Genoa

1. Introduction

In introducing the five versions of poems by the Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1892 – 1981) that appear below in section 5. A SAMPLER – ‘EASTBOURNE’, ‘NEW STANZAS’, ‘THE RETURN’, ‘THE STORM’, and ‘LITTLE TESTAMENT’, let me first of all thank David for inviting me to present them. As regular readers of these pages may recall, David and I met at the University of Liverpool in the academic year 1965 – 1966, when we shared several memorable poetic experiences, including hearing those young fellows, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, read. Carelessly, we then lost touch for some four decades, only catching up with one another again around 2009 through this website.

It was in the mid-Sixties that I first came across a handful of poems by Eugenio Montale. As far as I can remember, this was in 1965 in Stanley Burnshaw’s splendid The Poem Itself (Penguin, 1964), whose subtitle was 150 European poems translated and analysed. Burnshaw’s book (which had first appeared in the U.S.A. in 1960) offered the text of these 150 poems followed by a crib linked, often line by line, with a careful account of the poem. In his introduction Burnshaw set out what he saw as some of the key innovations of ‘modern poetry’ (as at that date) across the five languages his book covered: French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Eugenio Montale was represented by four poems. He found himself in company that included, among many others, Valéry, Perse, Éluard, von Hofmannsthal, Rilke, Machado, Vallejo, Lorca, Alberti, Neruda, Pessoa, Campana, Saba, Ungaretti and Quasimodo. For a young man infected by poetry and a love of languages, this was a rich trove indeed.

This early encounter encouraged me to take two steps. The first was to seek out other poems by Montale that had been rendered into English. This led me almost at once to Robert Lowell’s versions of ten poems in his collection Imitations (Faber, 1962) and to those by the Italianist George Kay. Kay’s wide-ranging selection was published by Penguin in 1969 in their innovative and influential series Modern European Poets and used versions that first had appeared in 1964 from Edinburgh University Press, though there with the Italian originals on the facing page. For many, not always coincident, reasons, I found both Lowell’s versions and Kay’s unsatisfactory. This led directly to my second step: to learn enough Italian to be able to read in the original what I already sensed were wonderful poems. And this is what I did.

In compiling this material, I have been interrogating my younger self about what it was in Montale’s poetry that caught my attention. In the paragraphs that follow, I discuss only his first three books – Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925; second, enlarged edition in 1928), Le occasioni  (The Occasions, 1939; second, enlarged edition in 1940) and La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things, 1956), and offer a sampler (see section 5 below) of five poems from the second and third of these. I have confined my attention to these three books partly because it was these that established his reputation and partly because, in the Sixties, remarkably perhaps, these were the only full collections he had so far published. His next collection, Satura, would not appear in a trade edition till 1971. To address the work from his extensive later career would take me well beyond my remit.

 

2. Biography

Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896 into a comfortable middle-class family and spent his formative summers at his parents’ villa in Monterosso on the Ligurian coast, part of the so-called Cinque Terre, an experience that would deeply ground and influence his poetry. Largely self-taught, he did not attend university but, from 1914, began a course of intensive self-education, guided by his sister, Marianna, a philosophy student at the University of Genoa, and supported by reading at the public and university libraries.  In 1917, he enlisted in the army and served from January 1918 at the front, where he commanded an outpost near Valmorbia in the province of Trento. In 1920 he was demobilized with the rank of lieutenant.

In 1922 Montale began placing poems in magazines. This was also the fateful year in which Mussolini and the Fascist Party seized power in Rome. Montale refused to join the Party, a stand that would eventually cost him his employment. His first collection, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), was published in 1925 by the left-wing editor, Piero Gobetti.

In 1927 Montale moved to Florence, where he was employed initially by the publisher Bemporad. His circle of literary contacts grew to include, among others, the writers and poets Italo Svevo, Umberto Saba, Salvatore Quasimodo and Mario Praz. In 1928, an enlarged edition of Ossi di seppia appeared. That year, Montale’s poem ‘Arsenio’ appeared in T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion, in a translation by Praz, a significant event in that it brought him to the attention of an English-speaking readership. In 1929 he was appointed Director of the Gabinetto G.P. Vieussieux, a historical and cultural institute in Florence, where he worked for the next ten years.

At the start of December, 1939, however, he was, as he had long expected, dismissed from the Vieussieux for his persistent refusal to join the Fascist Party. Now without stable employment, he became a freelance translator, mainly from English. In October 1939, his second collection, Le occasioni, was published by Einaudi in Turin. A slightly enlarged edition appeared in 1940.

In 1942, he left Florence for Monterosso, taking refuge from the bombardments, which in the same period had destroyed the family home in Genoa and, with it, all his books. In the winter of 1943 – 1944 he sheltered Umberto Saba and other friends who had been forced into hiding. In June 1943, one month before the overthrow of Mussolini, a chapbook, Finisterre, which after the War would form the first part of his third collection, was published at Lugano in Switzerland. It had been smuggled out of Italy by a friend and bore the epoch-challenging epigraph ‘Les princes n’ont point yeux pour voir ces grand’s merveilles. Leurs mains ne servent plus qu’à nous persécuter…’ (Agrippa d’Aubigné: ‘The princes have no eyes to see these great marvels: their hands serve only to persecute us’).

