Salvatore Quasimodo

Salvatore Quasimodo (Italian: [salvaˈtoːre kwaˈziːmodo]; 20 August 1901 – 14 June 1968) was an Italian poet and translator, awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times". Along with Giuseppe Ungaretti and Eugenio Montale, he was one of the foremost Italian poets of the 20th century.

Quasimodo was born in Modica, Sicily, into a Sicilian-Greek family. His paternal grandmother, Rosa (née Papandreou), was from Patras, Greece. Quasimodo integrated both of his ancestries in his works, in which he defined himself as a "Siculo-Greco" (lit. 'Sicilian-Greek'). In his biography for Elio Filippo Accrocca, he even sought to relocate his birthplace to Syracuse, the most notable city of Magna Graecia, instead of Modica, where he was actually born.

Quasimodo spent his childhood in Roccalumera. In 1908 his family moved to Messina, as his father had been sent there to help the local population struck by a devastating earthquake. The impressions of the effects of natural forces would have a great impact on the young Quasimodo. In 1919 he graduated from the local Technical College. In Messina, he also made friends with Giorgio La Pira, future mayor of Florence.

Salvatore Quasimodo was introduced to the Scottish Rite Freemasonry by his father, who was a member of the Masonic Lodge "Arnaldo da Brescia". The Grand Orient of Italy has recognized Quasimodo as one of his most notable brothers.

In 1917 Quasimodo founded the short-lived Nuovo giornale letterario ("New Literary Journal"), in which he published his first poems. In 1919 he moved to Rome to finish his engineering studies, but poor economic conditions forced him to find work as a technical draughtsman. In the meantime, he collaborated with several reviews and studied Greek and Latin.

In 1929, invited by Elio Vittorini, who had married Quasimodo's sister, he moved to Florence. Here he met poets such as Alessandro Bonsanti and Eugenio Montale. In 1930 he took a job with Italy's Civil Engineering Corps in Reggio Calabria. Here he met the Misefari brothers, who encouraged him to continue writing. Developing his nearness to the hermetic movement, Quasimodo published his first collection, Acque e terre ("Waters and Earths") in that year.

In June 1968, when he was in Amalfi for a discourse, Quasimodo was struck by a cerebral haemorrhage. He died a few days later in the hospital in Naples. He was interred in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan.

Traditional literary critique divides Quasimodo's work into two major periods: the hermetic period until World War II and the post-hermetic era until his death. Although these periods are distinct, they can be seen as a single poetical quest. This quest or exploration for a unique language took him through various stages and various modalities of expression.

As an intelligent and clever poet, Quasimodo used a hermetical, "closed" language to sketch recurring motifs like Sicily, religion and death. Subsequently, the translation of authors from Roman and Greek Antiquity enabled him to extend his linguistic toolkit. The disgust and sense of absurdity of World War II also had an impact on the poet's language.

This bitterness, however, faded in his late writings and was replaced by the mature voice of an old poet reflecting upon his world.

He was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution. As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth.