When I read a “hermetic” poet like Ungaretti, I often get the sense that his language has been pared by doubt, as if he felt that breaking the semantic threads of grammar would clear the way for a renewed sense of meaning in his doubting heart and mind. Or maybe his stitched-together fragments represent vestiges of faith or confidence in life's meaningfulness. Either way, it is an effort, and we feel the strain of it, of a religious sensibility to construct a cloister of language in a secular age.

Allegria di Naufragi (Joy of Shipwrecks, 1919), Ungaretti's first full-length collection, established his reputation overnight as one of the leading Italian poets of his generation. Ungaretti's poetry was as new, strange, and, for many Italian readers, exciting, as “Prufrock” or “Mauberley” were to American and English readers of that period. As Eugenio Montale would say years later, the innovators of modernist poetry in Italy set out to “wring the neck of the old aulic eloquence”—namely, and immediately before them, the romanticism of Carducci, the sentimental decadence of Pascoli, and the bombastic decadence of D'Annunzio. At the start of the 1910s, the Crepuscular poets—most famously, Corredo Govoni, Sergio Corazzini, Guido Gozzano, and Marino Moretti—came out with their Laforgue-influenced, ironic, subdued style, consciously breaking with the past augustness of the formidable Italian patrimony. Their lexicon was that of everyday speech, their tone self-effacing, and their syntax linear and free of inversions. The landscapes in their poetry were no longer the grandiose ones of Carducci or D'Annunzio, but rather, enclosed gardens and other domesticated spaces. Gozzano introduced modern neologisms into his poems: fotografia, dagherròtipo, and so on, as well as foreign words. The meter and rhyme schemes of the Crepusculars were less regular than Italian poets formerly had employed, and so their work was an important stage in the move toward vers libre in Italy.

An even more rebellious aesthetic, and one that Ungaretti also emulated in his early writing, was launched by Marinetti's Futurist manifesto, which was published in 1912 in Le Figaro in Paris. The aspect of Marinetti's monomaniacal rant that had a special relevance for Ungaretti was his proposal of a new poetic language of parole en liberté, joined in “ever deeper and distant analogical associations.”¹ Nineteen twelve was the very year that Ungaretti came to Paris from his native city, Alexandria—interestingly, also Marinetti's hometown (although they didn't know each other there). French culture and education had been de rigueur in Alexandria ever since Napoleon occupied the city, so Ungaretti was completely bilingual from the start. His early immersion in authors such as Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Laforgue, and Mallarmé, rather than the more usual fare (for Italian poets at that time) of Carducci, D'Annunzio, and Pascoli, had everything to do with Ungaretti's decisive, innovative influence on Italian letters. Ungaretti came to Europe equipped for radical change. He immediately became an integral part of the intense creative ferment that was underway in Europe, just before the war, as if in anticipation of the irreparable destruction that the war would inflict. As Ungaretti's close friend the Futurist Ardengo Soffici put it, the arts were breaking “with conventional forms in order to draw closer to the fluidity of life, to its impressions.”

Ungaretti was in Paris for less than two years, but that was long enough for him to refer to that time, more than fifty years later, as his cultural and social coming-of-age. He attended Henri Bergson's and other lectures at the Sorbonne, became a close friend of Apollinaire, and came into regular contact with the major exponents of the avant-garde: Picasso, Braque, Léger, De Chirico, Jacob, and others. Having become friendly with the Futurists Giovanni Papini, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Soffici, he was invited to collaborate with them on their new journal, Lacerba, where Ungaretti first published his poems. Lacerba, edited in Milan, and La Voce, in Florence, were the main organs for the earliest stages of Italian modernism.

As always, although Ungaretti was in the thick of cultural activity and public discourse about it, he went his own way. Like all of the most talented modernists, Ungaretti was as much at odds with the avant-garde as he was a part of it. He was iconoclastic only to the extent that cultural detritus and insincere formalism were in the way of reality. The essence of language, the quasi-mystical resonance of the authentic poetic line, could be rediscovered only by starting over again with its basic units: the syllable, word, or phrase. Ungaretti was separated from his Futurist and Crepuscular peers by his moral seriousness and philosophical fervor: “While I did not use the word except when it came to me infused with moral content,” he wrote in old age, “they … asked nothing of the word but a physical impressionability.” Another way of saying this is that Ungaretti remained a committed humanist, as demonstrated by his apprenticeship to Petrarch and Leopardi, and as evident throughout his poetry but particularly in the poems written in response to the occupation of Rome in World War II. He always defended human culture, even as he acknowledged its transience and illusoriness. For Ungaretti, cultural forms, though always in need of renewal, are all there is at times between us and a terrifying emptiness. Such a humanistic attitude, of course, would put Ungaretti at odds with the French surrealists and with Freudian reductionism. Ungaretti would always espouse, as he put it, a waking dream, un sogno ad occhi aperti, rather than the somnambulism of the surrealists. In an essay on Valéry he wrote: “Valéry learns from Poe that in order to understand the genesis of a work of art one must start, not with an initial emotion, but from the technical means put to work by the artist to produce such and such an effect.” For Ungaretti, this classical perspective would always be a safeguard against solipsism and aesthetic decadence. His summary statement about Valéry could also be said of him: “to utmost turbulence he opposed … utmost precision.”

Just after Italy's entry into World War I in 1915, Ungaretti (who had already enlisted in the army) was sent to the Carso, in northern Italy, scene of some of the war's bloodiest battles. The immediate crisis of the war, of witnessing and being so close to death day after day, was the alembic in which Ungaretti's developing sensibility was purified. Not only did he lack the time to second-guess the amazing phrases that he jotted down as they came into his head, but he had every reason to believe that no one would ever read them. He was no more likely to survive the almost daily battles on the Austrian front than the friend he wrote about in “Vigil,” which I quote in full:

An entire night
thrown down beside a
butchered
companion with his mouth
grimacing
toward the full moon
and his hemorrhaged hands
thrusted
into my silence
I wrote
letters filled with love
I have never held
so hard
to life

Or, as Ungaretti wrote in 1963: “The war suddenly revealed to me the language [of my own voice as a poet]. That is, I had to speak quickly because time was limited. … I had to express in a few words … an extraordinary intensity of meaning.” We might say, ignoring Ungaretti's dislike of psychology, that his ego had nothing left to grasp, nothing to lose. And in fact, one of the most striking qualities of Ungaretti's war poems is the sense that the person who spoke them is transparent; the “I” in them is closer to Taliesin than to Petrarch.

When I find
a word
in this my silence
it is dug into my life
like an abyss

Or:

Like a firefly
I waver
at the corner of a road

To say nothing of his famous two-line gem, “M'illumino / d'immenso,” which literally means something like “I turn luminous in an immensity of spaces.” When Ungaretti refers to himself as “Ungaretti, man of pain,” uomo di pena, the directness does not move us because of one individual's suffering. Rather, an ordinary soldier's oblique identification with Christ, the universal man, consecrates the massive suffering and death that war inflicts.

As a student of Bergson, Ungaretti had received philosophical justification for his natural proclivity for a knowledge that is global and immediate, intuitive, reaching into the essences of things by sympathy. As Glauco Cambon expressed it in his excellent long essay on Ungaretti (1967), “The basic conception underlying Ungaretti's poetry is that of the existence of a universal, cosmic life to which man is integrally joined in a nonrational, intuitive way.” Ungaretti, like many of the most forceful modernist poets, had a basically religious notion of his poetic calling: he wanted to “free the word from its conventional superstructures so that it might regain its original pristine form,” so that it might, said Ungaretti, “penetrate into one's darkest recess, without upsetting or being able to uncover its secret.” Hence the distinction Ungaretti liked to make, following Leopardi, between the two Italian words for “word”—parola and vocabolo—the latter referring to literal meanings, the former to a word's ineffable essence. Ungaretti was quite explicit about his religious conception of poetry: “It is the search to establish a relationship with the inviolable secret within the divine creatrix.” In his 1964 lectures at Columbia about his late poem “Canzone,” Ungaretti said that the moments the poet can be a poet are exactly those when the “primal image” “ruptures the ice” of habitual daily consciousness. And in a 1965 interview he said that his early war poems were an attempt to close the gap between language and that which one would like to say. “Such a poetry,” writes a critic, “annuls the distance between word and object, between word and image, its sense being captured in a spark of intuition.” A literary label for this aesthetic is, of course, Hermeticism (actually coined in 1936 by Francesco Flora, a critic who considered Ungaretti's elliptical style as too mannered). Hermetic poetry was a poetry that sought, not to describe or represent, but to evoke. Some of the Italian poets, besides Ungaretti, who are well known for this style are Montale, Salvatore Quasimodo, Alfonso Gatto, and Leonardo Sinisgalli. The Hermeticists were never a “school,” as such; they were simply some poets who shared, in their different ways, this aspiration for “pure poetry.”

After Ungaretti left Alexandria at the age of twenty-four, and started to discover his ancestral roots in Italy and his cultural and intellectual roots in Paris, there would be no turning back: he would remain, as he put it, a man with many homelands. It could be said that Italy for him was the land of the fathers—his own paternity and Italy's poetic patrimony—while Alexandria was maternal, less linked in his imagination to the masculine creators of culture than to the enveloping maternal world of sustaining imagination and unfathomable mystery.

In a bay in Alexandria there was discovered …, sunken in water, an ancient port, the primitive port of Alexandria: a buried port, therefore. And then, the reason why this port has become the symbol of my poetry is easy to explain. There is a secret in us, the poet dives into, and reaching the port he discovers this secret, therefore arriving to give that little bit that a man can give of consolation to the soul.

If the poems in L'Allegria represented found objects retrieved from the maternal buried harbor, those of Sentimento del Tempo (A Sense of Time, 1936), his second complete collection, embodied the beginning of his long experiment with the assimilation of the Italian poetic tradition. Ungaretti's impulse was part of a general need for reconstruction after the war: the rediscovery of (or, in the case of fascism, the coercion into) order. What this meant for literature was represented by Vincenzo Cardarelli's founding of La Ronda in 1919, the express purpose of which was to promote a new classical style, “to reconnect [said La Ronda's manifesto] to the greatest and most authentic Italian tradition, [which was] interrupted after Leopardi and Manzoni.” For Ungaretti, this meant that the naked flashes of insight that characterized the poems of his first book needed to be filled out and grounded by the memory of history. Another way to say this is that Ungaretti now felt a need to substantialize further his poetic language. Sentimento del Tempo, as its title states, was a return to the temporal dimension after the split-second flashes of the war poems. In a piece he wrote in 1930 for Turin's Gazetta del Popolo, he describes how after the war he set to work on assimilating the Italian poets—Jacopone, Cavalcanti, Dante, Petrarch, Tasso, Leopardi, and others—not, he says, for literary research: “I was looking for the song in them … the song of the Italian language.” And: “It was my heartbeat that I wanted to feel in harmony with the heartbeat of my betters from a desperately loved land.”

Ungaretti's passionate attachment to Italy and his Italian roots also led him to believe in Mussolini and Italian fascism. He came to this view shortly after meeting Mussolini, when Mussolini was a leading socialist agitator and journalist, just before Italy entered the First World War, and it lasted for many years. The scholar Luciano Rebay has charted the progress and nature of Ungaretti's politics during this period by following letters exchanged by Ungaretti with his very close friend Jean Paulhan, who from 1925 to 1940 was the editor of La Nouvelle Revue Française, the most important literary magazine in France. What comes out of Rebay's analysis is this: while Ungaretti trusted Mussolini “without a shadow of a doubt,” the basis of Ungaretti's position was his belief in Mussolini's version of fascism as a movement for gaining rights for exploited Italian workers, restoring order and self-respect to a badly fragmented postwar Italy, and preserving tradition in industrialized Italian society. At no point in Ungaretti's letters or other writings do we see the racism and imperialist power mania that Italian fascism increasingly represented and that eventually led to Mussolini's downfall. Ungaretti was patriotic, but he was too cosmopolitan and tolerant to be narrowly nationalistic. He was vocal about his opposition to racist laws—he got into some trouble for this at one point—and his anger over social conditions was directed toward the wide gap between rich and poor in early-twentieth-century Italy. Rebay shows that Ungaretti believed passionately in a political system that would be “for the people” and thought that fascism was the system that could best accomplish this, bringing about “a social order capable of guaranteeing dignified work for all in accordance with their aptitudes and talents, regardless of class.” In other words, Ungaretti's mussolinismo was based on the years leading up to the March on Rome, in which Mussolini's main agenda was a populist and antibourgeois revolution. Clearly, Ungaretti was coming to this view as the working-class son of emigrants from Tuscany. A very high number of Italian writers (95 percent, according to the notes section in the Mondadori edition of Ungaretti's collected essays) were attracted by Mussolini's “pararevolutionary, paraprogressive, antibourgeois” promises of social change, while at the same time Mussolini's achievements, his public works and so on, were widely admired in Europe and America. This was the context in which Ungaretti's publisher solicited a preface from Mussolini for the 1923 edition of Il Porto Sepolto (The Buried Harbor). Many Italian writers' idealism, not balanced by facing and/or knowing the dark side of Mussolini's career, resembled that of the well-meaning, but grossly mistaken, modernist artists and intellectuals who were attracted by revolutions that turned out to be Communist tyrannies. That Ungaretti and other Italian intellectuals could support Mussolini and fascism while espousing antiracist and other humanitarian values testifies to the enormous collective confusion of the years between the world wars.