In the turbulent period following the War, Montale worked as a journalist and reviewer. In 1948, he became an editor with Corriere della Sera and moved to Milan. In this year, too, he travelled to London under the auspices of the British Council, where he met T. S. Eliot for the first time, and read in Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh. His third full collection, La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things), was published in 1956 in a limited edition in Venice, and in 1957 by Mondadori in a trade edition. Over the next few years, the importance of his work was recognized by the award of many prizes and honorary degrees.

In 1962 a new collection, Satura, appeared in a limited edition. That year he and Drusilla Tanzi, his partner of three decades, married, though in 1965, following a fall, she died. In 1966, he published Xenia, poems in her memory, which in 1971 took its place as the first section of a trade edition of Satura. In 1973, he published a further collection, Diario del ’71 e del ’72, his fifth. In 1975 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1977, his sixth collection, Quaderno di quattro anni (Notebook from Four Years), appeared. In 1980 a further set of poems, Altri versi (Other Poems), was incorporated into a collected edition of his poetry.

Eugenio Montale died in 1981 in Milan, a month before his eighty-fifth birthday. He was given a state funeral in the Duomo in Milan and was buried next to his wife in the cemetery of San Felice a Ema, near Florence.

 

3. Montale’s Poetry

The critical literature in Italian on Montale is vast. In my non-specialist’s enthusiasm I have read a good deal of it, as well as studies by English scholars. I have also read all the published English versions of his collections, as well as versions in German and French. In what follows I address, sometimes only briefly, six topics: Montale’s stance to life; his character as a Muse poet; his allusiveness, including what has been called his hermeticism; and his reputation as a ‘poet of the object’. I also offer some brief remarks about the formal properties of his verse.

One of Montale’s most famous poems with Italian readers – it is also one of his earliest, having been written in 1915 – goes by its almost untranslatable first line: ‘Meriggiare pallido e assorto’. One academic Italian dictionary sketches the meaning of the first of these four words thus: ‘Literary: to pass in peaceful idleness the hottest hours of the day, for the most part in an open and pleasant place, refreshed by shade and water’ (my translation). Montale’s short poem – it has just seventeen lines – describes its narrator sitting by the sunbaked wall of a garden listening to the alarm call of blackbirds and the dry rustling of snakes in nearby thorn bushes. He observes the columns of ants manoeuvring in cracks in the earth, glimpses far off through palm trees the ‘sea’s pulsing scales’ and hears the harsh sound of cicadas from the bare mountains. The poem ends with what has become a celebrated image: ‘walking along in the dazzling sun / to learn, in melancholy wonder, / how life and all its travails are just this – / this walking beside a high wall topped / with bits of jagged glass’.

For an impressionable young man who had grown up in Liverpool in the 1950s but who had also had the good fortune of having lived for a short period in his early teens en famille in Marseilles and Corsica, this was instantly appealing. The detailed Mediterranean setting with its sea view, the heat, the sense of existential languor were irresistible. But the poem also offered a compendium of motifs and themes that would figure, directly or transfigured, in much of the poetry in Montale’s first three collections: barriers and boundaries; enclosed spaces, seen as sites of inertia; life-denying repetition (for example, following the line of an insurmountable wall); by contrast, glimpses of openness into which escape might be made and where meaning might perhaps be found, although that openness may also seem alien (for instance, the sea with its pulsing reptilian scales); finally, in terms of manner, the deployment of objects as carriers of implied significance.

Montale’s fear that quotidian life may be an illusion was cogently expressed in another short poem from Cuttlefish Bones, ‘Perhaps, just out for a stroll…’, from 1923:

 

Perhaps, just out for a stroll, the morning air

being dry and glassy-clear, I’ll turn and see,

with a drunkard’s terror, the miracle occurring:

at my back the void, mere nothingness behind me.

 

Then – presto – as if on a screen, houses, trees

and hills will all reassemble: the old trick.

Too late. Silent, I will pass on among those

who never turn round, keeping my secret.

 

It has often been remarked that Montale is a Muse poet. In conveying the dynamic of enclosure and escape, of meaninglessness and the discovery or creation of meaning, his key mediating trope is that of a salvific female figure. In poem after poem, such figures, either present or absent, are directly addressed. This is especially true of the first three collections, the number of such poems rising book by book. Today this may perhaps be a literary mode which, for all kinds of reasons, is no longer fashionable, or even, some might say, admissible. Nonetheless, it is a central fact of Montale’s oeuvre. In this, he is the inheritor of the long tradition of love poetry that arose in the thirteenth century with Cavalcanti, Dante and other Italian poets, a tradition itself derived from the earlier poetry of the Provençal troubadours. Taken forward by Petrarch and later writers, it would reverberate throughout the literatures of Western Europe.

