tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9139185550151027390.post6973225494907818708..comments2024-01-31T01:39:02.006-08:00Comments on Vanitas Magazine: TC: Giuseppe Ungaretti: A Red Dress (12 September 1966)VANITAShttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10486783210928118377noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9139185550151027390.post-35552873194506197712013-05-21T14:14:26.303-07:002013-05-21T14:14:26.303-07:00Poor devil! He might have touched her knee. In a...Poor devil! He might have touched her knee. In any event, a terrific poem. I love the translation, particularly:<br /><br />"...I had already known<br />Long ago that, in suffering<br />With reckless faith for love,<br />Age counts as nothing."<br /><br />But it is all amazing. And your combination of it with the images of ES is mind-boggling. How hot is that?VANITAShttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10486783210928118377noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9139185550151027390.post-35036738760926289352013-01-16T08:07:46.084-08:002013-01-16T08:07:46.084-08:00This poem comes from a collaboration with the youn...This poem comes from a collaboration with the young Brazilian poet Bruna Bianco: Ungaretti's nine love poems are his part of the "dialogue", counterposed with Bianco's five "response" poems.<br /><br />In his late seventies, in October 1966, while on a trip to Sao Paolo to receive an honorary degree, Ungaretti attended a poetry conference, where he met and fell in love with one of the other poets at the conference, Bianco, a twenty-six-year old Italian-born law student from a Croatian family.<br /><br />He rediscovered in her, as he would tell her in a letter, mio vivente amore di Poesia.<br /><br />He returned twice to Brazil and over the next few years exchanged hundreds of letters and many poems with her. She visited him in Italy, and asked him to return with her to Brazil to live. He declined.<br /><br />("He never even touched my knee," Bianco, who would carry on with a law career in Sao Paulo, marry and have three children, would later testify.)<br /><br />Dialogo was issued hors du commerce in an edition of eighty copies on the occasion of Ungaretti's 80th birthday.<br /><br />The story of the late-blooming love poems of the aged widower (Ungaretti's wife of thirty-eight years, Jeanne Dupoix, had died in 1958) took a further turn in 1996 with the publication of an article by Sebastian Grasso in Corriere delle Sera, revealing evidence that after a five-year "dry spell" in which the poet had written nothing, his renascent emotions had sparked poems which, in the process of composition, had drawn freely upon poems by other poets: Eliot, Quasimodo, Hikmet and, in particular, James Joyce's Pomes Pennyeach, from Chamber Music.<br /><br />Before his death Ungaretti himself had quietly admitted that both the love affair and the poems had been desperate -- and doomed -- attempts to resist the inevitable. In 1969 he told his correspondent that his love for her still burned, but now only from "beneath the ashes".<br /><br />His private secretary of that time later recalled that after getting back from the first trip to Brazil, he had thrown away his cane and appeared elated, "rejuvenated".TChttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05915822857461178942noreply@blogger.com