"Ed è subito Martini" alludes to the most famous line of twentieth-century Italian verse, "Ed è subito sera" ("And suddenly it is evening"). In the poem by Salvatore Quasimodo in which this line occurs, "sera" ("evening") stands for death. At the cocktail hour, however, the Martini as the "secular sacrament" means the opposite: restoration of life and new hope. See M,SU 23-24, 26, 55-56, 86-89. So the title of the Italian translation of M,SU is what scholars of Latin poetry call a "corrective allusion." Latin poets sometimes quote a word or a phrase from a Greek poet or earlier Latin poet in such a way that, in its new context, it changes or reverses the meaning that it had in the original. The phrase "Ed è subito," ominous in the original, becomes the opposite when "Martini" replaces "sera." The new sentence promises the swift arrival of the cocktail hour, a consummation devoutly to be hoped for, certainly not to be dreaded.

The whole poem:
 

Ognuno sta solo sul cuor della terra
trafitto da un raggio di sole:
ed è subito sera.

Everyone stands alone on the heart of the earth
transfixed by a ray of the sun:
and suddenly it is evening.
 

© 2001, Lowell Edmunds