The question of who the female addressees are in these many poems has been the subject of much biographical speculation; in the decades since Montale’s death the picture has become somewhat clearer. Within the scope of this article, however, it is not possible to unpack this complex story. Suffice to say that Montale was sometimes evasive about these matters, claiming that the woman addressed was an invention, while elsewhere asserting that he was incapable of inventing anything. Often, he combined aspects of more than one woman. For the poems, however, the key is to regard these figures as indeed being fictions, though fictions inspired by real women (as Dante’s Beatrice was inspired by a real person), someone to whom Montale was, in different degrees, emotionally close.

As Montale reimagines the Petrarchan tradition, and the Thirties advance towards the expected world war, his poetry enacts a double trajectory, one private, one public, which increasingly converge. In the earliest poems the female figure is elusive, perhaps (so it is implied) prematurely dead. She is strongly associated with the Ligurian coastal landscape of his boyhood and was perhaps inspired by a friend of the poet’s youth, who in reality did not die young – which should alert us to the complex blend of fact and fiction that is in the nature of these figures.

As she enters his poems of the Twenties and Thirties, her role changes. The opening poem of Montale’s first collection, Cuttlefish Bones, is ‘On the Threshold’. It was written in the first half of 1924. It ends with a prayer, addressed to the woman-figure, that she might break free of the constraints holding the two of them, while yet leaving him behind still trapped:

 

We are held fast in a net. Find a tear

in the mesh. Go now, leap clear:

this is my prayer for you. My thirst

will be less, less bitter the rust.

 

Two years later, however, ‘Delta’, one of the poems Montale added to Cuttlefish Bones in its second edition in 1928, marks a turning point. Here the presence of the elusive woman-figure is signalled obliquely by events occurring in the landscape, which associate her, for instance, with the water rushing through the delta of the title. These manifestations offer, however fleetingly, the possibility of his own escape. Her ‘silent word’ ambiguously sustains him on his way. Here is the enigmatic final stanza of this four-stanza poem:

 

In the alternation of the hours – ash-grey

or split by a sulphurous flash – no sign of you

but the whistle of the tugboat, which out of the mist

puts in towards the bay.

 

The rhetorical doubleness of this – the negative formulation (‘no sign…but’) and the charging of a humdrum event with a significance not fully explained, and this at the climax of the poem – is a characteristically Montalean blend of diminishment and meaning-making. Nonetheless, his own escape now seems not impossible. ‘Delta’, with others in this group, opens the way to The Occasions and The Storm, whose poems thematize the dialectic between the absence of the woman-figure and the arcane sign whose occurrence in the world signals her paradoxical agency, implying a realm beyond the quotidian. These are, one might say, poems of displaced religious feeling, though it is worth noting that Montale rejected, often vigorously, all forms of established religion and was wary of settled creeds, whether religious or secular. Indeed, there are poems in The Occasions and in The Storm and Other Things, and in later poems, that are driven by a strongly satirical impulse in such matters.

Montale’s poems from the second half of the Thirties, collected in The Occasions, come from a period marked by significant historical events: in 1935 the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and Italy’s consequent expulsion from the League of Nations; in 1936 German remilitarization of the Rhineland in violation of the Treaty of Versailles; from 1938 the promulgation in Italy of racial laws after the German model; also in 1938 the Anschluss, Germany’s absorption of Austria, and, later that year, its annexation of parts of Czechoslovakia; in May 1939, the signing of the military alliance between Italy and Germany known as the Pact of Steel; in September 1939 Germany’s invasion of Poland. In these unfolding circumstances, which threatened to sweep away the cultural world to which Montale belonged, the female figure shifts and becomes more dynamic. Her new avatar is a species of secular angel. As Montale wrote in 1946, he ‘projected [her] on to the background of a war both cosmic and earthly, a war without purpose and without reason’ (‘Intenzioni: Intervista immaginaria’, 1946). Her particular power is to oppose the barbarism of the present and to encourage in the poet and in those to whom she appears a belief that barbarism will eventually be overcome. In this incarnation, she is strongly associated with light, especially with light breaking out of darkness, or light that flickers or flashes or dazzles – Montale’s diction is rich in such words – but her manifestation and demeanor, though charged with power, are unpredictable.

At its apogee in the late Thirties and early Forties, Montale’s imagining of this compound Muse invests her with a quasi-redemptive power. In several poems of the period he draws on Christian imagery to do so, while rejecting conventional religious handling. This move reflects his on-again-off-again, intense friendship with the human addressee of these particular poems, the American Dante scholar, Irma Brandeis. Their relationship came to a definitive end in September 1938 when Brandeis, who was Jewish, was obliged for her own safety to return to the U.S.A.. They would never meet again. In my view, his powerful feelings of loss and their idealized projection on to the contemporary world-historical circumstances skew these poems in an unconvincing direction, despite their many strengths.

