Salvatore Quasimodo
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Image:Salvatore Quasimodo.jpg Salvatore Quasimodo (MWCD /säl-vä-'to-rā kwä-'zē-mə-dō/ — August 20, 1901 - June 14, 1968) was an Italian poet, translator, and critic. Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale he is one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century. In 1959, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times." The award, as it often does, provoked much controversy. Some critics thought that the better-known Italian poets Ungaretti and Montale had been unfairly passed over; others maintained that the award was justified, but thought it should have been given for Quasimodo's early "hermetic" poetry, not (as it was) for the more engaged and accessible verse of his later years.
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Early life
Quasimodo was born in Modica, a small town near Syracuse, Sicily, of Sicilian-Greek parents, Gaetano and Clotilde (Ragusa) Quasimodo. He also had a sister and a brother. His father was a stationmaster for the state railroad--a job that required the family to move frequently from one small Sicilian town to another. The family moved from Gela, where the boy had begun his education, to Messina, where the family arrived two days after the great earthquake of 1908. The dreadful spectacles Quasimodo saw then, as a child of seven, made a deep and lasting impression on him.
Although he had learned to read and write at an exceptionally early age, and had shown a precocious interest in poetry, Quasimodo was at first more drawn to mathematics. His mother persuaded him to enroll in the local technical institute rather than in the Gymnasium where he might have pursued an academic course, because the Gymnasium was farther away and because, both parents felt, the academic education would not be as practical as the technical training. Thus, he decided on a career in engineering, attended the Palermo technical college, and in 1918 went to Rome, where he studied for two years at the Polytechnic. Finding that he lacked sufficient funds to complete an engineering degree, he qualified as a surveyor instead. It was at this time that he met Monsignor Rampolla del Tindaro, a Sicilian priest. At Tindaro's urging he began to teach himself Greek and Latin and embarked on an intensive program of reading, not only of the Greek and Roman classics, but of ancient and modern philosophy, as well.
As his passion for the classics developed, Quasimodo's interest in surveying waned. He was obliged to earn his living nevertheless, and in 1920 he became a technical designer for a construction firm. That same year, he married Bice Donetti. In 1924 he exchanged this job for one in a hardware store, and in 1926 he joined the state department of civil engineering.
Quasimodo the writer
Quasimodo's new post took him to many different parts of Italy--initially to Reggio Calabria in the south, where he was able to renew his contacts with his friends in Messina. He had been writing verse intermittently since his teens, but now, encouraged by the admiration of his circle, he began work in earnest. At the invitation of his brother-in-law Elio Vittorini, Quasimodo sent some of his poems to the Florence review Solaria. He was quickly established as a member of the Solaria group, which included Gianna Manzini, Montale, Arturo Loria, and Alessandro Bonsanti, and which in 1930 published his first book, Acque e terre (Waters and Lands).
Soon after this, Quasimodo's work enabled him to leave the south. In 1938, after brief terms of residence in various northern towns, he settled permanently in Milan, at the same time resigning his government post. From 1938 to 1940 he worked as assistant editor and drama critic of Il Tempo, and in 1941 he was appointed professor of Italian literature at the Milan Conservatory of Music, where he was to remain until 1964.
Critics concur, more or less, in identifying three stages in the development of Quasimodo's verse, beginning with the hermetic poetry of the 1930s. Italian hermetic poetry, which derives from French symbolism, attempts a renewal of language in which each word is returned to its former sovereignty, given its full value of meaning and sound and association, purged of all merely decorative effects. The hermetic poet turns his back on his society and looks inside, exploring his own interior landscape, and recording his findings in his "new language" and with an often deeply private imagery.
Ungaretti's work in the hermetic mode was already well known when Quasimodo published his first book, but Quasimodo always regarded Ungaretti as a developer of the French tradition, himself as the first truly Italian hermetic. This is a vexed question, since Quasimodo obviously learned from Ungaretti. Both inherit and proclaim the cult of the word (Quasimodo somewhat more overtly). Both have a fondness for sharply chiseled images, short lines, and strained syntax. In both poets the brevity of their compositions suggests the fragmentary.
Nevertheless Quasimodo's voice is very much his own, most obviously in the tension between his acquired austerity of diction and melody, and a more instinctive sensuality and lyricism. He writes of the fragility of man's world, the bittersweet consolations of memory, and the persistent presence of death in an elliptical language of metaphors which matches the cryptic but richly evocative shorthand of his language: "The desire of your hands transparent / in the penumbra of the flame: / they smelled of oak and of roses; / of death. An ancient winter." He may fairly be claimed as the most extreme, if not the first, Italian exponent of hermetic poetry.
