{"product_id":"allegria-isbn-9781939810649","title":"Allegria","description":"\u003cb\u003eGeoffrey 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFamed 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.\"\"Ungaretti’s first book-length collection of poems appeared almost a century ago. It transformed modern Italian poetry and announced the arrival of a unique voice in world poetry . . . The slender poems celebrate life, inflecting its light, memory, and mystery, and seizing the eternal from the seemingly ephemeral in vivid and striking imagery. This elegant translation preserves Ungaretti’s economy and his pursuit of poetic purity.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--National Translation Award committee\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"The sequence of poems is strong, the verse compact but not terse. [\u003ci\u003eAllegria\u003c\/i\u003e] is wartime poetry, crisply conveying the feel of both battle and the uncertainty beyond it.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--M.A.Orthofer, The \u003ci\u003eComplete Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\". . . These poems burn like sparks of emotion, flashes of understanding, splinters of insight. However, despite their diaristic form, intensified by the horrors of war in the trenches, there is nothing fragmentary or unfinished about them; on the contrary, they aim to represent the totality of experience in the infinite and fathomless details of its unfolding . . .\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Graziano Krätli, \u003ci\u003eWorld Literature Today\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"If a poet’s first book represents a rebirth into language and the announcement of an arrival, then \u003ci\u003eAllegria di naufragi\u003c\/i\u003e introduces Ungaretti as a newly christened European and still spiritually loyal to the “bottomless” mystery of his and our origins.\" \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Ron Slate, \u003ci\u003eOn the Seawall\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\"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 \u003ci\u003eAllegria\u003c\/i\u003e, 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.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Ilya Kaminsky, author of \u003ci\u003eDeaf Republic\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eDancing in Odessa\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Matthew Reynolds, \u003ci\u003eLondon Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The poems of \u003ci\u003eL’Allegria \u003c\/i\u003edo not just present, distilled and remade concrete in language, an impression, a moment, an insight. They do all this and they bear witness; they bear witness both to an objective, external reality, and to this reality as it is experienced, felt, lived . . . Geoffrey Brock’s new translation . . . is as faithful and rewarding as any English rendition of Ungaretti’s work could be.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Nicola Vulpe, \u003ci\u003eManhattan Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"With his latest translation, Brock does justice to one of the masterpieces in Italian poetry, one which had a long-lasting influence on subsequent generations of poets . . . Brock then once again offers to the English-speaking readership a collection of poems which in their brevity and crystalline clarity resonate with our modern taste.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Elena Borelli, \u003ci\u003eReading in Translation\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Ungaretti's poetry, born in the ordeal of World War I and its trenches ... marked a turning point in modern Italian literature.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Glauco Cambon\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"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.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Allen Mandelbaum\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"One of the most authentic poets of Western Europe.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--T. S. Eliot\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"A sparse, compelling expression of the disintegration and hope born in the aftermath of the senseless waste of WWI . . . Brock’s translation keeps the poet’s language tight and consistent, and the outlines of the work as a whole drawn sharp and distinct, achieving a cohesiveness that, given its concentrated expressionism, is a remarkable achievement.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e– Thomas Sanfilip, \u003ci\u003eThe Literary Yard\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eOne of   the most authentic poets of Western Europe.\u003cbr\u003e — T.S. Eliot\u003cbr\u003e Every poem is open, and not closed, to all the winds of the spirit and the   world; and the poetry of Ungaretti has always communicated to me a freshness,   a free air, of boundless light and the persuasion of a voice both moved and   moving . . . so sober, so precise with his phrases, so concise amidst the   silences of white spaces.\u003cbr\u003e — Jorge Guillén\u003cbr\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e — Ilya KaminskyGiuseppe  Ungaretti (1888-1970) was born in Alexandria to Italian settlers--his  father was a laborer working on the Suez Canal and his mother ran a  bakery. Ungaretti left for Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where he  befriended Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Valéry, Picasso, Braque, and  Léger. Ungaretti wrote his first book of poetry while serving in the  Italian Army in World War I. From 1936 until 1942, he taught Italian  literature at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. After the death of  his nine-year-old son, Ungaretti published a collection of poems, \u003ci\u003eIl dalore\u003c\/i\u003e,  which expressed both tragic personal loss and horror at the atrocities  of Nazi Germany. Ungaretti translated Shakespeare, William Blake, and  Racine into Italian, among others. He died in Milan in 1970.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eGeoffrey Brock was born in  Atlanta and holds an MFA from the University  of Florida and a PhD from  UPenn. He has won multiple prizes for his  original poetry, including  the New Criterion Poetry Prize. For his  translations, which include  work by Cesare Pavese and Umberto Eco, Brock  has won Poetry magazine's  John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize, a  Guggenheim Fellowship, the MLA's  Lois Roth Translation Award, and the  PEN Center USA award for  translation.ETERNITÀ\u003cbr\u003e Tra un fiore colto e l’altro donato\u003cbr\u003e l’inesprimibile nulla\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e ETERNITY\u003cbr\u003e Between one flower plucked and the other given\u003cbr\u003e the ineffable nothing\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e NOIA\u003cbr\u003e Anche questa notte passerà\u003cbr\u003e Questa solitudine in giro\u003cbr\u003e titubante ombra dei fili tramviari\u003cbr\u003e sull’umido asfalto\u003cbr\u003e Guardo i testoni dei brumisti\u003cbr\u003e nel mezzo sonno\u003cbr\u003e tentennare\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e BOREDOM\u003cbr\u003e This night too will pass\u003cbr\u003e This roving solitude\u003cbr\u003e tentative shadows of tram wires\u003cbr\u003e on damp asphalt\u003cbr\u003e I watch the big heads 2 of the coachmen\u003cbr\u003e half sleeping\u003cbr\u003e totter","brand":"Archipelago","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304916111589,"sku":"NP9781939810649","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781939810649.jpg?v=1767721322","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/allegria-isbn-9781939810649","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}