A later poem, ‘Little Testament’ (included below) marks another phase. It was written in May 1953 and was the penultimate poem of The Storm and Other Things. There it stands as the first of two poems in the final two-poem section, whose overall title is ‘Provisional Conclusions’. That reductive title and the limiting adjective ‘Little’ convey something of the more circumscribed ambitions of these poems. The ephemeral ‘rainbow’ which, in ‘Little Testament’, Montale bequeaths to the female addressee is ‘no great legacy, no lucky charm / to withstand the monsoons / that batter the spider-silk of memory’: a fragile token hardly likely to protect her in what he fears will continue to be a world menaced by demonic and destructive forces. Yet it is all he can offer. The final poem of The Storm, ‘The Prisoner’s Dream’, written in 1954, reflects the historical moment of both poems. This was the period that saw the entrenching of the Cold War. The nuclear arms race was heating up: in 1953 the Soviet Union detonated a hydrogen bomb. Also in 1953, Joseph Stalin died, to be replaced by Nikita Khrushchev. In the U.S.A., Senator McCarthy’s witch-hunt on unAmerican activities was still in full swing, though it would end with his denunciation in April 1954. In Montale’s homeland, the fissiparous nature of Italian politics was on full display in the contentious general election of 1953, in which the Communist Party gained a fifth of the votes and other left-wing parties a further fifth. ‘The Prisoner’s Dream’ contains the following lines:

 

The purge has gone on forever,

no why or wherefore. They tell you

that if you recant and sign you can

save yourself from this massacre of geese:

condemn yourself but betray and sell out

the flesh of others, and you can grab the ladle

instead of ending up in the pie

reserved for the pestilential Gods…

 

…and the beatings go on and on, and the footsteps,

and still I do not know whether at the feast

I shall be the stuffer or the stuffing.  The wait is long:

my dream of you is not yet at an end.

 

These two poems foreshadow the increasingly wry and self-deprecating character of much of Montale’s later verse. Opinions on this later period vary, some readers finding there a diminution of lyric power, while others (such as myself) find the astute ironizing of his existential concerns a fitting, if oblique, commentary on the age.

As these remarks suggest, Montale’s poetry is highly allusive. He began as a poet in the decade following the deaths of Giosuè Carducci (1835 – 1907) and Giovanni Pascoli (1855 – 1912), and their presence can be felt in his early verse – for example, from Pascoli, his transfiguring of humble details drawn from ordinary life, as well as his sense of a present haunted by its past. Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863 – 1938), whose career as a writer had already passed its peak in the first decade of the century as he morphed into a contentious public figure on the Fascist Right, was a presence whose scintillant, pantheistic energy was to be written against.

But it is Dante who most powerfully suffuses Montale’s writing. Dante is there at the level of myth, in the deployment of motifs, and even in his diction. An example of the first is the centrality of the angel-woman in his mature poetry. As to motifs, one might consider these: the descent into or the ascent out of the darkness of a lower region, often involving stairs (including, in one poem, an escalator); enclosed spaces and their associated boundaries (walled gardens, prison cells, political borders); the crossing of rivers; storms and winds of various kinds, including whirlwinds; plants as being alive in a human manner; regions of ice; images of light as signs of grace; fire, desiccation; endless circular motion. These and many more often acquire a specifically Dantean coloration by particular word-choices. For example, in the penultimate stanza of ‘Delta’ (discussed above) Montale employs the word ‘riviera’ to refer to the river flowing vigorously out through its several mouths into the sea. In standard modern Italian, however, ‘riviera’ means ‘coast’ or ‘seashore’ (and in this sense is of course a loan-word into English). For Dante it signifies ‘river’ – used, for example, to refer to the ‘trista riviera  d’Acheronte’ in the third canto of the Inferno, or figuratively in Paradiso 30 to describe a river of light: ‘E vidi  lume  in  forma  di  rivera  / fulvido  di  fulgore,  /  intra  due  rive’ (‘And I saw a light in the form of a river dazzlingly bright between two banks’). The allusive effect of this kind of word-choice may be impossible to convey in English.

Montale’s has often been described as a ‘poetry of the object’ in which sensuous details serve as a bridge between abstract and concrete (like the whistle of the tugboat in ‘Delta’). As one Italian critic put it, ‘Objects are entrusted with bearing witness’ (Angelo Jacomuzzi, La poesia di Montale: Turin: Einaudi 1978). In this, Montale’s practice has sometimes been linked with T. S. Eliot’s ‘objective correlative’, though in my view this is misleading. For a start, Montale was already writing  his ‘poetry of the object’ well before Eliot’s 1919 essay on Hamlet appeared in which he set out his influential concept. As Eliot put it there, ‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.’ This has a dogmatic tone alien to Montale, nor does it satisfactorily describe his own approach, which is more open-ended; and of course Eliot was discussing drama, not lyric poetry. Objects in Montale’s poems often have the property of suggesting a penumbra of meanings. One important aesthetic consequence is that an object in Montale, whatever signifying force it may seem to have, remains very much itself.

