Salvatore Quasimodo

Salvatore Quasimodo was born in 1901 in Modica, in Sicily, and spent his childhood in the island’s east. In 1908 his family moved to Messina in the aftermath of the earthquake that had devastated the city, and the sight of that destruction stayed with him. He founded a short-lived literary journal as a teenager, went to Rome to study engineering, and, when money ran short, worked as a technical draughtsman while teaching himself Greek and Latin. Employment with the state civil engineering service later took him across Italy.

In Florence, through his brother-in-law Elio Vittorini, he entered the circle of Eugenio Montale and the review Solaria, and his first collection, Waters and Lands, appeared in 1930. With Sunken Oboe and And Suddenly It’s Evening he became a leading voice of Hermeticism, a compressed, allusive lyric of solitude and longing in which Sicily appears as a lost paradise. His translations of the Greek lyric poets were themselves an event in Italian letters. The war transformed his work: in Day After Day and the collections that followed, the hermetic voice opened onto history, mourning the dead and demanding moral responsibility from a ruined country.

Quasimodo settled in Milan in the 1930s and continued to translate — Sophocles, Catullus, Shakespeare, Neruda — and to write criticism. The Nobel Prize of 1959 brought international readership and invitations to lecture abroad. In June 1968 he suffered a cerebral haemorrhage in Amalfi and died in Naples days later.