AUTHOR'S NOTE:

After spending a couple of years among the great young modernists in Paris, Ungaretti went to war. This poem, written in the trenches about 90 miles east of Paris, appeared in his pioneering 1919 collection, Alegria di naufragi (Joy of shipwrecks).

BIO:

Giuseppe Ungaretti is a well-known 20th-century Italian modernist. Geoffrey Brock is the author of Weighing Light, the translator of Cesare Pavese's Disaffections, and the editor of the forthcoming FSG Book of 20th-Century Italian Poetry. Currently a Howard Foundation Fellow, he teaches in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.