Eugenio Montale

Sometimes regarded as the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi (1798–1837), Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1975, and died in Milan in 1981. He served in the infantry in World War I, and settled in Milan in 1948, where he became the chief literary critic for Italy’s foremost newspaper, the Corriere della Sera. He was also a music critic and a translator, and, for his courageous opposition to fascism, was made a lifetime member of the Italian Senate in 1967.

Montale’s poetry is deeply personal, at times almost hermetic. Often it is addressed to an unknown "you" who, not infrequently, is dead, or to certain women, presented under fictive names (in the manner of classical and Renaissance poets), who played important roles in his real and imaginative lives. They are called Esterina, Gerti, Liuba, Vixen, Dora Markus, Mosca, and Clizia. Liuba, for example, was someone he glimpsed for only a few minutes in a railway station, where she was fleeing from Italy’s Fascist, anti-Jewish laws. Dora Markus was someone he never met; she was, he explained, "constructed from a photograph of a pair of legs" sent him by a friend. Nevertheless, as one of his finest translators, William Arrowsmith, declares, "the poem devoted to her is no mere exercise in virtuoso evocation; it is the objectification of the poet’s affinity for a personal truth, the existential meaning of a given fragment. ‘The poet’s task,’ Montale observed, ‘is the quest for a particular, not general, truth.’ " His poems almost always deal with fragmentary experience, the meaning of which is either obscure or, possibly, terrifyingly absent. As a poet, he had a preoccupation with images of limitation. This is manifested, Arrowsmith writes, in the form of "walls, barriers, frontiers, prisons, any confining enclosure that makes escape into a larger self or a new community impossible. Hence too his intractable refusal to surrender to any ideology or sodality, whether Communist or Catholic."

In 1927 Montale fell in love with a married woman, who left her husband in 1939 and moved in with him. He called her, half-affectionately, half-mockingly, Mosca (or Fly), a name he might have borrowed from Ben Jonson’s Volpone. She was a plain woman with poor eyesight, but he remained devoted to her, and when her husband died in 1958, they entered into a marriage that lasted until her death five years later.

Another woman who would figure prominently in Montale’s work was an American scholar he met in 1932 named Irma Brandeis—later to become the author of a brilliant study of Dante’s Divine Comedy called The Ladder of Vision, an examination of segments of Dante’s great epic without recourse to any credence in its theology. In Montale’s poems she becomes his Beatrice, a woman of more-than-human gentleness and perfection. (In an interview, Montale said the women in his poems were "Dantesque, Dantesque," by which he meant, suggests the poet/scholar Rosanna Warren, they were spiritualized, not fully individualized beings.) He gave this American, a figure of majestic spiritual importance to him, the name of Clizia (might this be derived from ecclesia?). Arrowsmith calls her "the absent center of the poet’s life.... Clizia’s sacrifice of physical love" allows her to become "her lover’s spiritual salvation," and redeems "all those who, like Montale, were suffering the darkness of the Fascist years and human evil generally. She ‘redeems the time,’ " in a phrase borrowed from T. S. Eliot.

Montale was a learned autodidact and a highly allusive poet, a matter that adds to the difficulties and puzzles of his poems. His literary influences, for example, include Plato, the Bible, Dante and the dolcestilnovisti of his circle, Petrarch, Shakespeare and the English Metaphysical poets, Browning, Henry James, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Jammes, and Valéry, as well as Eliot.

A word needs to be said about William Arrowsmith, Montale’s chief, and among his best, translators. He was a classicist who has translated Euripides, Aristophanes, and Petronius, as well as Pavese, and, with Roger Shattuck, edited The Craft and Context of Translation (1961). In addition, he has written penetrating commentary on Eliot’s early poetry and on Ruskin. He observes: "Translation, like politics, is an art of the possible; if the translator has done his work the best he can expect is that his reader, believing that the text has been translated, not merely transcribed or transliterated, will feel something of the contagion of the original."

The poems that follow are selected from Montale’s Satura: 1962–1970, as translated and annotated by William Arrowsmith, and edited by Rosanna Warren.

From Xenia I ------------

1   Dear little insect nicknamed Mosca, I don’t know why, this evening, when it was nearly dark, while I was reading Deutero-Isaiah, you reappeared at my side, but without your glasses you couldn’t see me, and in the blur, without their glitter, I didn’t know who you were.   2   Minus glasses and antennae, poor insect, wingèd only in imagination, a beaten-up Bible and none too reliable either, black night, a flash of lightning, thunder, and then not even the storm. Could it be you left so soon, without a word? But it’s crazy, my thinking you still had lips.   3   At the St. James in Paris I’ll have to ask for a room for one. (They don’t like single guests.) Ditto in the fake Byzantium of your Venetian hotel; and then, right off, hunting down the girls at the switchboard, always your pals; and then leaving again the minute my three minutes are up, and the wanting you back, if only in one gesture, one habit of yours.   4   We’d worked out a whistle for the world beyond, a token of recognition. Now I’m trying variations, hoping we’re all dead already and don’t know it.   7   Self-pity, infinite pain and anguish of the man who worships this world here and now, who hopes and despairs of another. . . (who dares speak of another world?) ...................................   "Strana pietà..." (Azucena, Act II)   8   Your speech so halting and tactless is the only speech that consoles me. But the tone has changed, the color too. I’ll get used to hearing you, decoding you in the click-clack of the teletype, in the spirals of smoke coiling from my Brissago cigars.   9   Listening was your only way of seeing. The phone bill comes to almost nothing now.   10   "Did she pray?" "Yes to St. Anthony who’s in charge of finding lost umbrellas and suchlike things in St. Hermes’ cloakroom." "And that’s it?" "She prayed for her dead too, and for me." "Quite enough," the priest replied.   12   Spring pokes out at a snail’s pace. Never again will I hear you talking of antibiotic poisoning, or the pin in your femur, or the patrimony plucked from you by that thousand-eyed [deleted], long daylights and unbearable hours. Never again will I hear you struggling with the backwash of time, or ghosts, or the logistical problems of summer.   13   Your brother died young; that little girl with tousled curls in the oval portrait, looking at me, was you. He wrote music, unpublished, unheard, now buried away in some trunk or trashed. If what’s written is written, maybe someone, unawares, is rewriting it now. I loved him without ever knowing him. Except for you no one remembered him. I made no inquiries; it’s futile now. After you, I was the only one left for whom he ever existed. But we can love a shade, you know, being shades ourselves.   14   They say my poetry is one of nonbelonging. But if it was yours, it was someone’s: it was yours who are no longer form, but essence. They say that poetry at its peak glorifies the All in flight, they say the tortoise is no swifter than lightning. You alone knew that movement and stasis are one, that the void is fullness and the clear sky cloud at its airiest. So your long journey, imprisoned by bandages and casts, makes better sense to me. Still, knowing we’re a single thing, whether one or two, gives me no peace.   The Death of God ----------------

All religions of the one God are only one, cooks and cooking vary. I was turning this thought over when you interrupted me by tumbling head-over-heels down the spiral staircase of the Périgourdine and at the bottom split your sides laughing. A delightful evening, marred only by a moment’s fright. Even the pope in Israel said the same thing but repented when informed that the supreme Deposed, if he ever existed, had expired.   To continue reading, please click _Download PDF._ -------------------------------------------------

Reprinted from Satura, Poems by Eugenio Montale. Copyright © 1971 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, SpA. English text copyright © 1998 by the William Arrowsmith Estate and Rosanna Warren. Originally published in Italian. With permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.