His allusiveness and his ‘poetry of the object’ are no doubt aspects of his writing that led to his being accused of obscurity. He was grouped by some critics with his near-contemporaries, the otherwise very different poets, Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888 – 1970) and Salvatore Quasimodo (1901 – 1968) under what had originally been intended as the disparaging label Ermetismo, a designation Montale rejected. It is nonetheless true that the poems are often rhetorically unstable. Their surfaces are often disrupted by shifts of direction across often concealed depths. Montale is mistrustful of the way language may lead toward statements that appear to claim for themselves certainty but which are in fact instances of mere velleity. It is often through syntax that these effects are mediated. Sentences beginning with conditional clauses are common. Other complex and extended structures occur, in which the completion of the syntax is delayed. Another favoured device is the list, its items linked (if at all) only by the coordinating conjunction ‘and’, a pattern that leaves unspoken the relationship between the components. Sometimes, the entire list can appear insecurely moored to the adjacent syntax, creating a further disorientation. Subdued plays on words abound. The fact that so many of the poems are poems of address means that they can be heard as one side of an implied dialogue. Questions, entreaties, figures of acknowledgement or concession abound. It also leaves open several, possibly conflicting, scenarios: that the woman is present, that she is elsewhere and is addressed only in imagination, that she is in fact dead. It is not always certain that she ‘hears’ what is said to her, so that the apparent act of communication implies the impossibility of communicating: the poem may be speaking only to itself.

One other important aspect of the poems in these three collections deserves mention: their formal characteristics. Across the three books, there is a gradient of evolution from the earliest poems, which are almost all in metre and rhyme, towards poems in which patterns of rhyming are less strictly observed, or which are not end-rhymed at all, and where there is greater freedom in the matter of metres. (This progression continues beyond The Storm and Other Things into the poems he wrote in the latter part of his career.) Despite this, it is the case that Montale is an instinctively formal poet. Even the shortest and slightest of poems are eloquently shaped.

Here are three instances, the first ‘Bibe at Ponte all’Asse’ from The Occasions, an expression of thanks to the innkeeper of a celebrated family-run trattoria not far from Florence, which overlooked the River Greve, and to his young daughter who helped out at table. (As of this writing, the business still exists.) In metre and content the original echoes a graceful poem of compliment by Carducci (whose metre in turn distantly echoes Latin elegiac couplets). Montale, however, clearly aware of this background, adjusts the form by adding rhyme. Perhaps my version gives something of its delightful feel:

 

Bibe, genial host, your little dark-haired Queen of Sheba

mixes smiles and Rùfina wine, fourteen percent.

 

Below, among the scattered maples, the earth shimmers.

Where the Greve bends, a boy’s fishing rod curves above the current.

 

The second instance is ‘To Ljuba Departing’, a brief poem of farewell to a Jewish friend escaping in 1938 from the Italy of the newly introduced racial laws. The poem in its compassionate wit and tenderness is both light and heavy, a mélange embodied in its formal features. As printed, its eight lines are a sequence of conventional metrical lines of eleven, seven and five syllables; only the first and last lines rhyme. In a quietly bravura piece of verse-making, however, the patterning of five pairs of internal rhymes marks out a quite different structure, a ten-line ballata stanza, a traditional song-form. It is a brilliance perhaps impossible to translate.

The third example is a ‘sport’ among Montale’s poems of this period, ‘Keepsake’. (Montale’s own title is in English.) By turns high-spirited and poignant, ‘Keepsake lists moments from the operas Montale loved, many now not well-known, especially in the anglophone world. Indeed, several details seem to be recollections of bits of ‘stage business’ from particular performances. In twenty-two skilful and fluent hendecasyllables Montale brilliantly incorporates a flurry of exotic names from these obscure works (for example, ‘Fatinitza, ‘il Marchese del Grillo’, ‘Zeffirino’, ‘Moschettieri’, ‘Van Schlisch”]’, ‘Takimini’, ‘Larivaudière’, and so on.) The poem concludes with the touching reflection that Man Friday, a character in Offenbach’s 1867 operetta Robinson Crusoé, ‘dreams of green islands and no longer dances’.

These three poems also serve to point up another of Montale’s qualities, one not much commented on, his occasional playfulness, even when, as in the poem for Ljuba Blumenthal, the circumstances are of great moment. The central image of the poem is her ‘hearth cat’ – ‘the magnificent god / of your scattered family’ (a glancing reference to the Jewish diaspora) – which she is taking with her into exile, carried, not in a cage but in a hatbox carefully wrapped.

I end this necessarily selective account of Montale’s first three collections with a short passage  from a prose piece he included in The Storm and Other Things, ‘Visit to Fadin’, and another from an essay written in 1944 as the end of the war in Europe was coming into view.

