Il porto sepolto by Giuseppe Ungaretti

First published: 1916 (partial translation, 1990, in The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems of Guiseppe Ungaretti)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Il porto sepolto (the buried harbor) came out of the peculiar circumstances of World War I; Ungaretti had volunteered in May of 1915 to join the Italian military. Each of the thirty-three poems of this, Ungaretti’s first volume, is tagged with the date and place of composition. Two of the poems were written in December, 1915, and twenty-eight were composed between April, 1916, and September, 1916. They are for the most part placed within the volume in chronological order. Thematically, the collection explores solitude and the various ways in which human beings try to bridge the spaces between themselves and others. It shows the heights to which human aspiration can ascend, even out of the depths of trench warfare.

Il porto sepolto forms one of three parts of a larger collection, Allegria di naufragi (1919; the joy of shipwrecks). The “harbor” that is “buried” is most likely the harbor off Pharos at Alexandria, Egypt, the city of Ungaretti’s youth. The harbor become mythic for Ungaretti. Like the legendary lost city of Atlantis, the harbor is so far below the surface, and so legendary, that it represents the unfathomable depths of the human psyche as well as the height of the most intense consciousness. It is to him, he writes, “the mirage of Italy”; it represents that part of one’s early life that is submerged in the subconscious “or in the intense heat of the mirage.”

The human condition of separateness and the striving of the human mind and spirit to overcome that condition is addressed in the poem titled “Pilgrimage.” In it, the poet refers to himself as “Ungaretti/ man of pain,” who gains courage from illusion. This statement is paradoxical: The first stanza shows the individual in the trenches in war, “in these bowels/ of rubble” where “hour on hour” the poet-soldier has “dragged” his “carcass/ worn away by mud/ like a sole.” Ungaretti’s illusion is the illusion of light beyond those pathetic, degrading, and dehumanizing—because disconnecting—conditions. He writes, “Beyond/ a searchlight/ sets a sea/ into the fog,” showing his illusion to be the possibility of order, of light, of form rather than chaos, of purification (the sea) instead of putrefaction (“bowels of rubble”). Toward the close of the poem, the faculty of the imagination is shown to lift the human spirit above the physical and psychological depths of the trenches: From the trenches, the poet perceives the essential similarity and the ultimate connectedness of things and seeks to communicate that vision in his poetry. The title “Pilgrimage” indicates more than a mere journey; it is a religious journey from the physicality of despair into the open air of spiritual aspiration.

Ungaretti was rooted in more than one literary and philosophical tradition, and he derives imagery from Italian and other Western cultures, from Asian literary traditions, and from the modern world. His images and symbols evoke thereby a curious admixture of resonances, often concerned with the search for identity. Such a theme is explored in “In Memoriam,” written on September 30, 1916, at Locvizza. This funereal and contemplative poem concerns Mohammad Sheab, a friend of Ungaretti from his days at a French school in Alexandria and with whom he later attended school in Paris. Ungaretti perceived Sheab, an Arab, and himself as individuals estranged from their roots, and on this estrangement Ungaretti blames the suicide of Sheab, “Descendent/ of emirs of nomads,” who changes his name from Mohammad to Marcel, who cannot remember how to live with Arab culture, and who takes his own life at 5 Rue des Carmes, to be buried in Ivry. In contrast, Ungaretti, the soldier-poet, finds his connection to Italy and to the Italian people.

The fact that Ungaretti was a man of both Asian and Western cultures, that he was fluent in at least three languages and was a writer in three literary traditions, becomes apparent again in “Phase,” in which he describes the depths of love as being in the “eye/ of thousandth-and-one night,” clearly an allusion to the famous collection of tales known as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments or The Thousand and One Nights. He mixes the Eastern image of the “deserted garden” with the Western myth of the dove descending. In “June,” he writes of the end of an evening of lovemaking, comparing the way in which “the sky is shut” to the concurrent movement of “the jasmine” “in my African land.”

“Rivers,” written at Cotici, August 16, 1916, opens with the poet holding on to a “crippled tree” that is alone in a ravine and that has as a quality “the laziness of a circus/ before or after the performance.” If this were the traditional symbol of a tree of life, it would come to represent a life “crippled,” “mutilato”—a life made dysfunctional through having been made the object of harm. The tree seems to be emblematic of human anguish. While the “circus” might appear to be lazy specifically when the performance is not on, it may also represent social instability and disorder. The poet-soldier, in repose, then watches the clouds pass in front of the moon, and the following morning he rests “like a relic.” In writing of the rivers, he establishes a stark setting and places himself first in Bedouin culture as “a pliant fiber/ of the universe.” He writes of the Serchio, to which his ancestry is connected; of the Nile, which witnessed the growth of the young man; and of the Seine, where his identity was “remingled and remade” and where he gained self-knowledge. After separating things in order to examine them in the harsh glare of the desert light, he resolves and modulates through a visual paradox: Night falls, and he writes, “now my life seems to me/ a corolla/ of shadows.”

