Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Paschal Moon: like a relic


The most common picture that comes to mind when we hear “First World War” is probably trenches snaking across Belgium and Northern France. We may have some vague notion of activities on the Eastern Front, or along the Dardanelles—or even Jerusalem and Damascus. But the war along the Italian Alps almost never makes the headlines (unless you’re a Hemingway fan).

And yet the Isonzo River was the scene of no fewer than twelve distinct, ghastly battles. Historian Mark Thompson sets the stage: “Imagine the flat or gently rolling horizon of Flanders tilting at 30 or 40 degrees, made of grey limestone that turns blinding white in summer.” And imagine the futility of launching attack after attack against entrenched fortifications across the seasons in that terrain.

From December 1915, Giuseppe Ungaretti served in the Brescia Brigade along the Isonzo—in his late 20s, he’d already absorbed the cultures of Egypt (where he was born to immigrants from Tuscany), Paris (where he went to study, and was influenced by Rimbaud, Apollinaire and other modernists) and Turin (where he’d trained to be a teacher). His poems are distilled down to the bare essence of his observations and experiences.

In today’s National Poetry Month entry, Ungaretti frames the confluence of the flow of his life in terms of the rivers symbolic of his experiences, converging on the Isonzo, which polishes him like a stone. It was written in August, 1916.

“Rivers”

I cling to this mangled tree
Left to lie in the crevasse
That has all the indolence
Of a circus
Before or after the show
And I watch
The tranquil passing
Of clouds across the moon.
This morning
I stretched out
In an urn of water
And like a relic
Rested.

The Isonzo rushing
Polished me
As one of its stones.

I pulled
My bones together
And off I went
On the water
Like an acrobat.

I squatted down
Beside my clothes
Filthy with war and like a Bedouin
I bowed to receive
The sun
This is the Isonzo
And here I best
Acknowledged myself
A pliant fiber
In the Universe.

My torment
Comes when
I think myself
Out of harmony. But those hidden Hands
That immerse me
Give me freely
An uncommon
Happiness.
I have gone
Through the stages
Of my life

These are my rivers.

This is the Serchio
From which perhaps two thousand
Years of my own country folk
And my father and my mother
Have drawn their water

This is the Nile
That saw me born
And saw me grow
In unawareness
On the expansive plains.

This is the Seine
And in its swirl I mingled
And I came to know myself

These are my rivers
Tallied in the Isonzo.

This is my nostalgia
That in each of them
It comes to me
Now that night has fallen
That my life to me seems
A flower
Of shadows.




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