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Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) |
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Italian poet, critic, and translator, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1959. Salvatore Quasimodo's works fall roughly into two periods, divided by World War II. His early poems were difficult with their metaphysical and complex imagery. In later works in his humanistic period he was more concerned with the contemporary history, social conditions, horrors of war, and the problems of human suffering. Many of his poems depict the landscape of Sicily. Quasimodo's Nobel Prize, which he received before Eugenio Montale (1896-1981), stirred much debate in Italy. Islands that were my home, Salvatore Quasimodo was born in Modica, a small town near Syracuse, Sicily, the son of Gaetano Quasimodo, a railway officer, and Clotilde Quasimodo (née Ragusa). His father's work took the family to Messina, where they arrived two days after the great earthquake of 1908. Quasimodo started to read and write at an exceptionally early age and show interest in Greek lyric poetry. When his parents felt that practical education would lead to a better life, Quasimodo was sent to technical schools in Palermo and Messina and then he moved in his teens to Rome, where he studied engineering at the Polytechnical Institute. He was fired from the department store La Rinascente for organizing a strike. Because of financial problems, he left the school without completing an engineering degree, but was qualified as a surveyor. For a period he worked for a construction firm. In 1926 Quasimodo was appointed to the government Civil Engineering Department. The new job took him to many differents parts of Italy. Eventually he returned to the south in Reggio Calabria, where he wrote his first poems. Quasimodo's brother-in-law, Elio Vittorini, who became a novelist, introduced him to the literary circles. Among his friends were Eugenio Montale, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1975, Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970), and Alessandro Bonsati (1904-1984). After meeting Monsignor Rampolla del Tindaro, a Sicilian
priest,
Quasimodo began to learn Greek. His earliest poems appeared in
magazines. His first collection, Acque e terre
(Water and
Land), came out in 1930, but it included poems written when
he was eighteen. Two of the most famous works in the collection are
'Vento a Tindari' and the three-line 'Ed è subito sera' (And Suddenly
It's Evening): "Each of us is alone on the heart of the earth / pierced
by a ray of sun: /
and suddenly it's evening." (Complete Poems, p. 29) Water and Land contained nostalgic poems about Sicily, and reveal moods of loneliness and melancholy. It was followed by Oboe sommerso (1932), which won the Antico Fattore poetry prize, Erato e Apollion (1936), and Poesie (1938), in which Quasimodo expression showed influence of symbolism. During this period hee divided his time between his governmental job and his poetry. After a short period in Sardinia, Quasimodo's work brought him to Milan. Eventually, in 1938, he resigned from the Corps of Engineers. Quasimodo worked as an assistant to Cesare Zavattini (1902-1989), who was editor of several periodicals. In 1941, Quasimodo was named professor of Italian literature at Milan's Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory. Most likely fascist authorities did not understand his poems. Thus Ed è subito sera (1942), Quasimodo's widely read book, appeared while Mussolini was still in power. During WW II, Quasimodo joined an anti-Fascist group, but he did not take an active role in the resistance movement. By mistake, Quasimodo failed to respond to his draft call and was declared a draft dodger. In 1943 he was briefly imprisoned at Bergamo. Quasimodo's silent outrage surfaced in 'Dalla Rocca di Bergamo Alta' (From the Fortress of Upper Bergamo), published in Giorno dopo giorno (1947): "For yourself, you spoke no words: / you were in the narrow circle: / and the antelope and heron stilled, / lost in a gust of malignant smoke, / talismans of a world scarce born." (The Selected Writings of Salvatore Quasimodo, edited and translated from the Italian by Allen Mandelbaum, Minerva Press, 1968, p. 173) The antelope and the heron in the poem are precious memories of childhood in Sicily. They are wiped out by the bitter smoke of war. ('Salvatore Quasimodo: Dalla rocca di Bergamo alta' by Wallace Fowlie, in The Poem Itself, edited, and with an introduction, by Stanley Burnshaw, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1995, p. 327) After the war in 1945 Quasimodo became a member of the Italian Communist party. When the party insisted that he should write political poems, he resigned in protest. Giorno dopo giorno reflected his country's hardships and his horror at Italy's role in the war. It has been characterized perhaps the best volume of poetry to come out of World War II in any country. With the following collection, La vita non è sogno (1949), Quasimodo placed himself in the role of "rifare l'uomo" (remake man), a poet of engagement. He viewed poetry not as a consolation but as a means to remake man. 'Auschwitz,' published in Il falso e il vero (1956), a poem on the tragedy of the Holocaust, urged the reader to reflect the past and move forward in a new way. At moments his poesie sociale bitterly attacked failures of Christians (he was not an atheist.) Quasimodo's first wife Bice Donetti died in 1948, and he married in 1948 Maria Cumani, a dancer. They separated permanently in 1960. Cumani later acted in Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's I sovversivi (1967), Liliana Cavani's Galileo (1968), Franco Rubartelli's Veruschka (1971), Franco Rossi's Porgi l'altra guancia (1974), and other films. Quasimodo's daughter Orietta was born out of wedlock in 1935 to Amelia Spezialetti, whom he had first met in 1931. Quasimodo's love letters to the feminist writer Sibilla Aleramo (Rina Pierangeli Faccio, 1876-1960), who was engaged in affairs with many male writers, were published in 1983. Salvatore Quasimodo
died suddenly. While presidenting over a poetry competition in Amalfi,
he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died in Naples, on June 14, 1968.
