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Mariano 29 giugno 1916
Vi arriva il poeta
e poi torna alla luce con i suoi canti
e li disperde
Di questa poesia
mi resta quel nulla
d'inesauribile segreto
Mariano 29 June 1916
There comes the poet
and then back to light with his songs
and scatters them
In this poem
that nothing remains to me
of an inexhaustible secret
and then back to light with his songs
and scatters them
In this poem
that nothing remains to me
of an inexhaustible secret
Il porto sepolto (The Buried Harbour): Giuseppe Ungaretti, from Il porto sepolto, 1916, trans. TC
Alexandria, Egypt, 2 March 1990: photo by NASA
Alexandria from Quitbays Citadel: photo by Ahmed Dokmak, 2006
Winter in Alexandria: photo by Abdelrhman 1990, 2008
Sunset over Citadel of Quaitbay: photo by Ahmed Sherif, 2008
Ungaretti was born in Alexandria in 1888, the son of an Italian from Lucca who had come to Egypt to work on the building of the Suez Canal. It was not until his mid-twenties that the poet saw Italy for the first time. The poem he chooses in late 1916 as title piece for a selection from his ongoing fragmentary poetic self-examination of conscience -- composed during front line service with the Italian army in the trenches of World War I -- suggests that, as he would later state explicitly, he regards the sunken ancient port of Alexandria as a symbol of his poetry. With its mysterious silences and depths, the work inscribes a mythic history of presence within the irretrievably lost.
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