Like Leaves in Autumn by Carlo Pirozzi et al sampler

giuseppe ungaretti (1888–1970) is one of Europe’s greatest modernist
poets. He was also a writer, literary critic, journalist and university
professor in Italy and in Brazil. He was born and raised in Alexandria,
Egypt, to an Italian family from Tuscany. At the age of 24, he moved
to Paris, where he associated with prominent artists of the European
avant garde. Ungaretti fought on the Italian front from 1915 to 1917,
taking part in some of the bloodiest episodes of the Great War, during
which time much of his greatest poetry was written. Ungaretti later
worked as a correspondent for Il Popolo d’Italia, a political daily paper
founded by Benito Mussolini. In 1936, he moved to Brazil, where he
took up a teaching post at São Paulo University. He continued to teach,
travel and write throughout his life.
The 21 poems by Ungaretti in the present anthology were selected
from the collection, L’Allegria (The Joy, 1931). The original title of the
book was Allegria di naufragi (The Joy of Shipwrecks), first published
in 1919. This collection in turn included, in one of its sections, a tiny
group of lyrical poems entitled Il Porto Sepolto (The Buried Harbour)
written in the trenches during the First World War on ‘scraps of paper
salvaged from the packaging of bullets’. The latter had been published
separately in 1916 in only 80 copies. The 1919 volume underwent
many corrections and additions before the 1931 publication, which
itself also underwent a series of small changes, until in 1942 a final
text appeared. The Joy, like Ungaretti’s entire critical essays, prose and
translations, is collected in several volumes published by Mondadori,
entitled Vita d’un uomo (The Life of a Man).

Like Leaves in Autumn
Responses to the war poetry
of Giuseppe Ungaretti
Edited by
carlo pirozzi and katherine lockton
Translations by Heather Scott
Luath Press Limited
EDINBURGH
www.luath.co.uk

Published in 2015 by Luath Press Ltd. in Edinburgh, the world’s first
unesco City of Literature, in association with the Scottish Poetry Library
and the Italian Cultural Institute, Edinburgh, and with the endorsement
of the City of Edinburgh Council and the City of Florence Council.
isbn: 978-1-910021-79-8
The paper used in this book is recyclable. It is made from low chlorine pulps
produced in a low energy, low emissions manner from renewable forests.
Printed and bound by The Charlesworth Group, Wakefield
Typeset in Sabon by 3btype.com
Giuseppe Ungaretti poems taken from
Vita d’un uomo. Tutte le poesie (The Life of a Man. All poems)
© Arnoldo Mondadori Editore S.p.A., Milano.
All poems by Ungaretti in this book, apart from the poem
Me a Craitur, have been translated by Heather Scott, 2015 © Heather Scott.
Eanna O’Ceallachain (Head of Italian, University of Glasgow) provided
assistance revising the translations from Ungaretti by Heather Scott.
Me a Craitur was written by Tom Scott.
The poem was published in The Collected Shorter Poems of Tom Scott
(Agenda/Chapman Publications 1993)
© Heather Scott.
All other poems and texts © the contributors.
The works of art included in this volume have been selected from artist rooms.
artist rooms is jointly owned by Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland and was
established through the d’Offay Donation in 2008, with the assistance of the National
Heritage Memorial Fund, the Art Fund, and the Scottish and British Governments.

To commemorate the wars of my grandfathers and the
waiting of my grandmothers.
To my grandfather Gaetano (1916–1955), and my grandfather
Antonio (1921–1978), the former a survivor of
imprisonment in Russia, the latter a survivor of conflict
in North Africa, both during the Second World War.
To my grandmothers Adalgisa (1926–1990), and Iolanda
(1921) who created everything from nothing. Iolanda, at
93 years old, still confronts the passage of time fearlessly.
C.P.
For my mum and dad; Rosemary & John Lockton
i.m. Dinna Lanuza (1914–2007)
who remembered every year.
K.L.