His last four volumes of verse show a continuing concern for social
justice, but there are also fond memories of past friends and past
loves. His final collection of verse was Dare e
avere (1966,
To Give and to Have). Besides the Nobel Prize, Quasimodo reveived
several other literary prizes, including the Premio Viareggio in 1958
and the Taormina Prize, which he shared with Dylan Thomas in 1953. Until the 1960s, Quasimodo was relatively unknown outside Italy. His name along with Ungaretti and Montale was omitted from the 1952 Oxford Book of Italian Verse. In his review of Allen Mandelbaum's The Selected Writings of Salvatore Quasimodo (1960), I. A. Portner wrote in the Christian Science Monitor: "It may leave the English-speaking reader still wondering whether the Nobel award was dictated by caprice or a just recognition of greatness." (quoted in Italian Literature Since 1900 in English Translation: An Annotated Bibliography, 1929–2016 by Robin Healey, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019, p. 146) According to Quasimodo's friends, when he learned that he had won the prize, he "paled and fell into a shocked silence". ('Books: A Poet to the Swedes,' Time, June 13, 1960) Quasimodo was a quet and shy person, and the controversy was distressing to him. Recurrent themes in Quasimodo's works are memories of
childhood and
the life and culture Sicily. He connects his impressions of the
landscape to literary associations, and the cultural heritage from
Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and other invaders. In the 1930s he became a
leader of the "hermetic" poet with Montale and Ungaretti, abandoning
realism. Hermetic poets were
accused of obscurity. They were guided by listening to their own inner
voice, and they often used difficult private symbolism. "Poetry, even
lyrical poetry, is always 'speech,'" Quasimodo stated in his Nobel
lecture. "The listener
may be the physical or metaphysical interior of the poet, or a man, or
a thousand men." (Nobel
Lectures: Literature: 1901-1967, edited by Horst Frenz,
Singapore: World Scientific, 1999, p. 538) Some younger writers rejected his work as a fossilization of "Ermetismo". He once said that "when you achieve something here, there are far too many who like to stub you right in the back." ('Quasimodo, Salvatore,' in World Authors 1950-1970: A Companion Volume to Twentieth Century Authors, edited by John Wakeman, New York: T he H. W. Wilson Company, 1975, p. 1179) In 'Discourse on Poetry' Quasimodo wrote: ". . . a poet is a poet when he does not renounce his existence in a given country, at a particular time, defined politically. And poetry is the liberty and truth of that time, and not abstract modulations of sentiment." (Complete Poems, p. 238) A modernist but acutely conscious of the tension between tradition and innovation, he wrote many essays on literature and translated classical writers and drama, among them such writers as William Shakespeare, Molière (Tartuffe), Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Virgil, Catullus. Quasimodo's light-hearted prose translation of Romeo and Juliet from 1949 was performed in Verona. His translations from European and American contemporaries include E. E. Cummings and Pablo Neruda. For further reading: Salvatore Quasimodo e la condizione poetica del nostro tempo by Natale Tedesco (1959); 'Quasimodo' by G. Cambon, in Chelsea 6, pp. 60-67 (1960); The Poem Itself, edited by S. Burnshaw (1960); Dialogue With an Audience by John Ciardi (1963); Poetry of This Age 1908-1965 by J.M. Cohen (1966); 'Salvatore Quasimodo' by Dennis Dutschke, in Italian Quarterly, Vol. 12, Nos. 47-48 (1969); Quasimodo e la critica, ed. by Gilberto Finzi (1969); Salvatore Quasimodo by Michele Tondo (1976); Salvatore Quasimodo: l'uomo e il poeta, ed. by Rosa Brambilla (1983); Concordanza delle poesie di Salvatore Quasimodo by Giuseppe Savoca (1994); Quasimodo: Biografia per immagini by Rosalma Salina Borello (1995); Italian Environmental Literature: An Anthology, edited by Patrick Barron and Anna Re (2003); 'Quasimodo, Salvatore' by Chris Picicci, in The Facts on File Companion to World Poetry: 1900 to the Present, ed. by R. Victoria Arana (2008); Poetry after Auschwitz: An Italian Perspective by Bethany Sarah Gaunt (PhD Thesis, 2018); La classicità e il mito nella poesia di Salvatore Quasimodo by Carmelo Luca (2019); Moderne parole antiche: Cardarelli, Ungaretti, Quasimodo, Saba e i classici by Enrico Tatasciore (2020) - Huom!: Quasimodolta on julkaistu suomeksi valikoima Ja äkkiä on ilta (1962), suomennoksia on myös mm. antologioissa Tuhat laulujen vuotta: valikoima länsimaista lyriikkaa, toim. ja suom. Aale Tynni (1974), Runon suku: valikoima suomeksi elävää käännöslyriikkaavalikoima suomeksi elävää käännöslyriikkaa, toimittanut Jarkko Laine (1991) sekä Maailman runosydän, koonneet Hannu Tarmio, Janne Tarmio (1998). Selected works:
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