Mauro.

9a more heroic humanity’: Piccioni [1979], 81.

10I have never seen bluer waters’: Mussolini cited by Svolšak [2003], 93.

11 he petitioned the dictator for favours: Piccioni [1980], 105.

12 An excruciating letter came recently to light: Zingone, 172.

13 the memory of dead comrades’ hands: Albertazzi; Salsa, 65.

14 The other night I had to march’: From a letter to Papini, 29 June 1916. Piccioni [1979]

15if my knapsack is hurting’: Ungaretti [1981b], 13–14, 38.

16unfit for commandwas the verdict: Ungaretti [1981b].

17The least thing that would have distinguished’: Ungaretti [1981a], 132.

18 his beloved friend Apollinaire: Piccioni [1980], 82.

19My dear comrades have looked death’: Piccioni [1980], 192.

20 thecommunity of suffering’: Piccioni [1979], 86.

21There was no time’: Piccioni [1979], 86.

22a fly-bitten, dusty little village’: Dalton, 35.

23I’ve lain down on muddy stones’: Piccioni [1980], 95.

24the almost savage exaltation’: Cortellessa. Ungaretti’s slancio vitale (vital impulse) translated the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s élan vitale or life force. See Chapter 20, ‘The Gospel of Energy’.

25burst like starlight from violence’: Cortellessa, 37.

26Where’s this all leading? Where?’: Dario Puccini, 250.

1 With one exception, the translations in this chapter are my own, though indebted to previous versions by Patrick Creagh (in McKendrick’s anthology) and Andrew Frisardi. The exception is ‘Vigil’, which is newly translated by Jamie McKendrick.

2 The leaf is also any soldier likely to die before his time. Transferred to France in summer 1918, Ungaretti wrote a micro-epic called, simply, ‘Soldiers’: ‘Si sta come d’autunno / sugli alberi le foglie’. (A tone-deaf reduction into English: ‘Here like leaves / on autumn trees’.) With Japanese delicacy, these lines renew a comparison that is as old as literature. Homer’s Greeks stood before Troy ‘as numberless as leaves bred in the spring’, (continued on p. 188) and Milton imagined Satan’s legions, the fallen angels, lying ‘thick as autumnal leaves’ (Paradise Lost, i. 302). By 1918, the exhausted Ungaretti felt more damned than vernal.  

3 Clive Wilmer’s paraphrase gets the sense: ‘I flood myself with the light of the immense.’

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