‘Visit to Fadin’ concerns Montale’s last visit to Sergio Fadin (1911 – 1942), a poet-friend, who died in hospital near Rapallo of an illness contracted during the Italian war in North Africa. It dates from 1943, the year in which Mussolini was killed by partisans, and his regime was overthrown to be replaced by the Germans. At its close, Montale draws from the life and death of his friend what he calls the ‘great lesson of daily decency (the most difficult of all the virtues)’ [Montale’s italics] and, addressing his friend, adds that he who has learned this lesson ‘can wait patiently for the book of your unpublished relics [i.e. poems].  It may that be your word was not of the written kind..

The personal moral imperative underlying this is evident in an essay entitled “Wish” (“Augurio”) which he wrote in September 1944, a year after “Visit to Fadin”. There he set out some of his hopes for post-War Italy: “…art and science today have value to the extent that a force superior to ourselves is expressed in and through them. This force is no longer the dark irrationalism, the fury of activity which Nazism-Fascism and its pseudo-cultural manifestations…hoped to make into a justification and a norm. It is simply the old battle between good and evil, the struggles of the divine forces fighting within us against the unbridled forces of bestial man, the dark forces of Ahriman. Thus, in us and through us, a divinity is brought into being, earthly at first, and perhaps celestial and incomprehensible to our senses, which without us could not develop or become cognizant of itself. And for this reason, we must simply say No to every exploitation of man by man, to every lie told by a reaction cloaked in the cult of order and a return to the antique, to all the too-easy one-dimensional certainties prompted by immediate advantage. We must simply say No….”

That this passage has, so it seems to the present writer, an acute relevance to our own time is a troubling mark of how precarious are the values Montale espoused in his writing and by which he tried to live.

 

4. Translating

The literature on the theory and processes of translation is extensive; thinking of this topic has no doubt been transformed by the advent of computer-translation programmes. My own approach has been built, however, on more modestly pragmatic foundations and is driven by two related motives: an initial investment of trust in Montale that his poems would repay time spent with them, and a dissatisfaction with every other English version I could lay my hands on – to which the remedy seemed simply to make my own. The consequence of this exercise in pleasing myself is that I may very well have pleased no one else.

Dryden long ago set out what among poet-translators is perhaps still, if sometimes in disguised forms, the predominant position among translators, though maybe not among philosophers of translation. In the Preface to his translations of Ovid’s Epistles in 1680, he surmised that “All Translation…may be reduced to…three heads.” The first he called Metaphrase, “turning an Authour word by word, and Line by Line, from one Language into another.” The second he called Paraphrase, “where the Authour is kept in view by the Translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly follow’d as his sense, and that too is admitted to be amplyfied, but not alter’d.” The third he called Imitation, “where the Translator (if now he has not lost that Name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sence, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion: and taking only some general hints from the Original, to run division on the ground-work, as he pleases” – that is, to execute free variations on the underlying bass-line.

I like to imagine an impossible conversation (impossible in more ways than one – and no doubt involving the surrender of many hostages to fortune) between a translator, on the one hand, and, on the other, a reader who has no substantive knowledge of the source-language. Such a conversation would seek to encourage in the reader confidence that the translation stood in a justified relationship to the original, showing, by reference to features apparent in (or capable of being inferred from) the source text the particular blend of reasoning and intuition that lay behind the translator’s choices. As I say, an impossible conversation – but, in respecting the fiduciary responsibility of translator to reader such a conversation would also attempt to respect the fiduciary responsibility of translator to author, who is to be “kept in view, so as never to be lost”. As Dryden notes a little later, “The sence of an Authour, generally speaking, is to be Sacred and inviolable”. While, from a twenty-first-century perspective, one might argue about what “sense” might be taken to mean, the principle still seems to offer a prudent and practical rule of thumb.

I have therefore declined the precedent of Robert Lowell in his 1962 anthology Imitations. This, as I have said, included versions of ten poems by Montale, four of them from The Occasions. In his introduction, Lowell was frank about his own approach. “I have been reckless with literal meaning, and laboured hard to get the tone… I have tried to write live English and to do what my authors might have done if they were writing their poems now and in America.” He lists some of the licenses he has permitted himself: “I have dropped lines, moved lines, moved stanzas, changed images and altered metre and intent.” Indeed, he went further than this, recasting poems wholesale, adding newly minted stanzas and conflating separate poems. As Dryden mordantly remarked, “Imitation of an Authour is the most advantagious way for a Translator to shew himself, but the greatest wrong which can be done to the Memory and Reputation of the dead.” Certainly, Lowell’s imitations of Montale are everywhere ostentatiously overwritten, often plainly to the point of error. At the other extreme, I have also tried to avoid acting as what Dryden in the same essay calls a “Verbal Copyer”, producing mere slavish transcriptions from one language to the other.

