Allegria

Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) was born in Alexandria to Italian settlers--his father was a laborer working on the Suez Canal and his mother ran a bakery. Ungaretti left for Paris to study at the Sorbonne, where he befriended Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul Valéry, Picasso, Braque, and Léger. Ungaretti wrote his first book of poetry while serving in the Italian Army in World War I. From 1936 until 1942, he taught Italian literature at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. After the death of his nine-year-old son, Ungaretti published a collection of poems, Il dalore, which expressed both tragic personal loss and horror at the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Ungaretti translated Shakespeare, William Blake, and Racine into Italian, among others. He died in Milan in 1970. About the translator: Geoffrey Brock was born in Atlanta and holds an MFA from the University of Florida and a PhD from UPenn. He has won multiple prizes for his original poetry, including the New Criterion Poetry Prize. For his translations, which include work by Cesare Pavese and Umberto Eco, Brock has won Poetry magazine's John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the MLA's Lois Roth Translation Award, and the PEN Center USA award for translation.