The Selected Writings

by Salvatore Quasimodo

The Selected Writings of Salvatore Quasimodo

Genres: Poetry, Nobel Prize, Italian Literature, Fiction, Classics, Italy, Literature

292 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Early nostalgic works of Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo contrast with his later socially concerned poetry; he won the Nobel Prize of 1959 for literature.

He won "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvato...

Reviews

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

The acrid odour of the lindens
will sink within the night of rain.
The time of joy, its fury, will be vain,
its lightning bite that shatters.
There scarce remains the indolence,
the memory of gesture, of a syllable,
but like a slow flight of birds
in fumes of fog. And still you await,
I know not what, my lost one; perhaps
an hour that decides, that recalls
the end or the beginning; hence forward,
equal fates. Here black the smoke
of fires still dries the throat. O if
you can, forget that taste of sulphur,
and the fear. Words wear us out,
they rise again from a stoned water;
perhaps the heart is left us, perhaps the heart...

[Raquel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tão lindo!

Uma edição bilingue que nos permite saborear o incompreendido e, depois, ter acesso à beleza de cada palavra.

Um grande poeta, cheio de espanto. Como o poeta bem refere: " and suddenly it's evening..."
--

"...you, too, are word to me and sorrow."

"and I hide in the forgotten things."

"In vain you search among the dust, poor hand, the city is dead."

[Lina AL Ojaili · Rating 3 out of 5]

لايعتمد ع مدرسة الهرمسية كثيرا فقد غلب عليه شعور المنفى والحنين الى الوطن

قاس هو المنفى
وبحثي عن السلام الذي انتهى بي إليك

تحوّلَ اليومَ إلى رغبةٍ في الموتِ مبكرة.

كلُّ حبّ وقاءٌ من الحزن.

خطوةٌ خرساء في الظلام

حيث الخبزة المرّة التي تركت

من أجلي.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I began reading Quasimodo's poems, I frequently thought of the rules we give young writers as they try their hand in poetry: Describe things so the reader experiences them vividly, and perhaps in a new way; emphasize the sensory over the intellectual; strive for universal truths. Quasimodo turns his back on rules like these, and so my question is, what makes it okay for him to do so? Wouldn't his poems be graded down for being too muddled, too vague?

The volume doesn't start with his poems, though. His essay, "Discourse on Poetry," is the introduction, and it plunges into a philosophical examination of the way Italian poetry evolved after World War II. Needless to say, my early impressions of this essay and these poems were rather disengaged, rather disaffected.

I hadn't encountered the hermetic school of poets before I picked up Salvatore Quasimodo - a tacit admission that I haven't read Ungaretti and Vittorini, I suppose. And It's essential to understand the poets of this school in the context of fascist Italy, a sociopolitical climate that prompted them to turn inward and attempt to restore purity to oppressively charged language through increasingly esoteric images and structures.

The result is an aesthetic that bears a strong affinity to that of the symbolists, though I would say the symbolists wield their subjectivity more aggressively. At any rate, the first half of Quasimodo's poetic work is quite opaque, reading like the melancholic daydreams of a disenchanted man who doesn't sketch in quite enough details for the eavesdropper to follow.

But to understand Quasimodo's earlier poems as small, carefully protected sanctuaries from the fascist world outside his window - it changes them almost completely. To understand his later poems as a kind of quiet, personal expurgation of those earlier times - it gives them a purpose, a value that isn't immediately apparent otherwise.

Poetry does not exist in a vacuum. Many poems can be enjoyed and appreciated without any knowledge of the author or the author's contextual experience. But almost any work of art takes on additional dimensions, additional richness when studied in context, and poetry is no exception. So Quasimodo's exegesis on the relationship between twentieth-century Italian history and its poetry is really important to his connecting with his work.

While after 1945, his style evolves into a much more meditative, even religious voice, the quasi-religious imagery can be detected here and there in his earlier work. The poem that struck me the most, "Of Young Woman Bent Back Among the Flowers" (written in the 1930-1933 range) contains a haunting image of a mother garlanding her dead son's head with a crown of white roses. But the final line, which gives the poem its title, conveys a religious experience much more ecstatic, practically free of dogma.

There is a fine line between artwork that can't stand on its own and must be explained (I consider such work to have failed), and artwork that reveals itself more completely to an informed audience. Quasimodo definitely lands in the second category, but his work makes it clear that without a solid foundation in liberal education - the kind of liberal education that is increasingly devalued in the United States - the twenty-first century reader may not connect with him, and that is quite unfortunate.

[Moneera · Rating 5 out of 5]

"حتى حزني لم يعد كما كان
وكأني لم أعد أنا،
منسيِّ حتى مني."

[Tim Genetti · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed his poetry. Well worth a read.

[nsgna · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The new generation knows that to find man it need not [like Dante] thrust beyond into the inferno: the inferno is here" (Salvatore Quasimodo, 1952).

[māris šteinbergs · Rating 5 out of 5]

best of the best italian poetry

[Ali Nazifpour · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was interesting to read this book which follows the poems of Salvatore Quasimodo in a chronological order and see how he matured as a poet as the book went on. At the beginning his poems were simple nostalgic descriptions of places and nature, but then they become deeply complex in their feelings, dealing with grief and faith and politics. I don’t think he stops being deeply concerned with places and nature but his emotional relationship with them becomes much deeper and therefore more impactful. I was really moved by some poems in the collection. I think he definitely was a deserving winner.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

E tutto che mi nasce a gioia
dilania il tempo; un’eco appena
ne serba in voce d’alberi.

[Jacek · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are glorious poems even in translation. I'm partial to the pre-war material, in which Quasimodo shuffles the same twelve or fifteen elements into images of continually astonishing and surprising beauty.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

He puts so much weight on words, I find it a bit hard to penetrate and to accept translation. Not to say they aren't moments of limpidity and beauty or truly moving laments ... but I didn't plunge beneath the surface. That's a loaded sentence considering his affiliation with Hermetism and his Sicilian heritage, with the affinities for omerta (in a non-criminal way) and dietrologia that this implies.

I love that many of the old books of Italian poetry I've picked up - Saba, Montale, Ungaretti, Quasimodo, Compana, etc - all have the Italian on the facing page. Though my understanding is limited, I can gain some appreciation of the structure and music, how they have been resurfaced in translation.