Ungaretti's aim, as a poet, was to find a modern idiom, cadence, and meter for bringing together the present with un antico strumento musicale, thereby linking modern poetry with the Italian patrimony. Ungaretti turned especially to Petrarch, Tasso, and Leopardi as exemplars of the Italian hendecasyllabic line—the Italian equivalent of the iambic pentameter in English—and claimed that “the hendecasyllable is the natural poetic measure of Italian speech.” Thus we find, in Sentimento, in addition to the blunt concrete diction of L'Allegria, a modernist grandiloquence: broken syntactical units have been transformed into a more fluid, complex organization; instead of the first-person speaker in the present tense there is an evocative use of the past tense; and staccato phrasing has become mellifluous speech. As if to announce the decisive change in style, Ungaretti opens his book with these (untranslatable) mind-bogglingly beautiful lines:

Dall'ampia ansia dell'alba
Svelata alberatura.
Out of daybreak's boundless hunger
Trees—like masts—revealed.

It is no wonder that in the 1930s Ungaretti became one of the most admired writers in Europe: the poems in Sentimento are so richly textured and perfectly made, the emotion in them so focused and intense.

The twenties and early thirties were happy years for him: he and his wife lived in Marino, one of the castelli romani, the ancient hill towns east of Rome, where, as Ungaretti said, the feel of a small Renaissance town in the country was still intact. They had children, a son and a daughter, and Ungaretti rediscovered his ancestral soul in the pastoral landscape. The classical deities seemed like realities now.

He landed on a waterfront where evening
Ever lasted, thick with ancient spellbound trees,
And threaded forth,
And a flutter of feathers loosened from the piercing
Palpitations of the scalding water
Made him turn, and he thought he saw
(Wilting, reflourishing) a shade;
Climbing again, he saw it was a nymph
Asleep on her feet, her arms around an elm.

In other poems, this glimpse of sensual, erotic innocence was associated with the childhood world of Africa:

No more now will I go off alone
Between the vast plain and the open sea,
Nor hear, from far-off ages, homely, clear
In the limpid air, the peal of bells; nor
The stinging, callow graces
My wild fantasy go stripping nude,
Nor will I pursue Diana
Stepping from the sparse palm grove
In a fleet gown of light …

There is an opalesque, polysemous effect in this great poem, which I have tried to carry over to some extent in my translation. For Ungaretti does not merely draw on memory, personal and collective; he attempts to reproduce its effects, as if the poem itself is an experience of memory.

Another way that Ungaretti turned to traditional forms during the twenties was his return to Catholicism. During Holy Week in 1928, he went on retreat at the monastery of Subiaco, where he renewed his commitment to his childhood faith and started working on the longest poem in Sentimento, “La Pietà,” an Ecclesiastes-like proclamation about the possible futility of all human endeavor, including (even especially) writing poetry:

I have peopled the silence with names.
Have I ripped mind and heart to pieces
Only to fall into servitude to words?
I am a king of phantoms.
O dry leaves,
Soul carried here and there …

In the second half of Sentimento he replaces the naked nymphs of the African oasis and the woods of Marino with a search for meaning and moral depth. “The Bible, not classical mythology, is now his text,” writes Cambon.

What difference does sin make
If it no longer leads to purity?
The flesh can scarcely recollect
A time that it was strong.
Inane and commonplace, the soul.
God, consider our frailty.

