As The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner-Italian Poets   

 

Italian War Poetry

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Attacking Bersaglieri

Contributed by Michael E. Hanlon (medwardh@hotmail.com)

See also: The Sonnets of John Allan Wyeth German War Poetry

Contributed by Michael E. Hanlon. Mike is Website Editor for the ø The Great War Society. He has written extensively on the Great War and guided tours of the Western Front. Annotations and biographical sketches have been contributed by Michael E. Hanlon. The translations are from the PENGUIN BOOK OF WORLD WAR I POETRY edited by Jon Silkin.

EUGENIO MONTALE, 1896-1981

Nobel Prize [1975] winning critic and poet. Served in the Trentino as an infantry officer 1917-18. The poetry of the Genovese-born Montale tends to be complex, pessimistic and somewhat obscure. His works appear in many volumes of prose and poetry avaiable in English.

THRUST AND RIPOSTE [Abridged] ...The time has come, now, to suspend the suspension of every worldly deception - wished for by you for me... Living on memories - I can no longer. Better the bite of the ice than your sleepwalker's lethargy, O late awakener! Scarcely emerged from adolescence, for half my life I was thrown into the Augean stables. I did not find two thousand oxen, nor did i see any animals - ever - and yet in the pathways, thicker and thicker with dung, walking was difficult, breathing was difficult - The human bellowing grew from day to day. Then from year to year - who counted the seasons any more in that thick mist? - a hand feeling for the tiniest openings worked in its memorial...until from the crevices the fanning fire of a machine-gun pushed us back, tired shovellers caught in the act by the foreign police chiefs of the mud. And at last the fall - beyond belief! What did that new mire mean? and the breathing of other, but similar, stenches? and the whirlpool-whirling on rafts of dung? Was that the sun, that filthy grub from a sewer over the chimney pots? ...(I think that perhaps you've stopped reading me. But now you know all of me, of my prison and my life afterwards; now you know that the eagle can't be born of a mouse.)