Collected Prose

became too great to be borne, as if, in some sense, the world were no longer there for him. And when nothing was left, there could be no more words.
You were my death:
you I could hold
when all fell away from me.

(trans. by Michael Hamburger)

    1975
    * Celan makes reference to Van Gogh in several of his poems, and the kinship between the poet and painter is indeed quite strong: both began as artists in their late twenties after having lived through experiences that marked them deeply for the rest of their lives; both produced work prolifically, at a furious pace, as if depending on the work for their very survival; both underwent debilitating mental crises that led to confinement; both committed suicide, foreigners in France.
    * I am grateful to Katharine Washburn, a scrupulous reader and translator of Celan, for help in deciphering the German text of this poem and suggesting possible references.

Innocence and Memory

    From his earliest important poems, written in the trenches of the First World War, to the last poems of his old age, Giuseppe Ungaretti’s work is a long record of confrontations with death. Cryptic in utterance, narrow in rage, and built on an imagery that is drawn exclusively from the natural world, Ungaretti’s poetry nevertheless manages to avoid the predictable, and in spite of the limitations of his manner, he leaves an impression of almost boundless energy and invention. No word in Ungaretti’s work is ever used lightly — “When I find/in this my silence/a word/it is dug into my life/like an abyss” — and the strength of his poetry comes precisely from this restraint. For a man who wrote for more than fifty years, Ungaretti published remarkably little before he died in 1970, and his collected poems amount to no more than a couple of hundred pages. Like Mallarmé before him (though in ways that are very different), Ungaretti’s poetic source is silence, and in one form or another, all his work is an expression of the inexhaustible difficulty of expression itself. Reading him, one feels that he has only grudgingly allowed his words to appear on the page, that even the strongest words are in constant danger of annihilation.
    Born in 1888, Ungaretti belonged to a celebrated generation of modern writers that included Pound, Joyce, Kafka, Trakl, and Pessoa. Like theirs, his importance is measured not only by his own achievement but by its effect on the history of the literature of his language. Before Ungaretti, there was no modern Italian poetry. When his first book, Il Porto Sepolto (The Buried Port) , appeared in 1916 in an edition of eighty copies, it seemed to have dropped from the sky, to be without precedent. These short, fragmented poems, at times hardly more ample than notes or inscriptions, announced a definitive break with the late-nineteenth-century conventions that still dominated Italian poetry. The horrible realities of the war demanded a new kind of expression, and for Ungaretti, who at that time was just finishing his poetic apprenticeship, the front was a training ground that taught the futility of all compromise.
Watch
Cima Quattro, December 23, 1915

One whole night
thrust down beside
a slaughtered comrade
his snarling
mouth
turned to the full moon
the bloating
of his hands
entering
my silence
I have written
letters full of love

Never have I held
so
fast to life *

    If the brevity and hardness of his first poems seemed violent in comparison to most Italian poetry of the period, Ungaretti was no poetic rebel, and his work showed none of the spirit of self-conscious sabotage that characterized the Futurists and other avant-garde groups. His break with the past was not a renunciation of literary tradition, but a way of affirming his connection with a more distant and vital past than the one represented by his immediate predecessors. He simply cleared the ground that lay between him and what he felt to be his true sources, and like all original artists, he created his own tradition. In later years, this led him to extensive critical work, as well as translations of numerous foreign poets, including Gongora, Shakespeare, Racine, Blake, and Mallarmé.
    Ungaretti’s need to invent this poetic past for himself can perhaps be attributed to the unusual circumstances of his early life. By the twin accidents of his birthplace and the nature of his education, he was freed from many of the constraints of a pure Italian upbringing, and though he came from old Tuscan peasant stock,