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Quasimodo 1901 - 1968 (67)

Everyone stands alone at the heart of the world, pierced by a ray of sunlight, and suddenly it’s evening”


QUOTES



The Sea Still

Sounds

“War, I have always said, forces men to change their standards, regardless of whether their country has won or lost. Poetics and philosophies disintegrate "when the trees fall and the walls collapse ". At the point when continuity was interrupted by the first nuclear explosion, it would have been too easy to recover the formal sediment which linked us with an age of poetic decorum, of a preoccupation with poetic sounds. After the turbulence of death, moral principles and even religious proofs are called into question. Men of letters who cling to the private successes of their petty aesthetics shut themselves off from poetry's restless presence. From the night, his solitude, the poet finds day and starts a diary that is lethal to the inert. The dark landscape yields a dialogue. The politician and the mediocre poets with their armour of symbols and mystic purities pretend to ignore the real poet. It is a story which repeats itself like the cock's crow; indeed, like the cock's third crow.”(Salvatore Quasimodo)

Salvatore Quasimodo (August 20, 1901 - June 14, 1968) was an Italian novelist, journalist, and poet, one of the most prominent figures in 20th-century Italian poetry. Born in Syracuse, Sicily, his mother was Greek (Rosa Papandreou), his father an Italian railway official. He began technical studies at the University of Rome, but did not complete them. From Rome he went to Milan where he worked as a journalist and later as a teacher of Italian literature.

He lived in many Italian cities and met the greatest Italian writers of the time. Although he wrote his first poems at a young age (in 1917), he began to publishe them much later (in 1930). He worked on translations of great English and Spanish poets such as Shakespeare and Neruda as well as Greek poetry collections. In 1945 he became a member of the Italian Communist Party.

His poetry in its first period, has lyrical tones and nostalgic memories from Sicily of his childhood, as well as the classical antiquity, Greek and Roman. After the traumatic experience of the war, Quasimondo's poetry acquires a dramatic character and is enriched with references to the social and political struggles of the post-war era to end, in his later work, as a poetry of a deeper existential search. In 1959 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. He died in 1968 in Amalfi, of a cerebral hemorrhage.