Share this page: Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal but which the reader recognizes as his own. -- New York Times (14 May 1960) However much everything else is distorted The dead can never be sold. Italy is my country, o stranger, It is of its people I sing, and of the sound Of secret lamentation that comes from its sea, I sing of its mothers' chaste grief, of all its life. -- Translation of a Quasimodo poem quoted by Presentation Speech by Anders Österling, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy during the award of 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature to Salvatore Quasimodo Là dura un vento che ricordo acceso nelle criniere dei cavalli obliqui in corsa lungo le pianure, vento che macchia e rode l'arenaria e il cuore dei telamoni lugubri, riversi sopra l'erba. There a wind remains that I recall afire within the manes of horses as they slanted their way across the planes, a wind that chafes the sandstone and erodes the very hearts of derelict caryatids cast down Onto the grass. (...) -- Strada di Agrigento (Agrigentum Road). Translated by A.Z. Foreman. Source: Poems in Translation blog. Share this page:

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