Giuseppe Ungaretti

Italian poet. Born in Alexandria, Egypt. His father worked on the construction of the Suez Canal, but died in an accident when Ungaretti was two years old. Since then, he was raised by his mother, who ran a grocery store, and a black wet nurse. Black milk, the desert, the Nile, and the Mediterranean Sea. The light, shadow, and sense of infinity that intertwine there made him grow into a cosmopolitan poet. He received a Swiss-style French education until high school, but at the age of 24, he crossed the sea for the first time and visited the Tuscany region of Italy, where his parents were born, and was deeply impressed by the culture of his home country. He then went to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne. The suicide of his childhood friend Mohammed Sheab, who was also born in Egypt and studied in Paris, cast a dark shadow over Ungaretti's poetry as a young man. During World War I, he served as an Italian soldier on the front against Austria. The short poems he wrote down in his notebook in the trenches under the gunfire turned into pure poetry free from all pretense, and bore fruit in his first collection of poems, "The Buried Port" (1916). His artistic exchanges with poets such as Apollinaire, Breton, Soupault, and Tzara, with whom he had close acquaintances before and after the war, as well as with painters such as Modigliani, Utrillo, and de Chirico, and with his lifelong ally Paulhan, were transferred to the Italian poetry world together with Ungaretti, and he revolutionized Italian contemporary poetry, which had been bound by traditional rhetoric. In 1936, he was invited to become a professor of Italian literature at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, and in 1942 he became a professor of modern literature at the University of Rome. In 1959, he visited Japan accompanied by the French painter Fautrier and the literary critic Paulhan, and gave lectures. His poetry collections, subtitled "The Life of a Man," such as "Joy" (1919), "The Sense of Time" (1933), "The Promised Land" (1950), and "Cries and Landscapes" (1959), became milestones in the mainstream of Italian contemporary poetry, the Hermetismo movement. His prose collections include "After the Desert" (1961) and "Innocence and Remembrance" (1969), both in French.

[Hideaki Kawashima]

Source: Shogakukan Encyclopedia Nipponica About Encyclopedia Nipponica Information | Legend

イタリアの詩人。エジプトのアレクサンドリアで生まれる。父親はスエズ運河の工事に携わっていたが、彼が2歳のときに事故死した。以来、食料品店を経営する母親と黒人の乳母に育てられた。黒い乳と、砂漠と、ナイル川と、地中海。そこに交錯する光と影と無限の感覚とが、彼をコスモポリタンの詩人に成長させた。高校まではスイス系のフランス語教育を受けたが、24歳のとき初めて海を渡り、両親の出身地であるイタリアのトスカナ地方を訪れ、故国の文化に強く打たれた。ついでパリに赴き、ソルボンヌで学んだ。同じくエジプトに生まれてパリに学んだ、幼いころからの親友モハメッド・シェアブの自殺は、青年時代のウンガレッティの詩に濃い影を落としている。第一次世界大戦には、イタリアの一兵卒として、対オーストリア戦線に参加、砲弾の飛び交う塹壕(ざんごう)の中で手帳に書き留めた短詩が、いっさいの虚飾をふるい落とした純粋詩となって、処女詩集『埋もれた港』（1916）に結実した。大戦前後に親しく交わったアポリネール、ブルトン、スーポー、ツァラなどの詩人たち、あるいはモディリアニ、ユトリロ、デ・キリコなどの画家たち、あるいはまた終生の盟友ポーランたちとの芸術的交流は、ウンガレッティとともにイタリアの詩壇に移されて、旧来の修辞法に縛られていたイタリア現代詩を革新した。1936年にはブラジルのサンパウロ大学にイタリア文学教授として招かれ、42年にはローマ大学の近現代文学教授となった。59年、フランスの画家フォートリエと文芸評論家ポーランを伴って来日し、講演などを行った。「ある男の生涯」という副題を冠せられた詩集『喜悦』（1919）、『時間の感覚』（1933）、『約束の地』（1950）、『叫び声と風景』（1959）などは、イタリア現代詩の主流エルメティズモ（錬金術主義）の里程標となった。散文集に『砂漠以後』（1961）やフランス語による『無垢(むく)と追憶』（1969）などがある。

［河島英昭］

出典　小学館　日本大百科全書(ニッポニカ)日本大百科全書(ニッポニカ)について　情報 | 凡例