Contents
Preface by Carlo Pirozzi 11
Introductions
War and Poetry 13
john burnside
A Note on Ungaretti’s Life and Poetry 17
carlo pirozzi
The Buried Harbour of Dreams: Giuseppe Ungaretti
in Alexandria of Myths 23
luca scarlini
Responding to Ungaretti 26
katherine lockton
Interpreting Ungaretti: 21 works of Art 30
lara demori and neil cox
Ungaretti’s Poems and Translations
Works of Art
Contributors’ Biographies
Poems and Commentaries by Scottish poets
Eterno – Eternal 35
Studien – Der Mensch (Grandmother and Child)
by August Sander 37
By remembering I fold myself into you, by J.L. Williams 38
Commentary by J.L. Williams 39
Noia – Ennui 41
David Hockney by Robert Mapplethorpe 43
The Northern Cycles, by Richie McCaffery 44
7

Commentary Richie McCaffery 45
Levante – Levant 47
Girl in a Fairground Caravan by August Sander 49
The two girls were always singing, by Richard Price 50
Commentary by Richard Price 51
Nasce forse – Perhaps a River Rises 53
Johannis Nacht gefallene Bilder (The Secret Life of Plants)
by Anselm Kiefer 55
Nasce forse, by Alan Gillis 56
Commentary by Alan Gillis 57
In memoria – In Memoriam 59
Untitled by Francesca Woodman 61
The Annals, by Gerry Cambridge 62
Commentary by Gerry Cambridge 63
Il porto sepolto – The Buried Harbour 65
Heroische Sinnbilder (Heroic Symbols) by Anselm Kiefer 67
The Pool, by Vicki Feaver 68
Commentary by Vicki Feaver 69
Lindoro di deserto – Lindoro of the Desert 71
Untitled (FW crouching behind umbrella)
by Francesca Woodman 73
Breaking the Silence, by Mandy Haggith 74
Commentary by Mandy Haggith 75
Veglia – Vigil 77
With Dead Head by Damien Hirst 79
Still vigil, by Christine De Luca 80
Commentary by Christine De Luca 81
Fratelli – Brothers 83
Four hands by Bill Viola 85
Brothers, by Jillian Fenn 86
Commentary by Jillian Fenn 87
8

Sono una creatura – I am a Creature / Me a Craitur
(version by Tom Scott in Scots) 89
Film Noir (Fly) by Douglas Gordon 91
War Memorial, Afton Valley, by Rab Wilson 92
Commentary by Rab Wilson 93
In dormiveglia – Half Asleep 95
Untitled by Francesca Woodman 97
Night, by Miriam Gamble 98
Commentary by Miriam Gamble 99
I fiumi – The Rivers 101
Untitled by Francesca Woodman 103
Fresh Fountains, by Valerie Gillies 104
Commentary by Valerie Gillies 105
Sonnolenza – Drowsiness 107
Untitled by Francesca Woodman 109
Desert, by Alistair Findlay 110
Commentary by Alistair Findlay 111
San Martino del Carso – San Martino del Carso 113
Untitled by Francesca Woodman 115
Believed to be buried in this Cemetery,
by Robert Alan Jamieson 116
Commentary by Robert Alan Jamieson 117
Distacco – Detachment 119
Lowell Smith by Robert Mapplethorpe 121
No-one mentioned it, by Tessa Ransford 122
Commentary by Tessa Ransford 123
Nostalgia – Nostalgia 125
Eel Series, Roma, May 1977–1978 by Francesca Woodman 127
Shoes, by Claudia Daventry 128
Commentary by Claudia Daventry 129
9

