Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Shout No More

Stop killing the dead,
don’t shout anymore, don’t shout
if you still want to hear them,
if you hope not to pass on.

They have the imperceivable murmur,
they make no more noise
than the grass that grows,
content where man does not pass.

Published in 1947 in his postwar volume Il dolore (Affliction)—a book that not only articulates experiences of World War II but also works through the poet’s loss of his young son—Giuseppe Ungaretti’s short poem “Non gridate più” invites the reader to rethink the value of an unassuming yet active and creative silence as opposed to an orchestrated and pompous manner of mourning.

Invocations of selfless patience and the ability to listen are contrasted with an industrious discharge of political, militaristic, religious, and scholarly clamor.

The poem consists of two stanzas of four verses each. The first stanza chastises a nameless group for desecrating “the dead ones” (who also remain anonymous) by shouting. The second stanza suggests that the deceased still produce living sounds, even though they cannot be clearly understood anymore. Like grass while growing, the fragile voices of the dead are afraid of being killed (again) by the boots of “man.”

Altogether, the eight short melodious verses that constitute “Non gridate più” (even occasional rhymes are interwoven in the text) encapsulate a programmatic criticism of pseudo-omniscient abuses of history and attempts at commodifying its victims, be it in the form of praises or officially staged grief.

Whether this poem can itself remain immune to its own attacks on the brutality of discursive disfiguration, including “normalization,” remains an open question.

While highly readable, Andrew Frisardi’s English version of the poem in Ungaretti’s Selected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2003) is as good a translation as one can probably find, though it does level off several vital nuances of the second stanza.