“[The rivers] is the very moment in which my poetry and I become truly self-aware: my poetic experience is the exploration of a personal continent of hell*, and the poetic act, once fulfilled, provokes and liberates, whatever the cost, the idea that only in poetry can one seek and find freedom.”  Giuseppe Ungaretti in a note on “I fiumi” and his poetic experience. (* war)

This poem is from the collection “Allegria” in Vita di un uomo, 1931.

The theme is war, of course, but also nature and its role in the poet’s life. In the first stanza, Ungaretti sets the stage. The tree is “mutilated”; the poet is “abandoned in this sinkhole” (sinkholes, like other natural depressions were used for defensive positions), which “possesses the languor/ of a circus/ before and after the show”, that is, between one bombing and another.  In the next three stanzas, religious images come to mind: the poet lies down in the water, in an “urn”, like a “relic” (symbolizing the holiness of saints, links to the divine and the belief in rebirth); he sets off “like an acrobat/ on the water” (and although acrobat may hint at the skipping of the poet over the stones in the river, the image calls to my mind the Christ walking on water – divine power over chaos, faith overcoming impossible circumstances); near his soiled clothes, he bows “like a Bedouin” “to receive/ the sun” (and the rituals of Islam and prayer are clear).  The poem then returns fully to the rivers of the poet’s life, the rivers through which the poet traces his past, rivers that give life, that like over stones, smoothes ones faults, whose “hands”, by enveloping him, make him one with nature. They are the Isonzo, Serchio, Nile and Seine rivers. The Serchio (in the province of Lucca) represents his origins, the place of his ancestors and parents before they immigrated to Egypt (his father worked on the Suez Canal); the Nile represents his childhood (he was born in Egypt); the Seine is the city in which the poet studied; the Isonzo represents the present, which, although there is a war going on, he finds himself in harmony with nature. Of the poem, I especially like the sixth and the last stanzas: in the first he realises his smallness with respect to the universe (not a grain of sand as per Galileo, but a docile fibre), but he is, nevertheless, a part of that universe; in the latter the poet expresses that his life seems to him marvellous and enigmatic, shades of dark and light, like a corolla..

I hope the poem is as clear in English as it is in Italian. I would just like to explain my choice of “bare bones”* for “quattro ossa”. Quattro ossa in Italian, as with many other sayings using “quattro” is not necessarily the number but often the idea of worthlessness (da quattro soldi, for example, means cheap). “Bare bones” means basic, essential, and too little or just not enough. I found it fitting. In both cases, “quattro ossa” and “bare bones”, the poetic device (synecdoche) defines the whole: his lowly body. Other poetic devices include: metaphor (the rivers represent the different stages of Ungaretti’s life); simile (for example, Ungaretti compares himself to a ‘relic’, evoking, as already stated, an image of sacredness and preservation of his identity); personification (the Isonzo plays an active role, as if it were capable of purifying the poet’s soul; alliteration; enjambement, which creates a continuous flow of thoughts and images; repetition (the term “rivers” is repeated often, emphasizing its centrality). -M.C.

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