Vie d’un Homme: Ungaretti in France (1934-1939)

Qeios, 2023

The study focuses on a very detailed overview of the events both on the Karst section of the Isonzo Front as well as in Brienne-le Chateau, Gigny-Brandon, France, during World War I and Giuseppe Ungaretti's participation in the various battles along with his composition of individual poems. Based on the historical documentation and concurrent reading of his letters from the front and the place and date of the creation of his poems, it can be confirmed that the poet's voluntary participation in the war played a key role in his poetic creation but also in his national self-determination. The detailed overview of the historical facts and his composing also led to the yet undetected inconsistency between the geographical placement of some poems in the village of Lokvica na Krasu and the actual situation on the front.

2021

Giuseppe Ungaretti is one of the major representatives of 20th century Italian poetry. He was born in Alexandria, Egypt in 1888, where he also pursued his first studies. Our claim, which is in contrast with what has been argued so far by literary critics, is that the Egyptian environment in which he grew up and formed his personality played a role in shaping the author’s ‘colonialist’ attitude. This emerges in a more detailed reading of his correspondence from the decade between 1909 and 1919. The main goal of this study is therefore to analyse a selection of these letters in order to highlight how the period in Egypt deeply influenced the author, leading him to internalize French and English colonial culture. We argue that this later induced the poet to make particular political choices such as backing Italian participation in the First World War and supporting Fascism.

2023

� Poetry is defined in this paper as intuitive language. This being so, the poet of an original work would ipso facto be the best vector of what was first intuitively felt before being poetically expressed. It is therefore the position of this paper that a self-translating poet, who in the first instance translates his/her thoughts into words, and only thereafter translates into another language, is the true poetic translator. This is as opposed to some other poet or translator, who, thanks to his/her knowledge of the poetic form and/or devices, translates the poems of another. Such a translator can at best be called a translator of poetry. A distinction is therefore made here between a poetic translator and a translator of poetry, with a preference for the former as the true conveyor of poetic thought. The implications of this for translation studies can be found in Seleskovitch and Lederer's (1984) observation that the art of translation is not just the rendering of words in one language into another, but rather the transfer of ideational concepts expressed in one language into a second one. This being so, the translation of poetic thought can best be achieved by original poets who are adequately literate in other languages. They are in a much better position to present to the world a true original version of their primal original thought.

Chimères, 1982

Mi destavi nel sangue ogni tua età M'apparivi tenace, umana, libera E sulla terra il vivere piu hello; Giuseppe Ungaretti (Poesie, 1912) You awakened in rny blood all your ages You appeared tome tenacious, human, fiee And on earth the finest form of living An ode to the country of his heritage, but not of his birth, captures the passionate longing for Italy and ber literary tradition sustained by Giuseppe Ungaretti during bis youth in Egypt. He was barn in Alexandriê February 8, 1888. His father, Antonio Ungaretti, emigrated from Lucca to find work on the Suez Canal and died eight years later, leaving Maria Lunardini Ungaretti to earn a livelihood for herself and two sons at the f amily-owned bakery in the Arab quarter. Educated at the Ecole Suisse Jacot, among the best scbools in Alexandria, he read for bimself the works o~ Leopardi, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Nietzcbe. In 1912 be left Egypt for Paris, where be and Apollinaire became friends, and be met the Italian futurists. He returned to Italy in 1914 and began to write the poetry that would eventually become Allegria di ~aufragi. At first glance the poetry of Ungaretti seems derived from the French influences. Closer analysis, as Frederic J. Jones points out, discloses Ungaretti's lifelong admiration for Leopardi (p. 51) and, as Joseph Cary notes, bis view of "Mallarmé and French symbolisme in general as the unwitting heirs to the pioneer labors of the isolated poet from Recanati" (p. 170). Cary holds tbat Ungaretti looked upon

Translation and Literature

These two new volumes of collected translations commemorate John Ashbery's longstanding affection for and preoccupation with French literature and culture, gathering together an adventurously eclectic body of literary influences, affiliations, and interests. The breadth of these volumes -which accommodate 28 prose pieces and 171 poems, translations of the work of 24 poets and 17 other writers -is in itself testament to Ashbery's ardent Francophilia. There are, of course, many other examples of the influence of French literature on American poets, many of whom, such as Pound, Stevens, Lowell, Wilbur, and Moore, also favoured translation as a revelatory mode of cultural encounter and mediation.

French Studies, 2006

Fideli, diligenti, chiari e dotti: Traduttori e traduzione nel Rinascimento, 2016

Much has been written about the 'querelle des femmes', the woman controversy, in the period from its first appearance in the late fifteenth century to the end of the seventeenth. Less has been said about the role played by translation in this controversy, while the combining forces of translation and print have been virtually ignored. This essay seeks to mark a first modest step in redressing this situation by examining three popular works on women (two Italian and one French) in English translation, paying attention to changes, not only of a textual nature, but also of a paratextual and printerly one.