The Joy of Shipwrecks

The collection «The Joy of Shipwrecks» (1919), with which Giuseppe Ungaretti, one of the most significant Italian poets of the 20th century, entered the «great» literature not only of Italy but of all Europe, reflects the first stage of his sixty-year creative journey. The main part of the book consists of a front-line cycle, born in the trenches and on the roads of World War I. The military trials become for the poet an inner journey, in which he seeks answers to the main questions: about God, about the meaning of the universe and human life. The psychophysical tension of a person, subject to any vicissitudes of military fate, seeks to express itself not through descriptions, not through epithets, but through intense, fragmented diction, sometimes sounding like a magical incantation. This edition is accompanied by an introductory article and comments by the translator Petr Epifanov.