And Suddenly It's Evening
by Salvatore Quasimodo
Summary
This is a poetry collection built around one of the shortest and most famous poems in modern Italian, its three line title poem stating the whole book's argument in a single breath: everyone stands alone at the heart of the earth, pierced by a ray of sunlight, and suddenly it is evening. Quasimodo's earlier work, gathered here alongside the newer poems, belongs to a hermetic style built from compressed, difficult imagery and sparse punctuation, poems that ask a reader to work for meaning rather than receive it. His later poems, beginning with the collection Giorno dopo giorno in 1947, turn outward from that private difficulty toward war, occupation and the ruined streets of Milan, where he taught from 1941 until his death.
Across both modes the same light recurs, a specifically Sicilian light that Quasimodo carries north with him into every later landscape, and the same sense of exile underlies even his poems about places he actually lived. Reading the collection means moving between a young poet's dense, riddling early style and an older poet's plainer, more direct address to public catastrophe, and the shift between them is really the story the book tells, a private vocabulary broken open by history.
It suits a reader with patience for poetry that resists paraphrase, especially in the earlier hermetic poems, and it rewards reading the collection roughly in order, since the later, more accessible war poems land harder after the strain of working through the earlier ones. Even readers who find the hermetic poems difficult tend to find their way in through the three lines of the title poem, still quoted in Italian schools decades after it was written.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Salvatore Quasimodo the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature for his lyrical poetry, which with classical fire expresses the tragic experience of life in our own times; And Suddenly It's Evening, published in Italian in 1942, is the collection that gathered his best known early work under one title. The choice startled many Italian readers, who had expected the prize to go to Giuseppe Ungaretti or Eugenio Montale instead, both more internationally established at the time, and a Swedish newspaper accused the Academy outright of rewarding a lesser poet.
Quasimodo spent the war years translating classical poets, publishing his rendering of the Greek lyric poets in 1940, and joined the Italian Communist Party after the war. Montale went on to win his own Nobel in 1975, which settled at least one half of the old argument.