Volume 23, Number 7 · April 29, 1976
Man of Pain
By Paul Auster
Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti
translated and edited by Allen Mandelbaum
Cornell University Press, 228 pp., $15.00
From his earliest important poems, written in the trenches of World War I, to the last poems of his old age, Ungaretti's work is a long record of confrontations with death. Cryptic in utterance, narrow in range, built on an imagery that is drawn exclusively from the natural world, and displaying an obsessive preoccupation with only the most fundamental metaphysical themes, Ungaretti's poetry nevertheless continually escapes being predictable. In spite of the limitations of his manner, he leaves an impression of nearly boundless energy and invention. For no word in Ungaretti's work is ever used lightly—'When I find / in this my silence / a word / it is dug into my life / like an abyss'—and the strength of his verse derives precisely from this restraint. For a man who wrote for more than fifty years, Ungaretti published remarkably little before he died in 1970, and his poetic work amounts to no more than a few hundred pages. His poems are more a distillation of experience than a commentary on experience, and what they lack in variety, they make up for in intensity.
Review, 2572 words
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