The poetic work of Salvatore Quasimodo, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1959, is of central importance to modern Italian poetry. Having worked for many years as a land surveyor, Quasimodo also explored the realm of language: words and sentences, precisely placed, form a textual landscape that assigns a space to both the heights, expanses, and depths of human existential experience as well as to the metaphorically condensed experiences of nature and history. This representative selection of poems provides a cross-section of Quasimodo's lyrical oeuvre created between 1920 and 1965, presented alongside the original Italian text and German translations by Christoph Ferber. Approximately half of the 110 poems collected here have been translated into German for the first time. Commentary on the individual poems by Antonio Sichera, a lecturer at the University of Catania, and an afterword by the Zurich Romance scholar Georges Güntert complement the volume.