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Biography of Salvatore QuasimodoName: Salvatore QuasimodoBirth Date: August 20, 1901 Death Date: 1968 Place of Birth: Modica, Sicily Nationality: Italian Gender: Male Occupations: poet, critic Salvatore Quasimodo The Italian poet, translator, and critic Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968) was one of the chief exponents of Italian hermetic poetry.Salvatore Quasimodo was born on Aug. 20, 1901, in Modica, Sicily, where his father was a stationmaster with the Italian railroads. After several moves throughout Sicily, the family in 1908 settled in Messina, where Quasimodo finished his education and remained until 1919. Subsequently he moved to Rome to study engineering at the Politechnical Institute but did not complete his studies. For some time he worked in different jobs until he moved to Reggio Calabria in 1926 as an employee of the Civil Engineering Board. Through Elio Vittorini, his brother-in-law, he was introduced to literary circles during a visit to Florence in 1929. Among others he met Eugenio Montale and Alessandro Bonsanti, the editor of Solaria, which in 1930 published his first poetry.In 1931 Quasimodo was transferred to Imperia and, after a short interlude in Sardinia, eventually was assigned to …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…Ed è subito sera (1942), representing a stylistic and structural revision of all Quasimodo had written up to that time, arranged the poems in a chronological order and imparted the feeling of greater ease and of solutions that allowed a more detached attitude on the part of the reader.The postwar collections Giorno dopo giorno (1947), La vita non è sogno (1949), and Il falso e vero verde (1956) seek a more direct relationship and dialogue with the reader, and Quasimodo himself referred to them as "poesia sociale." La terra impareggiabile (1958) is still oriented toward the social and dialogical approach, but it is somewhat weaker than the earlier collections. Further Reading A brief biography of Quasimodo is in Nobel Foundation, Nobel Lectures: Literature, 1901-1967, edited by Horst Frenz (1969). For general historical background see Carlo L. Golino, ed., Contemporary Italian Poetry: An Anthology (1962), and Eugenio Donadoni, A History of Italian Literature (1923; trans. and rev. ed., 2 vols., 1969). |