Complete Poems [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Salvatore Quasimodo was born in Sicily at Syracuse in 1901, the son of a station-master. His early days were spent in eastern Sicily, at Roccalimera, Gela, Acquaviva, Trabia and Messina. There, at the time of the earthquake, at the age of seven, he absorbed the images of death and disaster, and witnessed the shooting of thieves "caught in the rubble and executed in the dark / by firing squads from the landing pardes." At Palermo he began his studies as an engineer, and in the land of myth, sulphur and salt-mines, of peasant women in black, waters and Greek remains, the recurring themes of his later poetry were born - death, silence and solitude. They recur, as Carlo Bernari* has pointed out, in 84 of his 173 lyric poems. One could add to these the prevailing sense of deprivation and exile, the result of his "rupture" from "the incomparable earth" of the south. By the end of the First World War, having completed his intermediate studies, he left Sicily to study for an engineering degree at the Rome Polytechnic. Circumstances forced him to suspend his studies and take various jobs in order to live. He was employed as a technical designer, then as a shop assistant in a hardware store. During this period of casual employment, in 1921, he began to study Greek and to read Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Plato, St Augustine and Spinoza, all strong influences on his later development as a poet. In 1926 he returned to the south as an employee in the Ministry of Public Works at Reggio Calabria, having qualified as a surveyor. There, in company with old friends from Messina, every Sunday for the next three years he read, talked and wrote poetry. These were years of inspired apprenticeship. The group numbered among them Pugliatti, Natoli, Anto, La Pira, Saggio and Patd. The Sunday gatherings included trips to Tindari, * Quasimodo between Eros and Thanatos, Ma.t:otta., 1969.