The Sunken Keep

Il Porto Sepolto was written in the trenches of northern Italy while Giuseppe Ungaretti was serving as a private in the Italian army; when the collection was published in Udine in 1916, it changed Italian poetry. Part of its impact was due to the influence of Japanese poetry, which Ungaretti had recently encountered in Italian translation. In his introduction, Irish poet and Tokyo resident Andrew Fitzsimons explores the nature and history of Ungaretti's engagement with Japanese poetics; the book also includes sixteen vibrant illustrations by another Tokyo resident, the renowned Italian artist Sergio Maria Calatroni. This is the only complete translation into English of the Udine first edition: the poems of a 'man present at his own / fragility' that spoke to their moment, and continue to speak one hundred years later.

About the Author :
Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970), called by T. S. Eliot 'one of the most authentic poets of Western Europe, ' was, along with Eugenio Montale, the most significant Italian poet of the twentieth century. His first book, Il Porto Sepolto, was written while he served as an infantryman in World War 1. It was followed by five further books of poetry, including Il Dolore (Sorrow, 1947), on the death of his nine-year old son, Antonio, and culminating in his collected poems, Vita d'un uomo (The Life of a Man) in 1969. His travel writings and essays were collected in Il Deserto e Dopo (The Desert and Afterwards, 1961). He died on 2 June, 1970, in Milan. Andrew Fitzsimons was born in Ireland, and is a Professor at Gakushuin University, Tokyo. As well as essays on Irish poetry, he has published on Beckett, Shakespeare, and contemporary British poetry, and translated from Italian poets, including Eugenio Montale and Andrea Zanzotto. His study of Thomas Kinsella, The Sea of Disappointment, was published in 2008, and he edited Thomas Kinsella: Prose Occasions 1951-2006 (Carcanet, 2009). His books of poetry, What the Sky Arranges: Poems made from the Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō and A Fire in the Head were published by Isobar in 2013 and 2014. Sergio Maria Calatroni, artist, photographer and designer, was born in Santa Giuletta, Pavia, Italy, in 1951, and attended the Accademia di Belle Arti of Brera in Milan. His works have been exhibited in major museums in Italy and abroad; the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf im Ehrenhof, Germany, and the National Museum of Kyoto, Japan, hold his works in their permanent collections. He has been a professor of Architecture at the European Design Institute in Milan, and since 2007 a visiting professor in Department of Museum Technology at the University Museum, the University of Tokyo. In 2008 he received the Grand Prize in the Japanese Display Design Awards.

Review :
'The Sunken Keep, in the hands of Andrew Fitzsimons, approaches the poetry of the inexpressible which Giuseppe Ungaretti sought. In these austere versions, matched by the dramatic artwork of Sergio Maria Calatroni, the reader is taken along the edge of an abyss: at turns a sea coast, a frontline trench in WW1, an uninhabited universe. Once read and absorbed Ungaretti's translucent poems will remain forever.' - Gerald Dawe, Trinity College Dublin