by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Giuseppe Ungaretti was born February 8, 1888, in Alexandria, Egypt, of Italian immigrant parents. Surprisingly, in light of his future role as founder of modern Italian poetry, he was educated in French and did not travel to his parents’ homeland until 1912, when he passed through on his way to Paris to study. In Paris he attended lectures by the French philosopher Henri Bergson and met the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, the French poet Max Jacob, and Italy’s Futurist writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Artist-critic Ardengo Soffici invited Ungaretti to contribute to the new journal Lacerba, in which his first poems were published in 1915. Ungaretti returned to Italy at the onset of World War I, serving as a soldier on the Carso plateau from 1915 to 1918 and composing 33 poems that became the core of his first collection The Joy of Shipwrecks (partially published...