ABSTRACT
For American lovers of modern Italian poetry, this is an exciting time. After recent, and sometimes brilliant, translations of Eugenio Montale, Umberto Saba, and Cesare Pavese, here come Giorgio Caproni (1912-1990) and Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970). Reading their work is invigorating. Please forgive me if I am inclined to argue that, in comparison to many American poets, Caproni and Ungaretti often attain an admirable, intense equilibrium between various poetic intentions and tendencies. They can be sensual and metaphysical at the same time. They seek out vivid detail from the outside world, but also retire into secrecy, obliqueness, acute subjectivity. Their formal innovations, however striking, intelligently respect a refined literary heritage going back to Cavalcanti, Dante, and Petrarch. Like the aforementioned, their amorous passions come draped in an intricate intellectuality. They aspire to “song,” to a visceral musicality, even as they seek “ever deeper and distant analogical associations” (as Filippo Marinetti put it in his Futurist Manifesto). In brief, their poetic sensibilities are rich, moving, challenging, and—I daresay—not “dissociated,” as T. S. Eliot might have put it.