Once Sentimento was written, the trajectory of Ungaretti's writing life was set. One of the last poems he wrote for the collection, “Auguri per Proprio Compleanno” (“Greetings for His Own Birthday”) reiterates the themes of lost youth and disillusioned aspiration. Just after Ungaretti wrote this poem, in 1935, he conceived the idea for La Terra Promessa (The Promised Land, 1950), his fourth collection, which explores these motifs in depth. Joseph Cary, in his fine study of Montale, Ungaretti, and Saba, criticizes Terra Promessa, and I agree, for being too mannered and “stiflingly concerned with literary precedent.” It is not hard to understand why it should be so: there is no poetry without eros, without a healthy dose of paganism—without, as Blake put it, being of the devil's party. Ungaretti flirted with drying himself out on abstraction and idol-smashing. He was far too much of a poet to succeed in doing this, however, and so we have the actually very beautiful rarefactions of Terra Promessa:

That hardly anything of sand that slides
Without a sound and settles in the hourglass,
And the fleeting impressions on the fleshy-pink,
The perishable fleshy-pink, of a cloud …

For me, the poems of Terra Promessa are like exquisite alpine flora atop some ascetic crag. “Canzone,” for example, probably Ungaretti's most hermetic poem, very beautifully depicts in timelapse detail the changeover from night to dawn. Ungaretti's 1964 explication of this poem demonstrates how precise its images are. When he refers to the sunrise “thinning into iridescent echoes,” for instance, the physical reality represented in the poem corresponds to how “we know reality only through echoes,” and that “sunrise doesn't reveal a pure world, but a world that documents its own ruin.” I was struck when I first read this, by the implied reference to Ungaretti's experience in the war, documented in the following early poem about watching the sun rise over the aftermath of a battlefield:

Suddenly
the lucid
awesome vastness
is high
above the rubble
And the man
bent
over the sun-
shocked
water discovers
a shadow
Rocked and
gently
broken

Ungaretti's focus changed for several years between the time he conceived of Terra Promessa and the time he actually wrote it. In 1936 he was offered the chair of Italian Literature and Language at the University of São Paolo. He and his family moved there, and just as Ungaretti was getting used to his new prestige, his world fell apart: first, the death of his nine-year-old son from complications associated with appendicitis; then the death of his brother and, toward the end of his stay in São Paolo (he was hired to a professorship at the University of Rome in 1942, a position he would remain at until his retirement), the outbreak of World War II and the occupation of Rome. The death of Antonietto, his son, stirred such desperate emotion that the resulting poetry was more violent and visceral than anything since the war poems, although combined now with the artfulness that Ungaretti had acquired:

The many, gigantic, jumbled, glaucous stones
Shuddering yet within the hidden slings
Of suffocated elemental flames
Or in the terrible virgin torrents'
Headlong unappeasable caress—
Above the dazzling glare of sand, relentless
Along an empty horizon, remember?

The Brazilian wilderness provided images for nature in its ferocious, unrelentingly brutal aspect. This is very different from the poems in L'Allegria, where the elements are usually portrayed as healing and restorative. The change of perspective makes sense, of course: the war was caused by man, while Antonietto's death was a result of natural law. As in Leopardi's famous poem “A Silvia” (“To Sylvia”), which was in fact a model for Ungaretti's poem, nature is blamed for plundering innocence:

Happy grace,
You were not able not to break
Against a blindness so implacable
You artless breath and crystal,
Too human flash of light for the pitiless,
Savage, unrelenting, droning
Roar of a naked sun.

One part of the collection Il Dolore (Suffering, 1947), in which the above poem was published, is set in Rome during World War II: a cradle of Western civilization in the throes of violence and chaos. Ungaretti despairs over the breakdown of culture and humanitarian values but ultimately affirms the power of creative human endeavor to survive the darker forces that always threaten it. In one poem, the sight of a Masaccio painting of the Crucifixion, at San Clemente in Rome, restores this faith: “That was when I glimpsed / Why hope can still ignite me.” Ungaretti's reading and translating of Góngora and Racine—in addition to his interpretation of Michelangelo and the Roman Baroque, which I refer to below—had given him models for a refined but robust art that is haunted by a sense of emptiness and entropy.

