Ungaretti autograph: unpublished 1927 poem in French first edition

When Giuseppe Ungaretti entrusted Gallimard with the first French edition of his complete poetic works in 1954, the poet had already spent three decades in uninterrupted dialogue with French culture. The copy examined here — valued at €800-1,200 — testifies to this bond in an extraordinary manner: on the title page, written in green ink, four autograph verses entitled 'Ombra', dated 1927 and signed by the author. A document that predates the volume's publication by twenty-seven years and transforms an already significant edition into a bibliographic and literary unicum.

Bibliographic notes

Les Cinq Livres represents the first comprehensive collection of Ungaretti's poetry in French translation, edited by Jean Lescure for Éditions Gallimard. The volume brings together L'Allegria, Sentimento del Tempo, Il Dolore, La Terra Promessa and Un Grido e Paesaggi, offering Francophone readers the entire arc of his lyric production to that date. The choice of Gallimard — publisher of Gide, Valéry, Camus — sanctioned Ungaretti's international recognition as a central figure of the twentieth-century European canon. The original edition appears in publisher's wrappers, the typical format for the Parisian house's literary collections in the 1950s. Lescure's translation, by a poet and critic close to the Surrealists, sensitively renders the hermetic density and fractured musicality of the Italian original.

Provenance & condition

The copy bears traces of a cultivated and documented circulation. The first owner, Luciana Trezza, left her inscription; this is followed by the signature of Piero Cavallina, a collector and bibliophile active in the latter twentieth century. Accompanying the volume is the original invitation to the Roman conference at Teatro Eliseo where Gaëtan Picon — critic, essayist, future Director General of Arts and Letters at the French Ministry of Culture — presented the work. This document contextualises the Italian reception of the French edition and enriches the historical value of the ensemble. The autograph poem 'Ombra', dated 1927, is written in green ink with confident, legible handwriting. The four verses in French testify to Ungaretti's linguistic mastery; he had lived in Paris from 1912 to 1921 and maintained throughout his life a privileged relationship with the language and culture beyond the Alps. The text, apparently unpublished, constitutes a precious fragment for studies on Ungaretti's poetic genesis and creative bilingualism.

Market value

The valuation of €800-1,200 reflects the convergence of multiple factors: bibliographic rarity of the French first edition, presence of the unpublished autograph poem, documented provenance and period ephemera. On the international antiquarian market, Ungaretti first editions in original wrappers range between €150 and €400 for copies without special features; examples with brief autograph dedications reach €500-700. The presence of a complete autograph poem, dated and signed, places this copy in a superior bracket. Recent comparables include an edition of Sentimento del Tempo (Vallecchi, 1933) with autograph dedication, sold by Finarte at €680, and a copy of Il Porto Sepolto (Stabilimento Tipografico Friulano, 1923) with manuscript corrections, offered on specialist platforms at €1,100. The unpublished 1927 lyric, however, adds a philological dimension that justifies positioning at the upper end of the estimated range. The market for Ungaretti remains solid, sustained by international academic interest and demand from Italian and French collectors.

Why it matters

This copy of Les Cinq Livres transcends bibliographic value to become testimony to a creative process. The poem 'Ombra', written in 1927 — a crucial year between L'Allegria and Sentimento del Tempo — documents Ungaretti's linguistic experimentation in French, a language the poet considered not translational but generative, capable of liberating new semantic resonances. The fact that these verses remained unpublished, inscribed in a volume published twenty-seven years later, suggests a gesture of memory and continuity: Ungaretti reunites his Parisian past with the French editorial consecration of maturity. For scholars of Hermeticism and European Modernism, the autograph offers unpublished material for investigating twentieth-century poetic bilingualism. For collectors, it represents a rare opportunity to possess a document uniting aesthetic, historical and philological value in an object of contained dimensions but extraordinary cultural density.