tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post5434372373936958728..comments2024-01-28T03:56:39.351-08:00Comments on TOM CLARK: Hanging by a thread / Giuseppe Ungaretti: In MemoriaUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-4364838915625054432016-10-05T22:12:20.557-07:002016-10-05T22:12:20.557-07:00That's an image to think upon, and quite movin...That's an image to think upon, and quite moving as such. <br /><br />To be "not really *here"... there are moments, these days, when I feel that is the perpetual state of any of us who remembers anything at all. <br /><br />(That is, the old.)TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-58038950998299604852016-10-04T21:34:44.324-07:002016-10-04T21:34:44.324-07:00Yes, Tom, I hear what you're saying. But I won...Yes, Tom, I hear what you're saying. But I wonder about the words, "lost a Homeland," and what that *really* means. Given the way I've been brought up I have no affiliation with any country, any country that exists, but to lose a homeland suggests not just a melancholic nostalgia for it (since it's never *really* lost) but also that one is ripped out of a supporting web of relations, afloat...<br /><br />As kids me and my sister would sometimes visit an old Egyptian couple my father knew (there weren't many Muslims in town so we tried to keep in contact with these scattered people..Yemenis, Indians...). Malika, with her glass eye and broken English, considered me a son (she was childless). But the thing I wanted to say was..her husband worked on a ship and was only ever back for short periods. But even then he would sit in his room, not saying a word, with the windows open, smoking like a chimney, listening to to the recitation of the Qur'an on his radio and I remember thinking: he's not really *here*.<br /><br />Well, that was all of us, I suppose. I think it's changed for the next generation, though. <br /><br /> billoohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10716970909272480118noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-9104171601623129672016-10-04T07:09:30.174-07:002016-10-04T07:09:30.174-07:00billoo,
There is a remark Ungaretti made concerni...billoo,<br /><br />There is a remark Ungaretti made concerning what he called "my suicide friends", implying that Sceab's was not the only Alexandrian passage-to-Europe tragedy in his experience.<br /><br />The stark minimal telling of the story and the palpable sympathy make the poem very powerful. I think your reading in light of your own experience adds something to my own sense of the poem. (I read it in much the same way -- from the other direction, so to speak.) Thanks for that.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-12897001371064205832016-10-03T20:44:20.313-07:002016-10-03T20:44:20.313-07:00Tom,
I found the poem incredibly moving. Thank yo...Tom,<br /><br />I found the poem incredibly moving. Thank you for sharing it. In a century when lots of people are living in temporary settlements and everyone is on the move-and who knows, as climate change kicks the trend may only become more pronounced-I think the poem will resonate with a lot of people. As someone who never fitted in as a British-Muslim, British-Pakistani or, to think of it, even back here in the land of the pure, I think I understand something of what Sceab felt 100 years ago.billoohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10716970909272480118noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-70454634409791890092016-10-02T06:27:37.384-07:002016-10-02T06:27:37.384-07:00thanks !thanks !Sandrahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15053707892868584990noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-85414880221451686052016-10-02T05:00:39.034-07:002016-10-02T05:00:39.034-07:00Duncan,
Ungaretti was surprised to find himse...Duncan,<br /><br /> Ungaretti was surprised to find himself experiencing strange elations amid the most horrendous shelling in the trenches. There surrounded by the savage din... though his notebook poems from that stark situation do show the benefit of being direct and quick, each chance to write perhaps the last. They do have a little sing song, of a kind.<br /><br /> The Hockney -- well, "almost" would be magnanimous.<br /><br /> Sandra,<br /><br /> Thanks very much for that. I believe I prefer it to my own effort. Especially like the lacerante suburbio!<br /><br /> A bit of background perhaps useful here.<br /><br /> Ungaretti grew up in Alexandria, the son of an Italian engineer from Lucca who died (of an illness contracted during the excavation of the Suez canal) when the poet was an infant. The family owned a bakery in Alexandria, and Ungaretti's mother stayed on to maintain it. During his school years at the Ecole Suisse in Alexandria he began a literary friendship with a fellow student, Mohammed Sceab. They read the reviews and talked and met other young writers in the cafes; in a note on another of his early poems Ungaretti recalls "those cafes my friends who did the neo-Hellenic review Grammata used to go to, and where Sceab and I used to go to sip our evening yogurt." They discovered Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Leopardi, Nietzsche, and wrote poems of their own. In 1912 Ungaretti left Egypt, saw Italy for the first time, then moved on to Paris, where he meant to study law. Once again he was accompanied in these discoveries by Mohammed Sceab. They lived in the same hotel in Paris, on the rue des Carmes. Ungaretti spent two years in Paris, took courses at the Sorbonne and mingled with the modern poets and artists, Apollinaire, Jacob, Cendrars, deChirico, Modigliani, Picasso, Braque. In the summer of 1913 Mohammed Sceab committed suicide. With the outbreak of the 1914 war, Ungaretti moved to Milan, then entered the Italian army when Italy entered the war, and was sent immediately to Carso on the Austrian front, as an ordinary infantrymen. There he began writing the poems that would form his first collection.<br /> <br />Ungaretti, already a young man of several homelands, cast into the terror of the trenches, and thus dislocated, as a human, from humanity, recognized in the tragedy of his friend's death a kind of cultural dislocation -- the wrench of the passage. In another poem of the same period Ungaretti lamented that he felt at home nowhere on earth; Girovago (Wanderer) is the title. Here he shows real sensitivity to his friend's problems adjusting to life in the West. Mohammed Sceab's situation is perhaps not all that uncommon now, as those displaced by war attempt the problematic transit between civilizations. Ungaretti's poem captures the tragic aspect of this dislocation.<br /><br /> Sceab, an Arab, descendant of nomadic tribes, had lost touch with his past, and felt lost in the West. Ungaretti's sympathy with his friend's plight is deepened by his own private sense of deracination, his wandering among homelands, and his permanent sense of dislocation in the world.TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-53695700855620268862016-10-02T03:11:23.510-07:002016-10-02T03:11:23.510-07:00Bombs doing their best to drown out "...the l...Bombs doing their best to drown out "...the little sing song of the Koran". <br /><br />The bright colours of the Hockney seem almost obscene in the wake of all that white dust.Mose23https://www.blogger.com/profile/01100756913131511440noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4445844569294316288.post-71996179998915749692016-10-01T09:58:07.899-07:002016-10-01T09:58:07.899-07:00Su nombre era Mohamed Sceab
Descendiente de emire...Su nombre era Mohamed Sceab<br />Descendiente de emires y tribus nómadas<br />Se suicidó<br />Porque había perdido su tierra natal<br />Amaba a Francia <br />Y cambió su nombre<br />Era Marcel<br />Pero no era francés<br />Había olvidado <br />Cómo era vivir simplemente<br />Bebiendo café<br />En una tienda<br />Con su gente<br />Donde se tararea <br />La canción del Corán<br />Y no sabía<br />Cómo darle <br />A su aislamiento<br />Una voz<br /><br />Lo acompañé con el conserje<br />Del hotel donde vivía<br />En París<br />Siguiendo su cuerpo<br />Desde el sucio callejón<br />En el número 5 de la calle Carmes<br />Él descansa<br />En el cementerio de Ivry<br />Lacerante suburbio<br />Que recuerda<br />El día<br />En que termina una verbena<br /><br />Puede ser que yo<br />Solamente sepa<br />Que él vivió alguna vez<br />Sandrahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15053707892868584990noreply@blogger.com