SOURCE: Mandelbaum, Allen. Preface to Selected Poems of Giuseppe Ungaretti, translated and edited by Allen Mandelbaum, pp. ix-xvi. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Mandelbaum introduces translations of Ungaretti's poetry and traces the heritage from which Ungaretti's poetry emerges.

In 1958, I published, under the title Life of a Man, the first volume-length selection of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poems to appear in English translation.¹ Ungaretti's work had already undergone precocious immortalization, and his death in 1970 has not slowed that process. But the growth and consolidation of Ungaretti's significance have not rendered invalid the opening portion of what I said then. I cite it here in uninterrupted form, allowing what I have added now to follow from its own terrain in time:

The epigraph for all of Giuseppe Ungaretti's work is the poem that opens this volume: “Between one flower gathered and the other given / the inexpressible...