A Poet to the Swedes

THE SELECTED WRITINGS OF SALVATORE QUASIMODO (269 pp.)--Edited and translated by Allen Mandelbaum--Farrar, Straus & Cudahy ($5).

When Italian Poet Salvatore Quasimodo learned last October that he had won the Nobel Prize for literature, friends report that "he paled and fell into shocked silence." Given Quasimodo's widely unheralded poetic output, it was a natural reaction. In the U.S., where only a few academic specialists knew more than a handful of his poems, the news caused acute embarrassment to cocktail-party literati, who were too stunned to improvise knowledgeable chatter. In Sweden the respected newspaper Aftenbladet criticized the Swedish Academy for "rewarding mediocrity," and most Italian critics agreed. One of Quasimodo's detractors spread the story that he had his poetry published in Sweden for years at his own expense.

Because Quasimodo is a longtime fellow traveler, the pro-Communist Paese Sera cheered "a just and happy decision.''

Poet Quasimodo, 58, does not take it lightly that his countrymen rank him so modestly. A professor of literature (Milan Academy of Music), with children in their 20s and a mistress who is their contemporary, he makes enemies easily and does not easily forget them. Having long since recovered from his first silence about the Nobel Prize, he now sees it as a victory in a battle in which he "fought alone'' while "my adversaries, that is, the other candidates, had great forces." In this selection from his work, U.S. readers now have a chance to inspect 100 of the prize-winning poems, in the original and in a painstaking translation. Most readers will still be left wondering about the Nobel Prize Committee's decision.*

That Quasimodo is a poet can hardly be doubted. He can prove it in a three-liner about man's essential loneliness:

Each alone on the heart of the earth, impaled upon a ray of sun: and suddenly it's evening.

Or again in a touching Letter to My Mother, which ends:

. . . Ah, gentle death, don't touch the clock in the kitchen that ticks on the wall; all my childhood has passed on the enamel of its face, upon those painted flowers: don't touch the hands, the heart of the dead. Perhaps someone will answer? O death of mercy, death of modesty. Farewell, dear one, farewell, my dulcissima mater.

The question is, does he pack enough poetic dynamite to please the shade of a Nobel? Giving him the highest possible marks and allowing for the poet's most destructive enemy--translation--the answer is still no. Quasimodo does not often descend to the banalities of To the New Moon, first published in a Communist paper in celebration of Russia's Sputnik. Mostly he pays in recognizable poet's coin. His world is shrouded in melancholy, in mournful contemplation of man's fate. "Give me sorrow daily bread," and, doubtfully hoping, "perhaps the heart is left us, perhaps the heart . . ." His native Sicily is never far from his thoughts, "warm with tears and mourning," and he wonders "how much time has fallen with the leaves of the poplars, how much blood into the rivers of the earth."

But even Italian critics have found it hard to excavate his secret meanings, his private emotional code. What is lacking as much as lines of communication is the quality of size, the soaring imagination that transports both poet and reader to places that only insight can discover.

* Over the years, it has committed some notable omissions, including Tolstoy, Strindberg, Proust, Valery, Joyce.

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