Collected Prose

banish me from death?

Perhaps man is unworthy even of hope.

Dry, too, the fountain of remorse?

What matters sin
If it no longer leads to purity?

The flesh can scarcely remember
That once it was strong.

Worn out and wild — the soul.

God, look upon our weakness.

We want a certainty.

    Not satisfied to remain on safe ground, without the comfort of a “certainty,” he continually goads himself to the edge of the abyss, threatening himself with the image of his own extinction. But rather than inducing him to succumb to despair, these acts of metaphysical risk seem to be the source of an enduring strength. In poems such as “The Premeditated Death,” a sequence that serves as the hub to the whole of Sentimento del Tempo , and nearly all the poems in his following collection, Il Dolore (The Grief) (1936–47) — most notably the powerful poem written on the death of his young son, “You Shattered” — Ungaretti’s determination to situate himself at the extremes of his own consciousness is paradoxically what allows him to cure himself of the fear of these limits.
    By the force and precision of his meditative insight, Ungaretti manages to transcend what in a lesser poet would amount to little more than an inventory of private griefs and fears: the poems stand as objects beyond the self for the very reason that the self within them is not treated as an example of all selves or the self in general. At all times one feels the presence of the man himself in the work. As Allen Mandelbaum notes in the preface to his translations: “Ungaretti’s I is grave and slow, intensive rather than far-ranging; and his longing gains its drama precisely because that I is not a random center of desperations, but a soma bound by weight, by earthly measure, a hard, resisting, substantial object, not wished but willed, not dreamt-upon but ‘excavated’.”
    In the poems of his later years, Ungaretti’s work comes to an astonishing culmination in the single image of the promised land. It is the promised land of both Aeneas and the Bible, of both Rome and the desert, and the personal and historical overtones of these final major poems — “Canzone,” “Choruses Describing the States of Mind of Dido,” “Recitative of Palinurus,” and “Final Choruses for the Promised Land,” — refer back to all of Ungaretti’s previous work, as if to give it its final meaning. The return to a Virgilian setting represents a kind of poetic homecoming for him at the end of his career, just as the desert revives the landscape of his youth, only to leave him in a last and permanent exile:
We cross the desert with remnants
Of some earlier image in mind,

That is all a living man
Knows of the promised land.

    Written between 1952 and 1960, the “Final Choruses” were published in Il Taccuino del Vecchio (The Old Man’s Notebook) , and they reformulate all the essential themes of his work. Ungaretti’s universe remains the same, and in a language that differs very little from that of his earliest poems, he prepares himself for his death — his real death, the last death possible for him:
The kite hawk grips me in his azure talons
And, at the apex of the sun,
Lets me fall on the sand
As food for ravens.

I shall no longer bear mud on my shoulders,
The fire will find me clean,
The cackling beaks
The stinking jaws of jackals.

Then as he searches with his stick
Through the sand, the bedouin
Will point out
A white, white bone.

    1976
    * All quotations are translated by Allen Mandelbaum and appear in his S elected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti , published by Cornell University Press in 1975.

Book of the Dead

    During the past few years, no French writer has received more serious critical attention and praise than Edmond Jabès. Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean Starobinski have all written extensively and enthusiastically about his work, and Jacques Derrida has remarked, flatly and without self-consciousness, that “in the last ten years nothing has been written in France that does not have its precedent somewhere in the texts of Jabès.” Beginning with the first volume of Le Livre des Questions , which was published in 1963, and continuing on through the other volumes in the series, * Jabès has created a new and mysterious kind of literary work — as dazzling as it is difficult to define. Neither novel nor poem, neither essay nor play, The Book of Questions is a combination of all these forms, a mosaic of fragments,