Selected Poems

"[This is an] engaging selection of Ungaretti's poetry."—John Taylor, The Antioch Review

"A poet of Orphic secrecies, of spareness, of those resonant silences of the vacant piazzas in de Chirico, Ungaretti is tersely unique and beautifully translated here by Andrew Frisardi. These are poems that begin as irreducible nubs, only to expand to the largest of infinities."—Anthony Hecht

"Here at last is the essential Ungaretti re-created in English—urgent, spare, afflicted, inviolable, humane. Frisardi's searching labor of love has given us something we have long needed—a precise, compelling, and comprehensive translation of a modern Italian master, a singer of unfathomable voids and mysteries, a fundamentally religious poet of the waking dream and the desert silence."—Edward Hirsch

"The eldest and many say finest modern Italian poet, Ungaretti (1888-1970) was born to Tuscan parents in Alexandria. Hence, he was at once a birthright heir of the Renaissance and a child of a quintessentially international city within sight of an ancient culture's desert-bound remains; lush Tuscan hills and empty Egyptian desert are his poetry's mental as well as physical landscapes. He saw action in WW I, endured a dear friend's suicide in Paris, and participated in the postwar birth of modernist French and Italian poetry and art. He eventually settled in Rome, decamping only for an academic appointment in Brazil, during which first his brother and then his nine-year-old son died. With so much tragedy in a life lived largely in a crucible of twentieth-century calamity, that he wrote frequently about death in unsurprising, nor is it wonderful that he became engaged in a profoundly tenuous search for God. His spare poetry, beautiful in two languages in this edition, is the difficult but deeply engaging and affecting record of his quest."—Ray Olson, Booklist

"Splendidly fresh and definitive."—The Washington Post

"Frisardi has accompanied his sensitive translations with an introduction that combines helpful discussion of the poet's literary context with a biographical sketch, adding a detailed chronology of the poet's life and work as well as notes that provide many extracts from Ungaretti's own remarks on the connection of his poems with his life. This is a valuable and skillfully accomplished volume, and for those not acquainted with Ungaretti's uncommonly beautiful verse it is the ideal introduction. It is to be hoped that Frisardi will follow it with a further selection, to give an even broader view of the achievement of one of Italy's greatest poets . . . If any modern poet can be said to have found the song of the Italian language, it is Giuseppe Ungaretti, who in poem after poem, no matter how lachrymose its theme, creates a verbal music that will continue to enchant and to resound wherever Italian is spoken and poetry is read."—Bernard Knox, The New Republic

"In Andrew Frisardi's careful translations, much of Ungaretti's delicacy, mystery, and incantation survives. That in itself is a minor miracle, since translating Ungaretti—one of the [twentieth] century's high masters—requires one to translate sunbeams, fugitive shadows, and echoes even more than words or phrases. We owe Andrew Frisardi a debt of gratitude."—Rosanna Warren