Italia – Italy 131
Iggy Pop by Robert Mapplethorpe 133
As an Eadailt, by Aonghas MacNeacail 134
Commentary by Aonghas MacNeacail 135
Commiato – Leave-taking 137
Space 2 , Providence, Rhode Island, 1975–78
by Francesca Woodman 139
Birdsong in the War-Zone, by Anna Crowe 140
Commentary by Anna Crowe 141
Natale – Christmas 143
Heroische Sinnbilder (Heroic Symbols) by Anselm Kiefer 145
My Shoulders, by Jane McKie 146
Commentary by Jane McKie 147
Mattina – Morning 149
Providence, Rhode Island, 1976 by Francesca Woodman 151
D’immenso, by John Burnside 152
Commentary by John Burnside 153
Soldati – Soldiers 155
Plank Piece I–II by Charles Ray 157
Civilians, by Rob A. Mackenzie 158
Commentary by Rob A. Mackenzie 159
A short bibliography of Giuseppe Ungaretti’s works 161
Photographic Credits 163
Authors’ and Editors’ Biographies 165
Acknowledgements 167
10

Preface
carlo pirozzi
The present publication is part of my project, ‘The Ungaretti Multi-
Media War Project’ (um-mw), which is intended both to commemorate
the first centenary of Italy’s entry into the Great War and to celebrate
the 50 years since Edinburgh and Florence were first twinned.
The um-mw Project is in partnership with the Italian Cultural
Institute and the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh and has the
endorsement of Edinburgh City Council and Florence City Council.
As well as this new anthology, Like the Leaves in Autumn co-edited
with Katherine Lockton, the um-mw brings together new film,
animation, music, dance performance and sculpture in response to the
poems of Ungaretti included in this present book.
Specifically, in addition to the current book, the outcomes of this
project are:
• A new film directed by the Scottish artist Alastair Cook,
founder of the international poetry-film and festival project,
Filmpoem. Alastair has chosen to interpret ‘D’immenso’ by
John Burnside, itself inspired by Ungaretti’s ‘Mattina’.
‘D’immenso’ can be seen at www.filmpoem.com
• New scores composed by young musicians from the
Com po si tion Department of the Royal Conservatoire of
Scotland, Glasgow, under the supervision of Alistair
MacDonald (Director of the Electroacoustic Studios at the
Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow)
and students from the Music Department at the University
of St Andrews, under the super vision of Bede Williams
(Teaching Fellow and New Music Co-ordinator).
• New animated films created by students from the Animation
Department, Edinburgh College of Art, under the
supervision of Jared Taylor (Programme Director, Animation
at Edinburgh College of Art).
11

• A new sculpture by a young Scots-Italian artist, GianPiero
Franchi, from Gray’s School of Art, Robert Gordon
University (rgu), Aberdeen.
These artworks will be shown in conjunction with readings as part of
several 2015 book launches in St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh and
Florence.
12 like leaves in autumn

War and Poetry
john burnside
There’s no way of being sure about this, but I suspect I was the only
13-year-old Wagnerite in my East Midlands industrial New Town back
in the late 1960s. Introduced to the work by a brilliant music teacher,
and supported by a kindly priest, who not only lent me records but
also persuaded my parents to obtain a piano, I became one of those
child eccentrics who wander around humming snatches of Lohengrin
while trying to avoid becoming part of the playground social scene.
And, with all the naïveté of the child autodidact, I assumed that this
Richard Wagner must, by definition, have been a wonderful character,
a deeply spiritual soul, with a love of justice and kindness in his heart
for all. It was as much to justify this view as a matter of curiosity that
I began looking into his biography, but it didn’t take long to become
disabused of my rosy picture of the man. Indignant, I complained to
my teacher: why had he introduced me to the work of such a seemingly
vile man? And how could such a person have composed a work like
Parsifal?
I only retail this anecdote of youthful dismay in hopes of making a
serious point – for it is not only the young who suffer such disa p-
pointments. All through our lives, we are puzzled by the knowledge
that, in one way or another, our favourite artists (not to mention our
other heroes) were, or are, deeply flawed human beings and it is hard
to be forgiving of the admired novelist who, in spite of having written
some of the most perceptive prose ever committed to paper, turns out
to have been a Nazi, or the respected philosopher who lends his
support to a bloody totalitarian regime. It is the political dimension
here that always seems to matter – we are more ready to forgive
personal failings: the junkies and drunks, the serial adulterers, even the
man who shoots his wife in the head while playing an impromptu game
of William Tell are all rescued from ignominy by the quality of their
works. In such cases, we are able to say: yes, they may have been
terrible people, but look at what they made.
Political sins are harder to set aside, for some of us at least, especially
13

