Like Leaves in Autumn by Carlo Pirozzi et al sampler

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