Much has been said, and rightly so, about the connection between Ungaretti's search for geographical belonging and his “quest for essentialness” (as Cambon put it) in his poetry. Ungaretti's early poem about his Arab friend's suicide in Paris suggests that he could see himself in Mohammed Sceab's despair over having been uprooted:

… he no longer knew how
to live
in his people's tent
where you can hear the Koran
being chanted
while you savor coffee
And he didn't know how
to set free
the song
of his desolation

Ungaretti's parents and ancestors were from Lucca, in Tuscany. His father had been drawn to Alexandria by Ismail Pasha's government's demand for foreigners to come and work in public-works projects, including work on the Suez Canal. Ungaretti's father was killed on the job when Giuseppe was two years old. His mother raised him and his older brother with her earnings from the bakery she owned in an Italian section of Alexandria. Alexandria and the desert next to which Ungaretti lived, as well as the Bedouin culture he witnessed there, became huge, timeless images in the poet's imagination. For Ungaretti, the desert was the aptest of images for the eternity in which our lives are the mirages. He was ambivalent about the desert and the city that borders it. At times they are places of Edenic bliss:

Now
the clear sky is closed
like the jasmine
at this hour
in my native Africa

At other times they are places of delusion and madness:

If the Arab returns from the desert, ah! mastiffs are barking in his veins. This is why the nomad is incurable: the desert is a wine, and it is a drug, and it sets a rage on fire that can be quenched only in blood and in languorous loves.

Out of the many senses of death that his thousands-of-years existence has impressed in his veins, the Egyptian has received the saddest sense from the Arab: that the desire for pleasure is a radical thirst, suffering that does not ease up except in madness. This sense: that madness is as if an increase of soul, that the soul's prize is liberation into the mortal pleasure of the senses.

As Ungaretti put it in his 1965 interview: “The image of desolation has been an obsession for me since my first poems. To be precise, the desert was in me: from it was born … the motion and the feeling of infinity, of the primordial, of the decline into nothingness.” Thus the desert represented for him both the fullness and the emptiness of eternity; and Alexandria, the city on the desert, was a symbol for the ephemerality of civilization itself. The austerity of Ungaretti's spirituality—his negative theology—had much in common with that of the Desert Fathers, the ancient monks in the desert near Alexandria. Ungaretti was strongly inclined toward Platonism (as was Bergson), but he was also a skeptic. In contrast to Blake, whom he admired and translated, and in contrast to Dante as well, Ungaretti did not ultimately trust that products of the imagination were anything other than mirages—he was more Jansenist than Kabbalist. Hence his obsession with the Baroque and its “multiplication of units” to fill in “the void,” the fear of emptiness he said motivated its frantic attempt to fill up the empty spaces:

When one is in the presence of the Colosseum, an enormous cylinder with empty eye sockets, one has the sense of emptiness. It is natural, having the sense of emptiness, that one cannot help but also have the dread of emptiness. Those things piled up, coming from every direction, so that not a bit of space is left, of free space, everything is filled, nothing is left, nothing freed. … I believe that from the dread of emptiness issues, not the need of filling that space with it does not matter what thing, but all the drama of the art of Michelangelo.

When I said that the Baroque provoked the sense of emptiness, that the aesthetic of the Roman Baroque had been initiated by the dread of emptiness, I cited the Colosseum. I am afraid that I have not been clear enough. The dread in the Baroque originated with the intolerable idea of a body without a soul. A skeleton evokes the dread of emptiness.

For Ungaretti, poetry is a means for using memory, the collective memory that language embodies, to rediscover innocence, “the world resurrected in its native purity.” The challenge in the twentieth century—and certainly also in the twenty-first—is to reinterpret the present in relation to a disintegrated past. Ungaretti rejected the Futurists' pretense that the rubble of the past could simply be swept aside, while also affirming Leopardi's despairing realization that an age was spent. As Ungaretti put it in an essay four years before his death in 1970:

After the war we witnessed a change in the world that separated us from what we used to be and from what we once had made and done, as if at one blow millions of years had passed. Things grew old, only fit for a museum. Today everything that is stored in books is listened to as a testimony of the past, not as our own mode of expression. … Something in the world of languages is totally finished. … We are men cut off from our own depths.

Modern (or postmodern) man, he said, is “trapped in the impossibility of speech, in the violence stronger than the word.” It is remarkable that Ungaretti, like his master Leopardi, expressed such torment so beautifully, giving us a language for where we are in relation to what we have lost.

Note

1. All translations in this essay are mine.