Ungaretti and his reception in Germany

Despite its great success in Italy, Ungaretti's poetry only became known in Germany with a significant delay. The first acknowledgment, which identifies him as one of the major representatives of the so-called hermeticism, dates back to after 1945, and it is only in the sixties, thanks to Hans Magnus Enzensberger, an important poet and translator of Ungaretti, that he reaches full notoriety, that is, when his work is inserted in the international anthology of modern poetry, with the programmatic title Das Museum der modernen Poesie [The Museum of Modern Poetry]. Here, Ungaretti appears as one of the decisive voices of the new modern international poetry, which emerged between 1910 and 1945; subsequently, two of the major German-speaking poets, Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, will translate - uber-setzen [literally "ferry across"] - the Ungarettian poetic universe into the German language. The 1961 Suhrkamp edition of early work by Ingeborg Bachmann was a revelation for the German reader, while Celan's translations compare, in a constant dialogue, his own poetry with the word of the great poet of the Terra promessa.