Giuseppe Ungaretti: Sunset

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Tramonto sull'Isonzo. Tramonto sul fiume Isonzo ripresa dell'isola della Cona: photo by Teone! 2 March 2008

Versa il 20 maggio 1916

Il carnato del cielo

sveglia oasi

al nomade d'amore

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Versa 20 May 1916

The sky's chaste flesh

awakens oases

in the nomad of love

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970): Tramonto (Sunset), from Il porto sepolto (The buried harbor), 1916; English by TC

Wounded at field hospital on the Isonzo: photographer unknown, for Bain News Service, c. 1915 (George Grantham Bain Collection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

I began Il porto sepolto on the first day of my life in the trenches -- Christmas Day 1915. I was in the Carso, on Mount San Michele. I spent those nights lying in mud, opposite the enemy who was positioned higher than us and who was a hundred times better armed. In the trenches, almost always in those same trenches, because we stayed on San Michele even during the breaks -- the battles went on for a year. Il porto sepolto contains the experience of that year.

I was in the presence of death, in the presence of nature, of a nature that I learned to know in a new, terrible way. From that moment I became a man who makes war. It wasn't the idea of killing or being killed that tormented me: I was a man who wanted nothing for himself but relationship with the absolute, the absolute that was represented by death, not by danger, that was represented by the tragedy that brought man to meet himself in massacre. In my poetry there is no trace of hatred for the enemy, nor for anyone: there is the grip of consciousness of the human condition, of the fraternity of mankind in suffering, of the extreme precariousness of its condition. There is the will to expression, the necessity of expression, there is elation, in Porto sepolto, that almost savage elation of vital impulse, of the appetite for living, that is multiplied in the proximity and daily company of death. We live in contradiction...

Il porto sepolto was printed in Udine in 1916, in edition of eighty copies edited by Ettore Serra. It was entirely his fault. To tell the truth, those pieces of paper -- postage-exempt postcards, margins of old newspapers, white spaces in cherished letters I had received -- on which for two years, day after day, I had been examining my conscience, sticking them afterward helter-skelter into my knapsack, carrying them to live with me in the mud of the trenches, or making myself a pillow out of them during rare breaks, were not destined for any public. I had no idea of a public, and I hadn't wanted the war and didn't participate in the war to draw applause; I had, and I still have today, such respect for a great sacrifice such as war is for a people, that every act of vanity in that sort of circumstance would have seemed to me a desecration -- even that of one one who, like us, found himself in the midst of the fray. Also, I had set for myself an ideal so rigorous, and perhaps absurd, of anonymity in a war destined to end, according to my hopes, with a victory of the people, that anything that might in the slightest sense have distinguished me from another foot soldier would have struck me as a hateful privilege and an offense to the people to whom I had meant to give a sign of complete dedication, accepting the war in that most humble state.

This was the state of mind of the soldier who left that morning along the streets of Versa, carrying along his thoughts, when he was accosted by a lieutenant. I didn't have the courage not to confide in that young officer who asked me my name, and I told him that I had no other relief but to search for and find myself in some words, and that this was my way of making progress as a human being. Ettore Serra carried off my knapsack, put into order the scraps of paper, and brought to me one day, when we had finally taken San Michele, the proofs of my Porto sepolto.

Giuseppe Ungaretti, prefatory note to L'allegria (1931), translated by Andrew Frisardi in Giuseppe Ungaretti: Selected Poems, 2002

Autumn, 1916, Gorizia. Tramonto sull'Isonzo (Sunset on the Isonzo): photographer unknown; image by rvivanti, 20 April 2008

Entrance to the Schönburg tunnel, Monte San Michele: photographer unknown, February 1916; image by by Hans de Regt, 310 August 2010

Early Italian gas mask from the 1915-1918 Battles of the Isonzo, Gorizia Museum. This single-purpose (monovolente) mask, called the Ciamician-Pisci type, had a conical shape. It was made of 10 layers of gauze saturated with an alkaline solution of sodium carbonate and potassium carbonate. To keep the alkaline solution from irritating the user's lips a strip of flannel protected the mouth. It, too, offered protection only against chlorine. It was a major cause of a disaster at Monte San Michele on the Carso which was abandoned when the Austrians attacked with phosgene gas: photo by Hans de Regt, 5 September 2010

Old trenches from the 1915-1918 Battles of the Isonzo, Monte San Michele: photo by Hans de Regt, 31 August 2010

 Reflessi sull'Isonzo. La tappa sul ponte sull'isonzo è staat turbolenta. Mentre mi fermavo a fare foto, le nacchine mi sfrecciavano vicino facendo rumore sulle giunture del ponte: photo by David e Paola, 20 January 2008

 Isonzo dall'isola della Cone verso la strada per Grado. Gorizia, Friuli Venezia-Giulia, Italy: photo by SERGIO (giotto1959), 28 December 2007

Tramonto sul fiume Isonzo: photo by waferwaffa, 5 October 2006