November 9th, 2015 – “Of these houses, all that remains is the rubble of a ruined wall; Of the many who were so close to me all that remains is not much; But in my heart, not one cross is missing; My heart is this lacerated village.” In 1916, in the midst of the Great War, the voice of Giuseppe Ungaretti rose high with the poem San Martino del Carso, which represents the plight of war in the trenches as experienced by the great poet. The book “The War for Europe 1914-1918 as told by its poets” (published by Nottetempo) collects the voices of Ungaretti and 52 other poets from 16 countries, including Apollinaire, Joyce, Pessoa, and Mandelstam. As part of the celebrations for the centenary of the First World War – which has the network of the Ministry involved with hundreds of events and initiatives worldwide – the book will be presented tomorrow (at 7.30pm) at the Italian Cultural Institute in Madrid. The volume will be presented over the course of a news conference that sees the presence of authors Andrea Amerio and Maria Pace Ottieri and of publisher Ginevra Bompiani. “These verses – explains a note by the Italian Institute of Culture – don’t speak of heroes, glory, honor, dominion, power, but rather of war and the compassion that it brings. The words of poets reflect the barbarism of the war, its uselessness and the fact that it was fought in a new way, by means that became familiar only to the men in the trenches. Many poets fought and died at the front, other tried to escape, there were those who believed in honor, who ended up in a mental hospital or joined the church, who died of an overdose and those who pretended not to remember. Reading their verses is a poetic journey across Europe, a continent torn by the crisis of civilization.” (Red)
