Salvatore Quasimodo, the intellectual of the Word… to reawaken moral conscience and the truth of language.
More relevant than ever! Poet, writer, journalist, politician, translator, teacher, in a word, INTELLECTUAL of his time and far beyond, to infinity and beyond, as the Nobel Prize recognized in 1959.
Linked to the Hermetic literature of the 1930s, between 1943 and 1956, his work was permeated by neorealist culture, and his poetic production, as well as his use of the Word, remained faithful to the concept of poetry as a synthesis of personal and historical contradictions.
There is no doubt that his adherence to the Hermetic movement allowed him, in the early phase of his work, to deliver an INTENSE WORD FULL OF MEANING: Quasimodo’s peculiarity lies in his use of the WORD CONTEXTUALIZED to the point of becoming harmony and enchantment.
Especially after 1943, with the collection “Giorno dopo giorno” (Day after day), we note his constant effort to use classical language, inspired by the models of the Latin classics and Greek lyric poets, of whom he is an excellent and sublime translator.
His words are never expressively extreme, irreverent, crude, or essential as in Montale, for example.
In his poems, there is a search for a calm tone that moves away from historically determined and predefined models to create a poetic language loaded with themes of the historical moment, such as war, the painful condition of his contemporaries, and also, very dear to him, the themes of nature and the earth together with the theme of absence, according to a Word declined in verses full of suggestion and clear reality.
If the literary current of Hermeticism is disruptive, the use of the Word and verse is completely renewed: with Quasimodo, we can speak of INNOVATION in the use of words, as reported by literary critics during the first bibliotherapy conference in June 2022 in Rome, organized and promoted by the Center for Books and Reading (CEPELL).
His poetry, far from Ungaretti’s verse and Montale’s essentiality of the word, becomes STORY, NARRATIVE, DIALOGUE.
And it is in that dialogue that the Word is transformed into poetry, rising to that intrinsic thaumaturgical power, to communicate
to humanity that rebirth and renewal are infinitely possible.
It is the blossoming of a better humanity, one with identity and not alienated by the whirlwind of social rhythms in which the immediate, absolutely labeling, and judgmental Word gives way to the mediated, thoughtful, and contextualized Word.
In today’s performance-oriented society, rereading Quasimodo means being, with respect for mutual differences and individual choices, a humanity of value and rediscovered values, such as the sacred value of the Word.
–
You can still hear the sea-
[Salvatore Quasimodo, Giorno dopo giorno, Milan, Mondadori 1947]“For several nights now, you can still hear the sea, softly, up and down, along the smooth sands.
An echo of a voice locked in the mind that rises from time; and also this constant lament of seagulls: perhaps
birds from the towers, which April drives towards the plain.
You were already close to me with that voice;
and I would like you too to have, now, an echo of memory of me, like that dark murmur of the sea.”