when there is evidence of support for Fascism. In a perfect world, the
ruling principle might be George Orwell’s contention that ‘the impulse
of every writer is to keep out of politics. What he [sic] wants is to be
left alone so that he can go on writing books in peace.’ However, as
information technology improved through the last century, and people,
in the developed world at least, became more aware of the astonishing
levels of corruption and injustice that surrounded them on all sides, it
was to become more and more obvious, to Orwell and to others, ‘that
this ideal is no more practical than that of the petty shop-keeper who
hopes to preserve his independence in the teeth of the chain-stores…
It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our
own without wanting to change it.’ In the 20th century, and especially
after the First World War, writers from a wider range of social and
cultural backgrounds than ever before felt the need to call, not just for
thought, but for action. Wyndham Lewis worried about this tendency:
‘With all the energy at their disposal,’ he said, ‘a majority of the modern
intellectuals have striven to excite to passionate action – not to exhort
to reflection or moderation, not applied to the reason, but always to
the emotions: they have pointed passionately to the battlefield, the
barricade, the place of execution, not to the life of reason, to what is
harmonious and beautifully ordered. This is in fact the betrayal.’
However, if there is one thing we can learn from history it is that all
kinds of betrayal are possible. Those writers who remain alone in order
to ‘go on writing books in peace’ are more likely to be well-regarded
than either the revolutionary who calls for immediate action to change
a corrupt world, or the kind of arch-conservative that Lewis eventually
became (for what he presented as good reasons – reasons he shared, in
many ways, with many of the more highly respected writers – T.S. Eliot,
say – who lived through the first half of the last century: ‘Darwin,
Voltaire, Newton, Raphael, Dante, Epictetus, Aristotle, Sophocles,
Plato, Pythagoras: all shedding their light upon the same wide, well-lit
Greco-Roman highway, with the same kind of sane and steady ray –
one need only mention these to recognise that it was at least excusable
to be concerned about the threat of extinction to that tradition.’) Yet
are not those stay-at-home writers to whom Orwell refers in danger of
betraying an essential part of their humanity, if they simply make
books, while the corrupt and the unjust carry on business as usual?
14 like leaves in autumn

In the pages of literary history, Giuseppe Ungaretti is one of those
who, like Hamsun or Pound, was, at the very least, seduced by Fascism
– and for some, this remains a huge problem in looking at the work.
Yet (though I would hasten to note that I do not speak for any of the
other poets who responded to his work here), at least some of the
choices he made can be seen as the expression of a desire for decisive
action, action that makes something happen – and there are historical
occasions when anything happening, anything at all, comes to be seen
as preferable to the status quo, as Blaise Cendrars, another veteran of
the First World War points out: ‘For action, whatever its immediate
purpose, also implies relief at doing something, anything, and the joy
of exertion. This is the optimism that is inherent in, and proper and
indispensable to action, for without it nothing would ever be undertaken.
It in no way suppresses the critical sense or clouds the judgment.
On the contrary this optimism sharpens the wits, it creates a certain
perspective and, at the last moment, lets in a ray of perpendicular light
which illuminates all one’s previous calculations, cuts and shuffles
them and deals you the card of success, the winning number.’ History
tells us that Ungaretti was on the wrong side, and the action he
supported – knowingly supported – caused terrible harm. So, if the man
was a Fascist, why do we continue reading? I think it is because Ungaretti
is a poet who finds, in moments of extreme danger, that light to which
Cendrars refers. Poem after poem of those he composed in the trenches
finds that perpendicular ray, seeking out and illuminating the immense,
the eternal, just as it illuminated the transient and the fragile.
At the same time, it could tell us something about the real worth of
art, that we still find Ungaretti’s war poems so powerful, even uplifting.
Back in the music classroom, when I complained about the fallible
nature of artistic genius, my teacher had nothing to offer in response,
other than a wry smile – at least to begin with. Later, though, he found
me out and gave me a picture, a photograph that looked to have been
clipped from a book or a magazine. It was a picture of what I knew
as a water lily, though he called it a Lotus. He explained that, in some
cultures, it is considered sacred because it grows in the murkiest pools,
its root buried in mud and filth, yet it rises from that dark, muddy
water to produce a clean, pristine flower when it reaches the sunlight.
That was all he told me, but he let me keep the photograph and, after
war and poetry 15

a while, I came to see what he was getting at – which was not to forgive,
or to forget, anything that any particular individual did or did not do,
in historical terms, but to value the work itself, for its own sake and
for what it does in the world. It seemed to me, then, that everything
– even a flower – has consequences, often unforeseen or unintended
and it is those consequences that matter, not the political folly or
wisdom of the poet. So, while it may seem naïve, this is how I choose
to read Ungaretti’s war poetry today: the work itself expresses an
intense feeling for life, that sense of the miraculous in which, as
Cendrars puts it, ‘only a soul full of despair can ever attain serenity
and, to be in despair, you must have loved a good deal and still love
the world’.
16 like leaves in autumn

A Note on Ungaretti’s Life and Poetry
carlo pirozzi
Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970) is among the most influential Italian
poets of 20th-century European literature. He stands alongside Eugenio
Montale (1896–1981; 1975 Nobel prize) and Salvatore Quasimodo
(1901–1968; 1959 Nobel prize). Ungaretti was a writer, literary critic,
journalist and university professor in Italy and in Brazil.
He can certainly be considered one of the fathers of modern poetry,
along with T.S. Eliot (they were both born in 1888), Ezra Pound, some
of whose poems Ungaretti translated into Italian, and leading figures
in French poetry, like Paul Valéry, André Breton and Guillaume
Apollinaire. With Montale and Quasimodo, Ungaretti drew up a
blueprint for early 20th-century Italian poetry, whose peculiarity was
the invention of a revolutionary, innovative and consciously obscure
language, reduced to its essentials – ‘hermetic’ as it was dubbed at the
time. This language was proposed as a poetic manifesto and a response
to the sense of existential unease experienced by those living under
dictatorships and through two world wars.
Ungaretti was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1888 into an Italian
family originally from Lucca in Tuscany. In 1912, at 24 years old, he
left Egypt for the first time and moved to Paris. Before settling in Paris,
he stopped off in Italy, where he had a brief but memorable stay,
visiting Lucca, Florence and the surrounding areas. Once in Paris he
attended university courses taught by illustrious professors, such as the
philosopher Henri Bergson, at the Collège de France and the Sorbonne.
While in Paris he met and associated with some of the outstanding
figures of the avant-garde: Guillaume Apollinaire, Georges Braque,
Giorgio De Chirico, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso and, during
their frequent trips to Paris, the Futurists Umberto Boccioni, Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, Giovanni Papini, Aldo Palazzeschi and Ardengo
Soffici. Returning to Italy in 1914, he joined the army the following
year, just after Italy had entered the war. Ungaretti took part in some
of the bloodiest episodes of the Great War, fighting on the Italian front,
on the Carso and along the Isonzo River from 1915 to 1917. The
17