In the middle of the series, the poem “Leavetaking” expresses Ungaretti’s poetics. In eight lines that run in fluid movement, he writes of poetry as “the world humanity/ one’s own life/ flowering from the word”—and the reader envisions the most abstract expression, “the world humanity,” quickly transformed into concreteness through a special kind of metaphor: Flowers come out of words, and the flowers, and the words, and the action of the flowers coming from the words, all express life. Each word has the power to so impress one that, as Ungaretti describes it, “it is dug into my life/ like an abyss.” He tells readers to read every word and to let every word pour out its full complex of meanings. It is with this advice from the poet that the reader can approach the poetry. Ungaretti’s verse cannot be read quickly; rather, it must be allowed to unfold itself word by word. The reader must allow the poet to re-create in him or her the poet’s experience or perception. Ungaretti does not relate experience but re-creates it, and to enter into that re-creation is the reader’s challenge. Everything in Ungaretti’s poetry depends not on the narrative line but on each word.

Il porto sepolto marks such a dramatic break from the Italian poetry of the nineteenth century that Ungaretti has been seen as the first modern Italian poet. In “Morning,” written at Santa Maria La Longa, he writes a poem of two lines: “Immensity/ illumines me.” This work typifies the intensity and the sparseness of diction that characterize Ungaretti’s work.

Ungaretti himself described the intent of Il porto sepolto: Although clearly written by a soldier, it does not praise war and heroic glory. Rather, it is a cry for human connection, for brotherhood in the face of suffering. Participating in the waging of war paradoxically heightened Ungaretti’s vision of the essential integrity of all things in the cosmos and affirmed for him the possibility that the virtue of brotherly love can sustain a very fragile humanity in the face of cataclysm. He expresses the tenuousness of life during war in “Soldiers” and of human communication in “Brothers” by comparing both to leaves on the verge of falling from trees. He closes “Brothers” with the image of “man facing his fragility,” although facing it along with, and sustained by, his “brothers.” “Watch” displays Ungaretti’s paradox that through contemplating loss and death so often, he is actually engaging in a poetry of life. As he holds his dead, “massacred comrade,” he is moved by the image of death to speak; not even in love letters has he himself “held/ so/ fast to life” as he does in physically holding his dead friend.

The dominant contrast in Ungaretti is physical place: the desert, through which one roams alone, with only the memory of the promised land. It is the calling of poetry, according to Ungaretti, to redeem humanity, to make real the promised land. It is the possibility of poetry to help humanity become pure and attain its own perfection, to overcome its own anguish, to be in harmony with the universe.

The settings of Ungaretti’s poetry are often stark, elemental, although peopled with the subjects of the poems. He plays with the senses, often accomplishing difficult things with great agility, such as the verbal re-creation of sound. For example, in “Pleasure,” he compares the feeling of remorse after a day’s pleasure to the haunting sound of “a dog’s bark/ lost in the/ desert.” Similarly, in “Solitude,” he writes that the sound of his own voice in anguish can “wound/ like lightning bolts/ the faint bell/ of the sky.”

Ungaretti faced the challenge of an Italian poet of his time, either to write in or not write in literary Italian. He chose to pare down his language so far that he thought he might reach the essence of each word and each line, and, in fact, he put much work into revision for poetic compression and for the concentration of perception. It was Ungaretti’s belief that to break through into a new era of poetry in Italian, he would have to be intensely introspective, able to perceive his existence as part of a greater whole, and unequivocally able to express the consciousness of his own conscience. This, Ungaretti accomplished.

Bibliography

Auster, Paul. “Man of Pain.” The New York Review of Books, April 29, 1976. Offers a good introduction to Ungaretti’s poetry for the general reader.

Brose, Margaret. “Metaphor and Simile in Giuseppe Ungaretti’s L’Allegria.” Lingua e Stile (March, 1976): 43-73. Discusses Ungaretti’s adaptations of Symbolist techniques as well as his use of other aesthetic and stylistic devices.

Cary, Joseph. Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale. 2d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Includes an introductory chapter that provides accessible background information. Chapter on Ungaretti traces his career from his early days through his later poetry of anguish.

Frisardi, Andrew. “Giuseppe Ungaretti and the Image of Desolation.” Hudson Review 60, no. 1 (Spring, 2002): 75-89. Examines Ungaretti’s reputation as a poet, analyzing some of his work and placing him within the Italian poetic tradition. This issue of Hudson Review also contains some of Ungaretti’s poems.

Jones, Frederic J. Giuseppe Ungaretti: Poet and Critic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1977. Provides biographical information before examining Ungaretti’s perspective and discussing his work in terms of his connections to Alexandria, Paris, and Italy.

Pickering-Iazzi, Robin. “Alexandria Revisited: Colonialism and the Egyptian Works of Enrico Pea and Giuseppe Ungaretti.” In A Place in the Sun: Africa in Italian Colonial Culture from Post-Unification to the Present, edited by Patrizia Palumbo. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Focuses on the two poets’ lives in Alexandria, Egypt, and how their experiences there are reflected in their work. Includes discussion of Il porto sepolto.

Ungaretti, Giuseppe. The Buried Harbour: Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti. Canberra, A.C.T.: Leros Press, 1990. Offers excellent English translations of selections from Il porto sepolto.