Sunday Pages: "In Memoriam"

A poem by Giuseppe Ungaretti

Dear Reader,

We die twice: once when we actually die, and a second time when the memory of us fades away. There is no funeral the second time, no eulogy, no tears. There is permanent erasure—extinction, if you prefer, which is the English translation of the Sanskrit word nirvana.

This is not my idea. I read it somewhere, long ago, and—appropriately, given the subject of memory—I can’t recall where I read it or who wrote it. The idea is both poetical and objectively true. There will come a time, for all of us, when every last trace of our existence will be wiped away. We will quite literally be lost.

Given enough time, even the most famous and consequential among us are distilled to a sentence, a phrase, a single word: Napoleon was a short general who tried to invade Russia in winter. Henry VIII was a fat king with many wives. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. Julius Caesar was stabbed in the back on the Ides of March. The Buddha sat under a tree and found enlightenment. Et cetera.

Memory is for the living. Legacy is for the living. The dead don’t require homage, not really. But part of being human is to want to preserve the memory of our loved ones: to honor the ancestors. That impulse is the foundation of art, of architecture, of poetry.

After the Great War, the poet Giuseppe Ungaretti—a formidable figure in the annals of Italian literature, who was associated with Futurism, Dadaism, and Hermeticism—hooked up with Benito Mussolini. He was a correspondent for Mussolini’s newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia. He signed the Manifesto of Italian Writers in 1925. He saw Fascism as a vehicle for restoring the prominence of Italian art: “The first task of the Academy will be to re-establish a certain connection between men of letters, between writers, teachers, publicists. This people hungers for poetry. If it had not been for the miracle of the Blackshirts, we would never have leaped this far.” In other words, he believed Benito would Make Italy Great Again.

Ungaretti joined the Fascist Party. He worked for the Fascist regime. He even lobbied for Il Duce to write an introduction to one of his poetry books: “Would H.E. [His Excellency], who is consecrating renewed Italianity, raise my faith? I address H.E. as a Renaissance man; when Italy was great in the world, the powerful would not disdain to crown her with beauty (which is the only immortality). A few lines of preface from H.E., whenever the grave State affairs will allow you a moment of repose, would for me, in the eyes of all, be a great honor.” And he left behind letters in which he expressed racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Arab sentiments.

But in September of 1916, in a foxhole at Locvizza, the 28-year-old poet managed to transcend all of that ugliness to produce a lovely, haunting poem called “In Memoriam.” Ungaretti had been living in Paris in a shitty hostel a few blocks from the Sorbonne. There he befriended one of the other residents, a fellow poet and foreigner, Mohammed Sceab, who had taken his own life in 1913. In that foxhole three years later, with death hanging in the air, Ungaretti the solider was consumed by the fear that his own expiration might also ensure the final death of his friend. And so he wrote a poem.

I don’t speak Italian, but the language here is so simple, it’s not that hard to understand the lines. I will put the English translation below each stanza:

Si chiamava
Moammed Sceab
discendente
di emiri di nomadi
suicida
perchè non aveva più
Patria.

His name was
Mohammed Sceab
descendant
of emirs of the nomads
a suicide
because he no longer had
a homeland
 
Amò la Francia
e mutò nome
Fu Marcel
ma non era Francese
e non sapeva più vivere
nella tenda dei suoi
dove si ascolta la cantilena
del Corano
gustando un caffè

He loved France
and changed his name
He was Marcel
but was not French
and he no longer knew
how to live
in the tents of his people
where they listen to the chant
of the Koran
while savoring coffee
 
E non sapeva
scioglere
il canto
del suo abbandono

And he did not know how
to unfreeze
the song
of his cold desolation
 
L’ho accompagnato
insieme alla padrona dell’ albergo
dove abitavamo
a Parigi
dal numero 5 della rue des Carmes
appassito vicolo in discesa

I accompanied him
together with the landlady of the hotel
where we lived
in Paris
at number 5 rue des Carmes
a crooked dark alley

Riposa nel camposanto d’Ivry
sobborgo che pare
sempre in una giornata
di una
decomposta fiera

He rests in the graveyard at Ivry
a suburb that always
looks like the day
the carnival
comes down

E forse io solo
se ancora
che visse

And perhaps only I
still know
he lived

I think of Ungaretti’s poem today, and recall the poet’s love for his long-gone friend Mohammed. And I think of Mohammed’s desolation, his inability to integrate into a new environment, the profound sadness at his loss, as I look at images from the devastation in Asheville and throughout Appalachia.

This is not the typical coastal destruction (which itself is horrible enough and should not be minimized). This is different. Vast seas of water drained from the mountains into the valleys where the people live, churning up mud and debris as it poured down with astonishing power. Small towns have been completely destroyed. There is no power, no water, no cell service—and no way out. All of the Interstate highways into and out of Asheville were damaged by the storm. From where I sit, the destruction looks apocalyptic. Biblical. How can we witness such a great flood and not contemplate the wrath of God?

Is the devastation in Appalachia a metaphor? A foreshadowing? Divine retribution? Quirk of fate? I found myself, shamefully, wondering how it might affect the election—whether it will help Kamala or hurt her.

We have, as a people, normalized the damage caused by hurricanes and other natural disasters. On the New York Times website this morning, the little section about “Helene Aftermath” is well below the jump, right next to a section about Paris Fashion Week; the editors believe that the escalating atrocities in the Middle East—which, as many of the social media posts about Appalachia are quick to point out, the United States government is underwriting while ignoring more exigent needs at home—are more newsworthy. (The abominable war crimes in Kherson, meanwhile, are not being reported on at all.)

At a rally in Michigan, Trump correctly noted, as he read stolidly off the Teleprompter, that Helene “was a very large hurricane—that was a big one.” He said, without much conviction or interest in his voice, that people in its path would “be okay.” This is the same guy who threw paper towels at hurricane victims in Puerto Rico, mind you. His re-election would doom our democracy, and might also doom human life on earth, given his ignorance of and lack of interest in climate change, as well as his eagerness to whore himself out to the fossil fuel industry.

Will the wordsmith who gave us Hillbilly Elegy also write the hillbilly eulogy? JD Vance is a fascist like Ungaretti, but unlike Ungaretti, lacks the requisite empathy and compassion to give a crap. He is “skeptical of the idea that climate change is caused purely by man,” or so he claims. If he’s telling the truth, he’s intellectually unfit for office. And if he’s lying, as I suspect he is, well, that’s even worse.

It’s tempting to exploit these extreme weather tragedies for political purposes. I did it myself, on Friday’s show, railing against the GOP’s willful ignorance of climate change. And I did it again just now, because I am living in a place that is safe and dry, where the highways are accessible and the WiFi still works.

Meanwhile, the hurricane victims in Appalachia suffer, off the national radar, off the front page—nomads now, singing their own songs of cold desolation. We must keep alive the memory of what happened there.

I write this today to make sure that I myself do not forget.

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ICYMI

Our guest on The Five 8 was Alyssa Bowen of True North Research:

And we did this. Thanks to Stephanie St. John for the killer Melania impression:

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Photo credit: Ungaretti in Italian infantry uniform during World War I.