Nicely Combed 
Matthew Reynolds
- Selected Poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated by Andrew Frisardi
In Italy you can buy poetry T-shirts featuring lines by Dante, Leopardi and others. The Ungaretti shirt is good value: it gives you a whole work, though not a very long one. ‘Mattina’ (‘Morning’) reads in its entirety as follows:
M’illumino
d’immenso
In books, those words are tethered to a particular location, Santa Maria la Longa, 26 January 1917; but there is a rightness about their transplantation to innumerable present-day torsos. The genius of the poem is in the way it laminates the unique and the general; the way it recognises that while being illuminated with immensity may feel like a miracle to a soldier who has lived through a night – or night after night – in the trenches, it is to most people at most times just the start of another day.
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Matthew Reynolds’s last book was The Realms of Verse; he is now reading a lot of literary translations.
Other articles by this contributor:
Most Himself · Dryden
Jamming up the Flax Machine · Ciaran Carson’s Dante
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