One consequence of these strategic goals is that I wanted my versions to take account of the fact that, as noted above, the great majority of the poems in Montale’s first three books are written in metre and that many rhyme. I have therefore generally allowed the stress-timed pulse of English metres to sound in my head just as the characteristic syllabic patterns of Italian metres sounded in Montale’s head as he composed his poems. The divergences between the grammatical and syntactical rules of Italian and English, as well as their different metrical practices, make closer mimicry unwise. I have taken the same approach to rhyme, not giving it priority over sense and thematic patterning but drawing, as seemed possible and appropriate, on the stock of half-rhymes English offers. My aim has been to make a quieter music that could serve in our very different language as an equivalent for (though not a copy of) the music Montale’s lines make in Italian.

Seamus Heaney, in a short essay called “The Impact of Translation” in his prose collection The Government of the Tongue (1988), warns us that the reader of a translation experiences something “radically and logically different” from the reader of a poem in the original, because “phonetics and feeling [are] so intimately related in the human make-up”. (The whole essay offers a set of penetrating insights into the historical insularity of poetry written in English – in Britain, yes, but also in America –

in the aftermath of the cataclysmic events that occurred in Europe before and after World War II, and into the way the efflorescence of translations from European languages as embodied in Penguin’s Modern European Poets series in the late 1960s served as a critique of that insularity.) Heaney’s judgements stand as a wise challenge to my own modest and largely private project. There is an irony here, of course. Having taught myself how Montale’s poems might perhaps be translated into English, I no longer need the very translations I have made. Nonetheless, my hope is that my versions read as effective poems in English while reflecting the processes and meanings of the original, including the fact of their “foreignness” (another point on which I differ from Lowell): the translator’s impossible double task – to face back towards a poet inhabiting his native language and at the same time forward to readers inhabiting their own.

I have lived with these poems (and those in Montale’s other collections) for much of the past sixty years. While this statement indicates the value I find in Montale’s work, it also indicates a danger for me in my double capacity as reader and translator: the danger that long familiarity may have dulled my sense of the peculiar power of these poems or – worse – embedded in my memory accumulated misunderstandings, gross or fine, to which I am now deaf. I hope not.

5. A Sampler

I have chosen the following five translations of poems from Montale’s second and third collections partly to exemplify some of the features discussed above. A different approach would, of course, have generated a different selection. These versions offer, therefore, no more than glimpses into his rich poetic world. (Two of the translations below, with ‘Keepsake’, discussed above, were part of a submission of seventeen poems from Le occasioni to the John Dryden Translation Competition for 2020 – 2021. The submission won the prize for third place.)

Eastbourne

Boldly the trumpets strike up God Save the King! 

Through the gap between the pilings

of their raised pavilion the tide will advance

and destroy the wet prints

the horses made on the sandy beach.

 

A cold wind buffets me, but a flicker

of sunlight kindles the windows,

and white mica

glitters from the cliffs.

 

Bank Holiday… It brings sliding back

the long wave of my life, its lapse

soft and insidious. The day is ending.

The trumpets’ brassy din

draws out, grows faint and fades…

 

The amputees go by in their wheelchairs,

with long-eared dogs, small silent children,

or the elderly. (Tomorrow, perhaps,

I shall think all this a dream.)

 

And you are here as well, imprisoned voice,

spirit liberated and astray, voice of blood,

lost and restored to this my evening.

 

A hotel door revolves, the panels flash –

another answers, giving back their light;

the spinning of a carousel sweeps

everything away: shaken, I listen hard –

my country ’tis of thee – and now I know

your breathing, and I, too, get to my feet,

and at last the day brims over.

 

In time all this will seem unreal,

even the power you issue out of yourself

that holds in its tough matrix

the living and the dead,

these trees, these rocks.

The holiday is pitiless.

The din of the band returns,

and a grace that is without weapons

deploys in this first onset of the dark.

 

And evil triumphs: the wheel does not stop turning.

 

You knew this, too, Light-in-Darkness.

 

Of the fiery tract from which, at the first peal

of bells, you slipped away, nothing remains

but the acrid smouldering brand that was

Bank Holiday.

 

