 |
| Salvatore Quasimodo |
“Little happy horses
with little golden stars for bells:
stop for awhile in my hometown
We have the freshest water if you are thirsty,
We have the best hay if you are hungry.
We love stony farmhouses,
where hard hands, in clay bowls,
give us drink like children.
Your marble springs are poisoned,
and your hay bitter, just like the bread
you give as alms to the needy.”Salvatore Quasimodo: Little Evening Clouds
By Niccolò Graffio
Salvatore Quasimodo was born in the town of Modica, Sicily on August 20th, 1901. His father was a stationmaster with the railroads. His occupation caused him to relocate the family several times over the next seven years, finally settling down in Messina to help the locals recover from a devastating earthquake. By his own later admission, the horrors he witnessed as a result of the disaster would have a profound effect on his psyche.
In 1917 he founded the short-lived Nuovo giornale letterario (“New Literary Journal”), through which he published his first poems. By 1919 he had finished his education at the local technical college. During this time he prepared himself for a future as an engineer; he also made friends with Giorgio La Pira, the future mayor of the city of Florence.
He traveled to Rome to continue his engineering studies at the Polytechnic Institute there but dropped out before finishing due to poor economic conditions. While earning a living as a technical drawer, he collaborated with several reviews, as well as studied Greek and Latin.
In 1929 he was invited by his brother-in-law Elio Vittorini to Florence, where he was introduced to poets like Alessandro Bonsanti and Eugenio Montale. The following year he moved to Reggio Calabria, where he took a job with Italy’s Civil Engineering Board. He continued to write poetry on the side, getting published for the first time that same year.
In 1931 he was transferred to Imperia, then again to Sardinia, before finally winding up in Milan in 1934. In the interim he had established a prolific collaboration with Camilo Sbarbaro and others involved in Circoli magazine. His poetry at this time reflected his heavy involvement with the Hermetic movement, a modernist poetic movement that originated in Italy in the early part of the 20th century characterized by unorthodox structure, illogical sequences and highly subjective language.
In 1938 he quit his job and devoted himself full-time to writing, working with screenwriter Cesare Zavattini and for Letteratura, the official review of the Hermetic movement.
Though he never concealed his disdain for Fascism, Salvatore Quasimodo chose not to join the resistance movement against the German occupation of Italy during WW2. Instead, he undertook a translation of the Gospel of John, of some of Catullus’s cantos, and several episodes of The Odyssey of Homer. In 1945 he joined the Communist Party of Italy, but he would retain his membership for only a few years.
In 1946 he published his collection Giorno dopo giorno (“Day After Day”), which laid bare his increasing moral engagement and social criticism. This continued on with works such as La vita non è sogno ("Life Is Not a Dream"), Il falso e il vero verde ("The False and True Green") and La terra impareggiabile ("The Incomparable Land"). In the meantime he continued producing translations of Classic authors and collaborated as a journalist for some of the most prestigious Italian publications (mostly with articles about the theatre).
In the 1950s Quasimodo won the following awards: Premio San Babila (1950), Premio Etna-Taormina (1953), Premio Viareggio (1958) and, finally, the Nobel Prize for Literature (1959). In 1960 and 1967 he received honoris causa degrees from the Universities of Messina and Oxford, respectively.
Following WW2 Quasimodo’s style of poetry changed from Hermetic to what has been called post-Hermetic. The bitterness and disgust he felt over the absurdity of the war also gradually faded from his writings as he became more reflective over his life and the times he lived in.
In his later years he traveled extensively throughout Europe and America, giving public lectures and readings of his poetry, which have been translated into several languages. In fact, this writer finds it annoying there is a dearth of biographical literature in English on the life of such an accomplished Western poet!
In June, 1968 while attending a discourse in Amalfi, Italy, Salvatore Quasimodo suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. He died a few days later on June 14 at a hospital in Naples. He was buried in the Cimitero Monumentale di Milano.
Further reading:
