Among the Italian texts Elliott Carter sets for his new song cycle Tempo e Tempi are works by Giuseppe Ungaretti.  Sospeso performs these songs on Thursday, January 22, 2004 with soprano Lucy Shelton.

Giuseppe Ungaretti, one of the great Italian poets of the century, was born in 1888 in Alexandria, Egypt. Ungaretti spent his youth in North Africa, where he was greatly influenced by nomadic culture. In Paris, where he studied, he formed friendships with members of the literary and artistic avant-garde. His service in the Italian infantry during World War I provided the background for his first mature poems, written in the trenches, which deal with love and the precariousness of life.

Ungaretti’s style had already achieved a remarkable purity by condensing his poetic expression to its essentials. Working in the tradition of the French symbolists, he stressed the musical properties of the individual word and the illuminating power of a single striking image. Ungaretti’s poetry was spare and intense; he employed unconventional syntax and eschewed the elaborate rhetorical structures. Because of the allusive yet self-contained quality of his verse, the movement that he inaugurated in poetry was named Hermeticism.

The poems in Sentimento del tempo (1933) and Il dolore (1947) mark a return to the traditional meters of Italian poetry. Ungaretti also wrote essays and translated the works of Shakespeare, Racine, and others. He taught at the University of São Paolo in Brazil before accepting a chair at the University of Rome (1942). His works are collected in twelve volumes under the title Vita d’un uomo (tr. Life of a Man, 1969 and 1974). A good English translation of his poetry is Allen Mandelbaum’s Selected Poems (tr. 1975). Ungaretti died in 1970.