Poetry
The Buried Harbour
Il Porto Sepolto
Giuseppe Ungaretti · 1916
Synopsis
Thirty-three poems written at the front, in the trenches of the Great War, each dated and located like a note taken on the spot. The poet, a simple infantry soldier, speaks of the war at its closest, in brief, hard images written between two battles. The language is stripped to the extreme: no rhyme, no punctuation, no traditional form, sometimes a single word to a line.
Context
The collection was printed in Udine in December 1916, in only eighty copies, thanks to an officer, Lieutenant Ettore Serra. The poems were written from December 1915 to September 1916, then included in 1919 in a larger collection; a 1923 reissue appeared with a preface by Mussolini. In French, these poems appear under the title “Le Port enseveli” in “Vie d'un homme”, published by Gallimard; in English, Kevin Hart published a selection of them in 1990 under the title “The Buried Harbour”.
Who it is for
Very short poems, to be read in one go; the dates and places that accompany them are part of the text.
Prizes and reception
According to the Britannica, the collection heralds hermeticism and left its mark on the Italian poetry that followed.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.