In Geoffrey Grigson's Concise Encyclopedia of Modern World Literature there is a brief but very illuminating account of Quasimodo's character as a poet, "his constant searching for a poem which grows from the moment, and is at the same time as pure as remote music. Each poem is an attempt at this immediate-ultimate, and though Quasimodo's image of perfection changes, his poems of any one period are as interrelated as musical variations." The "image of perfection" in Quasimodo's early poems is most often the Sicily of his childhood, glimpsed through a cloud of introspective anguish: "Tindari, I know you gentle / in broad hills hung over waters / of the gods' sweet isles; / today you assail me / and lean into my heart."
Acque e terre was followed by Oboe sommerso (The Submerged Oboe, 1932), in which Grigson sees a new fineness of imagery: "... the heart migrates / and I am untilled / and the day a heap of rubble." The other books of Quasimodo's hermetic period are Odore di eucaliptus (Scent of Eucalyptus, 1933), Erato e Apollion (Erato and Apollyon, 1936), Poesie (Poems, 1938), and Ed e subito sera (And It Is Suddenly Evening, 1942). The development in these collections is towards a recognition that the poet's poignant sense of personal loneliness and exile represents a universal human condition; the bare landscapes which in the first poems "had offered only a few elements standing in their own light" become a little less deserted.
In Italy Quasimodo's exquisite verbal and rhythmic sensitivity was admired from the beginning by Macri, Bo, Contini, Montale, and some other critics and poets, but widespread recognition came only with the publication in 1940 of his magnificent translations of the Greek lyricists, Lirici greci. His greatness as a translator was confirmed by his subsequent versions of Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Catullus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and also Moliere, Shakespeare, and Neruda. One critic has described Quasimodo's classical translations as "masterful recreations imbued with a personal fire that, despite the antiquity of the original texts, makes them particularly meaningful to the modern reader." There is no doubt that his close absorption in these texts contributed to the development of his own work.
With Poesie nuove (New Poems, 1942), including poems written as early as 1936, a perceptible change of mood and manner emerged. The verbal and grammatical tensions have become less evident, partially replaced by a kind of expansive languor. The vision is still very personal and often veiled but the exposition is more open; we remark, as Gianni Pozzi says, "a melodic and discursive unfolding." Quasimodo's characteristic work of this middle period, if it has lost the enigmatic glitter of his earlier poems, has a new warmth and richness of color and shows a greater readiness to communicate. It is a progression which leads the way to Quasimodo's third period, in which he casts aside the hermetic cloak and speaks out as a poet of social engagement.
During World War II Quasimodo worked and wrote for the Italian Resistance, and as a result was imprisoned for a time at Bergamo. It was the war, and what it showed him of human lunacy and agony, which convinced Quasimodo that the poet has a duty to "remake" man--at the social level, presumably; he saw that "the poet cannot console anyone, cannot accustom man to the idea of death, decrease his physical suffering, cannot promise an Eden, nor a milder hell."
After about 1943, Quasimodo's poetry, as he said, "aspires to dialogue rather than monologue." He writes of partisans, the Korean war, the atom bomb, in classical forms and a charged but everyday vocabulary full of sirens, rifle shots, iron, dust, and blood--these fearful images often plangently counterpointed against his memories of Sicily: "I call to your memory that flaming geranium / on a wall riddled with machine-gun bullets."
It was in this strain, with an intense awareness of contemporary history, but by no means without hope for the future, that Quasimodo continued to write until his death. His postwar publications include Giorno dopo giorno (Day After Day, 1947), La vita non e sogno (Life Is Not a Dream, 1949), Il falso e vero verde (The False and the True Green, 1956), and La terra impareggiabile (The Incomparable Land, 1958). A much quoted example of his later manner is "Man of My Time": "You are still the one with the stone and the sling, / man of my time. You were in the cockpit, / with the malign wings, the sundials of death, / --I have seen you--in the chariot of fire, at the gallows, / at the wheels of torture. I have seen you.... / And this blood smells as on the day / one brother told the other brother: 'Let us / go into the fields.' And that echo, chill, tenacious, / has reached down to you, within your day. / Forget, O sons, the clouds of blood / risen from the earth, forget the fathers: / their tombs sink down in ashes, / black birds, the wind, cover their heart." (Translated by Allen Mandelbaum.)
