Salvatore Quasimodo

Salvatore Quasimodo, was born on August 20, 1901, in Modica, a town in the south-east of Sicily, where his father was a stationmaster with the Italian railroads. Five days after his birth, his mother Clotilde, along with his newborn Salvatore and his first son Vincenzo (1899), moved to his paternal grandparents house in Roccalumera (Messina), the birthplace of the Quasimodo family.

In Roccalumera the poet spent part of his childhood and returned as an adult to see again his parents and family (after he was awarded the Nobel Prize, he returned to Roccalumera to show the coveted prize to his ninety-year-old father).

In January 1909, Quasimodo’s father was designated to reorganize the railway traffic in the Messina station struck by the disastrous earthquake and subsequent tsunami occurred on December 28, 1908. At that time they lived in a freight car parked on a siding of the station. Such desolation, with the numerous deaths and the desperation of the survivors, remained an indelible memory for him, who evoked them in the poem Al Padre (To the father), inserted in the collection La terra impareggiabile (The Incomparable land), written on the occasion of the 90 years of the father and the 50 years of the disastrous earthquake of Messina.

In 1916 he enrolled at the Mathematical-Physical Technical Institute of Palermo before moving to Messina in 1917 and continuing his studies at the "A. M. Jaci" Institute, where he graduated in 1919.During his stay in this city he met the jurist Salvatore Pugliatti and the future mayor of Florence, Giorgio La Pira, with whom he formed a friendship destined to last over the years. Along with them he founded, in 1917, the "Nuovo Giornale Letterario" (New Literary Journal), a monthly magazine in which he published his first poems. The tobacconist of an uncle of La Pira, the only retailer of the magazine, became a meeting point for young writers.

In 1919 he moved to Rome to finish his engineering studies, but poor economic conditions forced him to find a job as a technical draftsman at a construction company and, later, employed at a department store.

Meanwhile he collaborated in some periodicals and began the study of Greek and Latin. The precarious economic conditions of this period in Rome ended in 1926, when he was hired by the Ministry of Public Works and assigned, as a surveyor, to the Civil Engineering Department of Reggio Calabria.

Here he became a friend with the brothers Enzo Misefari and Bruno Misefari, both exponents (the first communist, the second anarchist) of the anti-fascist movement in Reggio Calabria.In the same year he married Bice Donetti, 8 years older, with whom he had previously lived and to whom he dedicated a poem, after his death, in 1946:

«Con gli occhi alla pioggia e agli elfi della notte,
è là, nel campo quindici a Musocco,
la donna emiliana da me amata
nel tempo triste della giovinezza …»
(With eyes on the rain and the night elves,
is there, in field fifteen at Musocco,
the Emilian woman I loved
in the sad time of youth …)

(Salvatore Quasimodo, Epitaph to Bice Donetti)

Once the economic problems were solved, he could dedicate himself more assiduously to the literary work. He was invited to Florence by the writer Elio Vittorini, his brother-in-law, who introduced him to literary circles. Among others he met Eugenio Montale (an Italian journalist, poet and writer, who would have won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975) and Alessandro Bonsanti, the editor of the magazine “Solaria”, which, in 1930, published his first poems. In that period, he matured and refined the taste for the hermetic style, beginning to give consistency to his first collection Acque e terre (Waters and lands) that, the same year, he published for the Solaria editions. To this collection belongs Vicolo (alley) in which the author describes with nostalgia the modican places so dear to him.

Vicolo: una croce di case
Che si chiamano piano,
e non sanno ch’ è paura
di restare sole nel buio.
(Alley : a cross of houses
calling out low to each other,
never knowing it is fear
of being alone in the dark.)

In 1931 he was transferred to the Civil Engineering Department of Imperia, later to that of Genoa. In this city he knew leading personalities who gravitate around the magazine Circoli, with which the poet began a fruitful collaboration by publishing, in 1932, his second collection "Oboe sommerso" (Sunken oboe) in which all the poems written between 1931 and 1932 are collected and where his adherence to hermeticism begins to emerge more clearly.

In 1934 Quasimodo was assigned to duty in Milan. There, in 1938,he left his job to devote himself to literature and became editor of the weekly “Tempo” until he was named in 1941 professor of Italian literature at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory of Music, role he held until the end of 1968. With the final collection Ed è subito sera (1942) (And Suddenly It’s Evening), his Hermetic period came to a close.

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.”
and suddenly it’s evening

(Everyone is alone on the heart of the earth Pierced by a ray of sun : and suddenly it’s evening)

During the 1930’s Quasimodo was a leader of the “Hermetic” school of poetry; however, with the appearance of his translations Lirici Greci, it was obvious that his direction was no longer entirely along the lines of that group. In Nuove Poesie (New Poems), 1942, Quasimodo reveals both the influence of classical stylistics and a greater understanding of life in general. His following translations, which range from the Greek and Latin poets to Shakespeare and Molière and twentieth-century writers reflect his full appreciation of the original works as well as his modern taste and sensibility.

Though an outspoken anti-Fascist, during World War II Quasimodo did not take part in the Italian resistance against the German occupation.

In 1946 he published another collection, Giorno dopo giorno ("Day After Day"), which made clear the increasing moral engagement and the epic tone of the social criticism of the author. The same theme characterized his next works, La terra impareggiabile ("The Incomparable Land") and alle fronde dei salici (“to the branches of willows”) in which he condemns the atrocities of the war. In all this period Quasimodo did not stop producing translations of classic authors and collaborating as a journalist for some of the most prestigious Italian publications (mostly with articles about the theatre).

In the 1950s Quasimodo won the following literary awards: Premio San Babila (1950), Premio Etna- Taormina (1953), Premio Viareggio (1958) and, finally, the Nobel Prize for Literature (1959) “For his lyrical poetry, which with ardent classicism expresses the tragic experiences of the life of our times" that made him reach a definitive fame.

It was followed by honoris causa degrees from the University of Messina in 1960 and that of Oxford in 1967.

In his last years the poet made numerous voyages to Europe and America, giving public speeches and public lectures of his poems, which had been translated into several foreign languages.

On June 14, 1968, while the poet was in Amalfi, where he was to preside over a poetry award, he was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage (he had already had a heart attack while visiting the Soviet Union), which led him to death a few hours later: the poet's heart stopped beating on the car that was carrying him to the hospital in Naples.

His body was taken to Milan and buried in the Monumental Cemetery, a place that already housed the remains of Alessandro Manzoni.