Foreign Poems

Abstract

The article begins by considering Giuseppe Ungaretti’s fascination with an early Canzone by Leopardi, “Alla Primavera, o delle favole antiche” (1822). The poem draws on old superstitions about the so-called demonio meridiano said to haunt the earth at noontime. Ungaretti takes this “blind hour” when vision becomes mirage as the inaugural moment of a new poetics, Leopardi finding in the “uncertainty” of modern experience an alternative to the comfortable clichés of neoclassicism. Mallarmé and Valéry later perceive these intensities of light and heat as conditions of a poetry the latter describes “à la fois étranger et étrangère.” Valéry develops this idea of “foreignness” by describing the poet as “un espèce singulière de traducteur qui traduit le discours ordinaire … en ‘langage des dieux’.” The article considers ways in which some later French poets develop this nexus of poetry, painting and translation to explore the kinds of “foreignness” said to animate poetic language.