carnage was terrible, with more than 300,000 Italians and Austro-
Hungarian soldiers losing their lives, but Ungaretti came through the
conflict unscathed.
After the war, Ungaretti settled in Rome with his family, working in
the Press Office at the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and as a
correspondent for Il Popolo d’Italia, an important political daily paper
founded by Benito Mussolini. His position at the Ministry allowed him
to travel continually and he was able to lecture at various European
universities as well as further afield. In 1936 he moved to Brazil, where
he took up a teaching post at São Paulo University. During his stay in
South America, which lasted until 1942, he managed to forge links
with some of the leading Brazilian poets, including a young Vinicius
de Moraes, for whom he translated several poems. Ungaretti then
returned to Rome, where at La Sapienza University, he was given the
Chair of Italian Literature. During the Roman years he continued
travelling in Europe, Africa, North and South America and Asia. He
came home from his last trip, absolutely exhausted. Immediately after,
on the night of 1 June 1970, he passed away at the age of 82.
Among his many works, of particular note are his translations of
Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean Racine and Saint-John Perse, 40 sonnets by
Shakespeare and other sonnets by Luis de Góngora, a large number of
William Blake’s Visions, and some excellent versions of Ezra Pound,
Sergei Esenin and Brazilian poets, such as José Oswald de Souza
Andrade, Mário de Andrade and Vinicius de Moraes. Out of his
enormous corpus of literary criticism, the university lectures that he
gave during his stay in Brazil are especially memorable, principally
those centred on the founders of Italian and European literature, Dante
and Petrarch. No less important are his lectures on the centrality and
indisputable merit of Leopardi. Ungaretti, moreover, continued to
explore Leopardi’s work in depth during his period at La Sapienza
University (See Vita d’un uomo. Viaggi e lezioni, a cura di Paola
Montefoschi, Milano, Mondadori, 2000).
Ungaretti’s most important collections include L’Allegria (The Joy,
1919), A Sense of Time (Il Sentimento del Tempo, 1933), Il Dolore
(Affliction, 1947), La Terra Promessa (The Promised Land, 1950) and
Il Taccuino del Vecchio (The Old Man’s Notebook, 1960). These are
the fundamental components of his complete works collected under
18 like leaves in autumn

the moving epithet, Vita d’un uomo (The Life of a Man). The word
‘man’ needs to be read in the particular sense that Ungaretti attributes
to it, namely what a human being has been, in an endless series of
moments, words, events, meetings, readings, landscapes, reminiscences
and epiphanies.
After the innovative babel-like language of The Joy, which attempts
to start from an unheard-of word that ‘makes the world’ in the wake
of the total destruction of the war, those same words come back to be
constrained within in traditional Italian metre, creating a language
that is paradoxically more obscure, capable of capturing and expressing
the baroque sense of eternal time in Rome, the mytho-poetic city
central to Ungaretti’s works (A Sense of Time). Rome was to be
occupied and destroyed for a second time during the Second World
War. And it is here that Ungaretti returns, following his stay in Brazil,
accompanied by two terrible losses: the passing of his son Antonietto
and of his brother Costantino (Affliction). Rome also inspired his
Canzone and Chorus dedicated to the journey of Aeneas, founder of
the Eternal City, and to the tragic figures of Dido – whose estrangement
from Aeneas is interpreted in a very Ungarettian way as the end of
youth – and Palinurus, whose death was to allegorically represent the
impossibility for the poet of reaching an innocent, primordial land
(The Promised Land).
Rome seems to resist time and its passing, while the poet meditates
on old age, the meaning of death and on the void surrounding him.
Like a modern Aeneas, the poet is always on the move, at one moment
in the desolate Necropolis of Sakkarah in Egypt, at another, travelling
on a plane between Hong Kong and Beirut, in search of a promised
land or a buried harbour, where he might hear a word that, even if
only in appearance and in the imagination, might challenge mysteriously
the inevitable passing of life:
Mentre arrivo vicino al gran silenzio,
Segno sarà che niuna cosa muore
Se ne ritorna sempre l’apparenza?
(Da ‘Ultimi cori per la Terra promessa’ in Il Taccuino del Vecchio)
a note on ungaretti’s life and poetry 19

