ABSTRACT
Giuseppe Ungaretti's poems are a particular challenge to translate because they seem not completely at home in Italian. Ungaretti sought to repatriate Italian literary energies by translating some of the more Petrarchan of Shakespeare's sonnets; another variety of translation as process occurs when, as in Robert Lowell's translation of 'Tu ti spezzasti', translation becomes a means if sharing grief. Ungaretti was familiar with the pains and gains of reaching back and forth between languages. He was born and grew up in the multilingual environment of Alexandria, where a Sudanese wet-nurse and Croat housekeeper must have nourished what turned up in some of his later writing as frank Orientalism. Ungaretti's mellifluousness owes something to d'Annunzio, and his occasional ironies echo the 'crepuscular' poet Aldo Palazzeschi. The best sampling of Ungaretti in English is still the selected poems translated by Patrick Creagh.
