Allegria

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Pub Date 6 Oct 2020 | Archive Date 27 Sep 2020

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Description

NOTE FOR KINDLE USERS: There is a known issue whereby the text, which appears in both Italian and English, is scrambled in some downloads of the .mobi file prepared by NetGalley. We are not able to fix it at this time. If you request this title, please be prepared to use the Adobe or NetGalley version in case the Kindle file does not work.


Geoffrey Brock, whose translations have won him Poetry magazine's John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, finally does justice to these slim, concentrated verses in his English translation, alongside Ungaretti's Italian originals.

Famed for his brevity, Giuseppe Ungaretti's early poems swing nimbly from the coarse matter of tram wires, alleyways, quails in bushes, and hotel landladies to the mystic shiver of pure abstraction. These are the kinds of poems that, through their numinous clarity and shifting intimations, can make a poetry-lover of the most stone-faced non-believer. Ungaretti won multiple prizes for his poetry, including the 1970 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He was a major proponent of the Hermetic style, which proposed a poetry in which the sounds of words were of equal import to their meanings. This auditory awareness echoes through Brock's hair-raising translations, where a man holding vigil with his dead, open-mouthed comrade, says, "I have never felt / so fastened / to life."

NOTE FOR KINDLE USERS: There is a known issue whereby the text, which appears in both Italian and English, is scrambled in some downloads of the .mobi file prepared by NetGalley. We are not able to...


Advance Praise

"What a joy to have this new translation of Ungaretti, a great lyric poet so masterly translated by Geoffrey Brock. I will buy any book of poetry that Brock has translated. He is simply that good. But it is especially clear here, in the pages of Allegria, where the shortish lines test the translator's ability to deliver nuance with light touch, precision, and almost Mozartian grace. The poems themselves praise the fleeting moment in the middle of crisis, praise the spark of tenderness in the time of misfortune, praise the breadcrumbs of rememberings in the hungriest of times, when no one remembers and everyone zigzags around the room, around the street, around one's heart. This book will give you 'a momentary stay against confusion.' It is a beautiful gift." -- Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa

"In their comparative abstraction, melancholy timbre and interest in the passing of time, Ungaretti's early poems are in the tradition of Leopardi ... his decisive novelty in Italian - the tiny lines, the absence of punctuation, the consequent focus on each individual word - owes more to the stimulus of Mallarmé and Apollinaire ... His crystalline poems often emerged from a process of cutting; in his work ... the placing of words has an almost pictorial suggestiveness." -Matthew Reynolds, London Review of Books

"Ungaretti's poetry, born in the ordeal of World War I and its trenches ... marked a turning point in modern Italian literature." -Glauco Cambon

"Ungaretti purged the language of all that was but ornament, of all that was too approximate for the precise tension of his line. Through force of tone and sentiment, and a syntax stripped to its essential sinews, he compelled words to their primal power." -Allen Mandelbaum

"One of the most authentic poets of Western Europe." -T. S. Eliot

"What a joy to have this new translation of Ungaretti, a great lyric poet so masterly translated by Geoffrey Brock. I will buy any book of poetry that Brock has translated. He is simply that good...


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EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781939810649
PRICE US$18.00 (USD)
PAGES 204

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Featured Reviews

Thanks to #Netgalley for making this book available to me.
It took me a while to finish this book because of how heavy it was and how important it also was to know more about war and the loss that results from war.
L'allegria which means joy or merriness consists of poems that explore the realities of war from the perspective of a soldier and in this case Giuseppe Ungaretti's experience of the first world war. Originally written in Italian, this book is translated to English by the famed Geoffrey Brock.
A few of my depressing favorites are Solider "We are like the leaves on the trees in falls" here he expresses the fleeting nature of their lives, the uncertainty that they would be able to hold on to the world against the tribulations of war, Universe "With the sea, I made myself a casket of coolness", Clear "I see myself as something fleeting But caught in an immortal circle" this particular poem struck a chord with me because it just reveals how ephemeral life really is and how situations are just an everlasting circle.

Absolutely recommend this poetry collection.

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Thank you Archipelago and Netgalley for the e-copy.

Researching more into the author and on the poetry book itself really made me appreciate it even more.

I requested this poetry book not only because I’m falling in love with Archipelago Publishing but also because it was a book by an Italian author. As I grew up in Italy and consider myself Italian, I wanted to read something in Italian as well, and reading the Italian poems followed by the English translated version of them made me experience them twice and made me love each single one more and more.

These poems are deep and heavy, as they are his experience with war.
These poems aren’t only about war but they’re also about the self.
I'm so glad I got to read this poetry collection and being able to experience them to the fullest.

Would definitely recommend it if you love deep poetry that will make you think about other’s experiences with heavy moments in their lives, and in general if you love poetry that allows you to think deep and wonder.

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Super abstract but super different at the same time.

Many thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for providing me with an e-ARC of this book.

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That was lovely. I really enjoyed this superb and intense collection of poetry. It was a joy to read.

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Allegria is a celebration of life dressed in the colours of the essential. Melancholic and luminous at once, the collection’s original, longer title, Joy of shipwrecks makes a fitting oxymoronic allegory for the fundamental ambivalence that is the human condition.

Written between 1914 and 1919, quite a few poems are written from the perspective of a soldier of in the first world war, in which Ungaretti volunteered to fight in the Italian army. Many of them he literally wrote in the trenches, on the eastern edge of the Italian Front, on a hill in the Karst Plateau.

Born in Egypt and educated in French-language schools, later moving to Paris where he studied and became a friend of Guillaume Apollinaire and frequented the same literary and artistic circles, Ungaretti’s sense of belonging to Italy was not obvious. His youth in Egypt lives on in his poems, infused with allusions to Alexandria, the desert, the scorching sunlight – the feeling of being an eternal wanderer seemed strong (‘There is no/land/on earth/I can/make home).

Some of his poems, in their brevity, sense of nature and lapidarity, reminiscence haiku, shining from the page with a likewise purity and acuity. From the sobriety of expression, the Italian language itself comes to the fore as the focal point, the sound and musicality of it. Ungaretti, born in Egypt from Italian parents, considered the Italian language his true as well as imaginary homeland. At first knowing Italy only by hear say, it became a place of imagination and longing.

As most of the poems are accompanied by a note of date and place, they give the impression one is reading diary fragments, however Ungaretti continued honing and revising some of these poems for many years (this book is a translation of the 1931 edition of L’Allegria, Ungaretti’s last retouches date from 1969).

Ungaretti’s minimalism was at odds with the dominant tendencies in Italian poetry of that moment, he defied D’Annunzio’s bombast and mannerism a well as the overwhelming loudness of the Futurists, his poetry contemplative and sober.

I read this collection twice, both in the English translation on the right pages and in the original on the left (I started learning Italian this year); some poems I was glad to find also a Dutch translation. The poems raise from the pages as finely chiselled sculptures. Brilliantly blending beauty and intense sadness, they invite to be read over and over again, each word conveying a multitude of meaning.

The sea, stars, sky, rivers, trees, graves, the grumble of crickets, landscapes, the unsettling and moving poetry of Guiseppe Ungaretti is intense like the midday sun blinding the eyes. It is pure like the stones on a shore washed clean by the waves, cleared from any gratuitous ornamentation.

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