Some critics believe that the war renewed and fulfilled Quasimodo. Sir Maurice Bowra wrote in 1960: "More than any living poet he speaks for the whole of Europe, and is not afraid of attempting themes of profound and common concern." Others, like Filippo Donini, held that "where the new Quasimodo is the most engage, he is at times absurdly far from poetry: it is not enough for him to choose dutiful themes ... he actually adopts dutiful language, and employs the slogans of poor journalists, confirming the saying that the translator of the Greeks and Shakespeare is now translating from Pravda." It was, however, for his last books, beginning with Ed e subito sera, that the Nobel jury made its award.
Some have seen in Quasimodo's early verse a typically Sicilian reaction, of sullen withdrawal or ironic mockery, bred of centuries of continental indifference. This may well be true so far as it goes, and certainly the roots of his poetic lie in an almost morbid sensitivity. But Quasimodo, even in his most hermetic period, was never merely an arid intellectual, and in his warm and tender music it is possible to detect a deeply religious temperament which is neither Sicilian nor continental, but gives him a kinship with such great forerunners as Petrarch, Tasso, and Leopardi.
In addition to his poetry and his translations, Quasimodo wrote a number of essays, collected in Il poeta e il politico (1960, translated as The Poet and the Politician), and containing somewhat gnomic pronouncements on the role of the poet in society and the nature of contemporary Italian verse, and criticism of Dante, Petrarch, and other figures. He also published a volume of drama reviews.
In 1968, while presiding over a poetry competition in Amalfi, Quasimodo suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that resulted in his death. He was interred in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan.
Mr. Quasimodo was small and slight, balding, with a dark moustache. He was quiet, shy to the point of diffidence, and apparently lonely. After his first wife died, he married Maria Cumani, a dancer, in 1948. He had a son and daughter with her named Sandro and Orietta, but later divorced her in 1960. Just after World War II he was for a few disillusioning months a member of the Communist party. He quit when the party insisted that he write political poems. But the association, together with his unorthodox religious views, brought unfounded charges that he was an atheist. The controversy over his Nobel Prize also caused him much distress, and he said once that "when you achieve something here, there are far too many who would like to stab you right in the back." He also received the Premio Viareggio (Viareggio Prize) in 1958, the Taormina Prize (shared with Dylan Thomas) in 1953, and an honorary degree from Oxford University in 1967.
Bibliography
Salina Borello, Salvatore Quasimodo (1995: Gribaudo); Books Abroad, Winter 1960, Winter 1967; Chicago Review, Spring 1960; Horizon, December 1947; Italian Quarterly, Fall 1959; Italica, March 1948; London Magazine, December 1960, September 1968; Meanjin Quarterly, September 1961; New York Times Book Review, July 3, 1960; Reporter, December 10, 1959; Saturday Review, November 7, 1959; June 11, 1960; Twentieth Century, December 1959. Angioletti, A. E fu subito sera, 1968; Burnshaw, S. (ed.) The Poem Itself, 1960; Ciardi, J. Dialogue with an Audience, 1963; Cohen, J. M. Poetry of This Age, 1966; Contemporary Authors, 15-16, 1966; Curley, D. N. and Curley, A. Modern Romance Literatures, (Library of Literary Criticism), 1967; Current Biography, 1960; Dizionario enciclopedico della letteratura italiana, 1967; Dizionario universale della letteratura contemporanea, 1961; Finzi, G. (ed.) Quasimodo e la critica, 1969; Letteratura italiana: I contemporanei, 1963; Pacifici, S. A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature, 1962; Stefanile, M. Quasimodo, 1943; Tedesco, N. Salvatore Quasimodo, 1959; Zagarrio, G. Quasimodo, 1969.
Selected Works Translated into English
Complete Poems, 1984. The Selected Writing of Salvatore Quasimodo (ed. and tr. by Allen Mandelbaum) 1960; The Poet and the Politician (tr. by Thomas G. Bergin and Sergio Pacifici) 1964; Quasimodo: Selected Poems (tr. by Jack Bevan) 1965; To Give and to Have (tr. by Edith Farnsworth) 1969; Debit and Credit (tr. by Jack Bevan) 1972. Poems in Barnstone, W. (ed.) Modern European Poetry, 1966; Fulton, R. An Italian Quartet, 1966; Golini, C. L. (ed.) Contemporary Italian Poetry, 1962; Kay, G. R. (ed.) Penguin Book of Italian Verse, 1965; Pacifici, S. (ed.) The Promised Land, 1957. "Ed e' subito sera" (And Suddenly it's evening) [Recommended].
External links
- Salvatore Quasimodo — the poet's official website (in Italian)
- Nobel Laureate Page — a Quasimodo page at the Nobel Prize website, with links to his biography and to his Nobel lecture "The Poet and the Politician"
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