Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1972)

Among the Nobel literature prizewinners most of us have never heard of, the Italian poet Salvatore Quasimodo, the 1959 laureate, must count as the one with the most memorable name. Not that that is in any way relevant to his achievement, but it does leave you wondering when you first see it whether it could be some kind of convenient made-up name for those years when the members of the awards committee can’t decide on a winner and decide to share the prize money between themselves instead.

Quasimodo was born in Sicily, the son of a railway worker, in 1901. As a small child, he experienced the aftermath of the terrible 1908 Messina earthquake: as he describes in a late poem dedicated to his father, the family lived in a freight car in the ruins of the station whilst his father helped to keep the trains moving.

As a young man, he worked as a surveyor in various parts of Italy: many of his early poems are semi-nostalgic evocations of the Sicilian landscape as recalled from exile in the north. They are often extremely beautiful lyrics, but very much in the style of that time, inward-looking and static. This all changes with the poems published after the end of World War II (but often written earlier), when Quasimodo starts to engage with the horrors of that part of Italian and European history. It seems likely that those poems were the ones that caught the mood of the times and the attention of the Nobel committee. And the very tangible anger, grief and sympathy expressed there still have a pretty powerful impact even now. There’s also some very appealing stuff in his later poems, particularly “Al padre” where he remembers his father, and “Nell’Isola”, where he imagines a craftsman building a house in Sicily.

This short Dutch anthology, with about seventy poems from across Quasimodo’s whole career, was probably a sufficient dose to get a good impression of what he was about. The parallel translations are rather plain and literal, but they stick closely to the structure of the Italian text and are thus very useful if you’re trying to make sense of the Italian. The introduction, summarising Quasimodo’s life and work in about 20 pages, is also very handy.… (more)

I'm not much of a poetry reader. When a friend from abroad sent the book to me, I felt a twinge of dread. So few thin threads hold us together, if this one broke, we might just float apart. My friend mentioned Quasimodo's connection to Pablo Neruda, a poet for whom I sometimes jealously wish his poems were more difficult on the surface so that silly people wouldn’t be given to quoting him in greeting cards.
But what an intense and beautiful book! The poems are both concrete and mysterious; I let the images play over and over so the meaning could emerge directly from them or, as in haiku, from the tension between them. There is a feminine sensuality in the way the meaning slowly, slowly erupts. In some poems the intense pain of loss is right there in the images, so that it does not need to be said at all. Here is a man who knows that green is not an innocent color but something almost horribly alive from death, the way buds burst so violently, the way grass comes up over corpses. Here is a man with courage to suffer and to despise pathos.… (more)