As I approach the great silence,
Will it be a sign that no thing dies
If its appearance keeps coming back?
(From ‘Last Choruses for the Promised Land’ in The Old Man’s
Notebook, translated by A. Frisardi).
The word is the real miracle, as evidenced by the 21 poems from
Ungaretti’s first work, The Joy, which are presented in this anthology.
Facing a world of appearance and rapidly passing moments, poetry is
always at war with time and stands in opposition to the perishable
nature of things, to paraphrase lines by Shakespeare which Ungaretti
translated into Italian: ‘and all in war with Time for love of you, / As
he takes from you, I engraft you new’ (‘Sonnet xv’ by Shakespeare).
The poetry of Ungaretti binds ‘the days that are the past / and the
others to come /(…) in the present’, to build a time that seems to have
no reality but the memory of it, because it is an intuition of a moment
between two nothings, ‘between the flower that is gathered and the one
that is given’ (‘Eternal’), an intuition that comes from an ‘endless
secrecy’ (‘The Buried Harbour’) or from the ‘delirious ferment’ (‘Leavetaking’),
much like Petrarch’s ‘tremar di meraviglia’ (‘trembling in
amazement’).
It is a sort of metaphysical meditation on the instant, triggered by a
nostalgia for promised but absent words, by a repeated anamnesis
coming intermittently through sudden flashes of recollection. It is a
reminiscence in which the poet seems condemned or possessed by the
demon of artistic creativity, or by constant visions from unheard
‘fancies’ as Edgar Allan Poe would say. In ‘Silent’, one of Poe’s very
short and emblematic texts (of which a draft translation by Ungaretti
dating back to 1914 has only recently been discovered), the writer
seems to be a medium, an impatient interpreter of whispered words
that are capable of arousing almost primordial wonders and epiphanic
silences. And the poems of Ungaretti, such as ‘Ennui’, ‘Levant’ and
‘Perhaps a River Rises’ are nothing more than the manifestation of
these pure poetic moments: the loneliness glimpsed in the nodding of
the heads of cabbies sleeping on their carriages (‘Ennui’); the distant
shouting and dancing of Syrian emigrants on a ship traveling to Paris
joined to the remembrance of an ancient practice of burial from the
20 like leaves in autumn

homeland just left (‘Levant’); the Homeric, albeit brief, ‘Perhaps a
River Rises’ that seems to echo the Sirens’ song from the Odyssey.
The remaining poems are all variations on the theme of war and all
have location and date of writing appended to the title. Most were
written in 1916 on the front line running along the Karst, a rocky
plateau which extends from western Slovenia, through the north-east
of Italy, to the far north-west of Croatia. These poems reflect Ungaretti’s
hellish journey starting from Locvizza, today Lokvica in Slovenia, and
then moving back to Italian soil in Devetachi, a small village of San
Martino del Carso, then a posting to the small town of Mariano. From
there the poet moves up to the bloody battlefields around St. Michele
Mount, on to the small village Cotici, and along paths leading to the
heights of the Valleys of the Solitary Tree and of Peak Four, up to the
furthest point, Santa Maria la Longa, a rest camp that sees the writing
of the famous ‘Morning’ (1917). Only one poem was composed far
from the battlefields, in Naples in 1916, during military leave. Our
anthology closes with a poem dated July 1918, written in the area of
Courton Woods, a region to the east of Paris. Here the conflict was
atrocious, as testified by another Italian writer, Curzio Malaparte, who
described the violence as unprecedented, where the soldiers completely
exposed to enemy fire died in their thousands, and from where
Ungaretti, with two seven-syllable verses divided into four lines without
punctuation and one lapidary word, ‘Soldiers’, as the title of the
poem, testifies to the absurdity of the human condition and its intrinsic
finitude:
They are like
the leaves
of trees
in autumn
This is the geography of Ungaretti’s poetry which comes to be made
up of a language more and more grounded in brief episodes which
primarily reflect the war, but which also allow space for earlier
memories linked to the long stay in Paris, such as the tragic death of a
friend who commits suicide (‘In Memoriam’) and a nocturnal encounter
with a woman, lonely and silent, on a bridge over the Seine (‘Nostalgia’).
The words are increasingly emancipated from their surface meaning,
a note on ungaretti’s life and poetry 21

their use relying more on the evocative power of the sounds, reduced
simply to phoné, a pure issue of voice like the ‘final vowel’ in the first
line of the last poem written by another giant of poetry, Seamus Heaney.
In Heaney’s ‘Banks of a Canal’, pure sound seems to have the power
of ‘towing silence’, of silencing the entire world:
Say ‘canal’ and there’s that final vowel
Towing silence with it, slowing time
To a walking pace, a path, a whitewashed gleam
Of dwellings at the skyline. World stands still.
The ‘world stands still’ while the demiurge poet is grappling with the
naming of the world and the emptying of semantic language, with the
death and rebirth of the word. We are witnessing a dramatisation of
an expectation of meaning. Returning to Ungaretti, this poetic
validation and obliteration of the world is the essence of his poetry,
and shows that his work goes beyond the life of one man because it
belongs to all time:
The poet goes there
and then returns to the light with his songs
and scatters them there
As a conclusion and as a tribute to Scottish poetry, these lines from
‘The Buried Harbour’ can be set alongside some lines of another soldier
poet, from another war – the Second World War: Hamish Henderson.
He was one of the fathers of Scotland’s 20th-century folk renaissance,
and also the first translator of Gramsci into English. One of his poems
‘Under the earth I go’ seems to have been inspired by and blends with
the above verse by Ungaretti:
Maker, ye maun sing them…
Tomorrow, songs
Will flow free again, and new voices
Be borne on the carrying stream.
22 like leaves in autumn

Eterno
giuseppe ungaretti
Tra un fiore colto e l’altro donato
l’inesprimibile nulla
eterno 35

Eternal
giuseppe ungaretti Translated by Heather Scott
Between the flower that is gathered and the one that is given
the inexpressible nothing
36 like leaves in autumn

August Sander · Studien – Der Mensch (Grandmother and Child) · c. 1919

By remembering I fold myself into you
j.l. williams
No silence no present moment exists
in which you do not exist
The men I adore holed up dreaming
eagles whose nests are bent into mist
I was always waiting
for you my brother
lost on the road under the tree
whose pain is gold golden
My father who I do not know
My country who I do not know
You are here finally
in the mouth of the bird
whose tongue is one I recognise
whose tongue is the crab living in the mouth
replacing the tongue
saying all your food is mine finally
my love
Poor bird without trees
whose home was given to the war
who remembers the two-penny hangovers of men
My only my bird whose wing is pulling
via shoulder muscle tight within the belly
up up past the present
past the observation of burning light
in clouds over sea to the boys on the side
their privilege their impatient deaths their unwritten down
Their wooden rifles carried into war
Their horse-drawn carriage
Their quiet mule
Their mother’s dress
Their warm hay bale
Their accumulation of birdsong
38 like leaves in autumn

Commentary
j.l. williams
I have heard it said that Ungaretti’s entire poetics is summed up in the
two lines of his poem Eternal, whose music is even more evocative in
the Italian:
Tra un fiore colto e l’altro donato
l’inesprimibile nulla
It is untranslatable in a way, as the movement into English in various
translations conveys meaning but struggles, because of the inherent
difference in the sound of the English words and the Italian words, to
convey the beauty and import of those ringing o’s: colto e l’altro
donato.
Between the gathering or cultivation of the flowers and the giving
of the flowers, between the growing and the passing on, between birth
and death, between one language and another, between peace and war,
between the creation of the poem and the sharing of the poem is the
gulf of the inexpressible. Yet that is what words, especially the blooms
of words in poems, do – through image, metaphor, sound and silence,
they represent the strange and inexplicable occurrence that is existence.
eterno 39

j.l. williams (b. 1977)
Jennifer’s first collection Condition of Fire (Shearsman, 2011) was
inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a journey to the Aeolian
Islands. Her second collection Locust and Marlin (Shearsman, 2014)
explores the idea of home and where we come from and was nominated
for the 2014 Saltire Society Poetry Book of the Year Award. She plays
in the band Opul and is Programme Manager at the Scottish Poetry
Library. More info: www.jlwilliamspoetry.co.uk
august sander (1876–1964)
August Sander is one of the most influential documentary photographers
of the 20th century. He photographed individuals or groups of people
in Germany, adopting a scientific or anthropological approach, as if
constructing a sociology of contemporary man. His figures are mostly
depicted frontally against a neutral background and with limited facial
expression, producing realist effects.
40 like leaves in autumn

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