Completed in 1935; from The Occasions (first edition, 1939) – This poem recollects a visit Montale made to Eastbourne in 1933, a month after he had first met Irma Brandeis, the American Dante scholar. (See Section 3 above.) The date is significant. In that year Montale wrote several poems addressed to an earlier compound Muse. It is clear, however, from a letter dated 7 August 1933 written on headed notepaper from the Queen’s Hotel, Eastbourne, that at this time Brandeis was much in his thoughts. In September she sailed home to the States. She returned to Florence the following summer. Her third and final visit was in 1938. She and Montale would never met again. Eastbourne’ was composed in 1935, while Brandeis was in America. In its characteristic Montalian set-up – the poet looks out from shore, either in the company of the woman or perhaps with her in his mind – ‘Eastbourne’ overwrites several earlier poems with the same set-up. – A strand of military and ambiguously patriotic metaphors runs, half-submerged, through the poem, though translators and commentators often elide it. It reflects the tensions occurring in the world at that time – for instance, in 1934, Hitler’s becoming Führer, and the antecedents of the Italian invasion of Ethiopia the following year, and, in 1935, German re-armament in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. This strand is announced by the blast of the trumpets striking up the British National Anthem and continues in the lines immediately following. The sound of the band recedes, and Montale presents a vignette from the surrounding scene. The amputees are former soldiers wounded during the Great War, a not uncommon sight, even as late as 1933. The old people are perhaps their parents. In a typical motif, the flash of the revolving hotel doors and the spinning of a carousel on the seafront trigger the irruption of a Muse-figure. That she is an American is signalled, again in a typically oblique manner, by the realization that the British National Anthem and the American patriotic song ‘My country ’tis of thee’ are sung to the same tune. (Indeed, until 1931, with the formal adoption of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ as the American National Anthem, ‘My country ’tis of thee’ had commonly fulfilled this role.) With this realization Montale joins the rest of the seaside audience by getting to his feet. When the auditory illusion passes, and the sound of the band is heard again, the British anthem seems both strangely benign and vulnerable. The Italian verb that lies behind ‘deploys’ (‘dispiegarsi’) is variously given in other versions as ‘unfold’, ‘unfurl’, or even ‘diffuse’ or ‘suffuse’, but it is also a technical military term, which, in this context, seems entirely fitting. The poem concludes with a concealed pun on the name of Irma Brandeis, which luckily carries across the divide between Italian and English: the Italian word ‘tizzo’ signifies a charred or partly burning log – precisely, a brand.

New Stanzas

In your crystal ashtray you have stubbed out

the last shreds of tobacco, and the spiral

of smoke slowly rises to the ceiling,

watched from the chess board

by the astonished knights and bishops;

and still newer smoke rings follow,

more unresting than those you wear

on your fingers.

 

The Fata Morgana loosed into the sky

towers and bridges – and was swept away

by the first breath of air: the unseen

window opens, and the smoke wavers.

Out there, a different host is afoot

on that chess board whose meaning

only you can divine,

a pandemonium of men

ignorant of your incense.

 

Once I feared you had not seen

the game unfolding on that board,

which is now a storm-cloud at your door.

Death’s frenzy is not cheaply appeased –

the flash of your eyes is worth nothing, then? –

and demands other fires beyond the dense

veils of smoke the god of chance,

should he bestow his favour, ignites.

 

Today I know what it is you wish.

The Martinella tolls its dull note

and terrifies, in a ghostly snow-light,

the ivory figures. But in this lonely vigil

he will endure and win the prize who,

like you, can raise to the burning-glass

that dazzles and blinds the pawns

your eyes of steel.

 

Written in late May, 1939; from The Occasions ( first edition, 1939) – On 22 May the Foreign Ministers of Germany and Italy had signed the Pact of Steel, committing the two countries to military cooperation should either be attacked, so that by the date of this poem it was clear that Italy was bound to be drawn into the forthcoming conflict. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the poem’s final word is ‘Acciaio’ (steel).  – ‘fata Morgana’: a mirage as seen across the Strait of Messina which creates the illusion of towers and pinnacles in the sky (originally associated with the story of Morgan Le Fay in the cycle of Arthurian stories which the Normans had brought to Sicily). ‘Martinella’: By tradition the bell in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence was rung to warn of the threat of war. It had also been rung on 9 May 1938 to celebrate Hitler’s visit to Florence with Mussolini. This visit, which was captured on film (the newsreel can be found online), was the subject of one of Montale’s most famous poems of the period, ‘La primavera hitleriana’ (‘Hitler Spring’) a poem that was unpublishable during the War but was included in Montale’s third collection in 1956.

The Return

Bocca di Magro

Here is the mist, and a wild southwesterly,

which sweeps across the flickering dunes,

and there, hidden by the uncertain brink

or lifted on the to-and-fro of the foam,

Duilio, the boatman, makes the crossing,

struggling at his oars; here is the tang

of the pine-trees, keener

as it breathes through poplar and willow;

and wind-pumps beating their blades;

and the narrow path, fruiting with poisonous fungi,

which follows the waves into the muddy torrent;

and here, still, is the spiral staircase,

the treads worn away at the lip, which twists

in a polychrome frost of pointed arches

up to the veranda;

and here, listening to you, are our old stairs,

vibrating to the sound

you have wakened once more from the phonograph –

the saraband’s light voice

or the cold Erinyes gusting their infernal snakes,

while a storm of screams moves off along the shore;

and here is the sun, which has run its course

and grows dim at the song’s margin – and here

your dark tarantula-bite: I am ready.

 

Written in 1940; added to the second edition of The Occasions (1940), where it is inserted immediately after ‘New Stanzas’.  – Though the War is never referred to, something of the violence and menace of that period darkens what otherwise might seem a set of entirely private memories. Bocca di Magro (i.e. mouth of the river Magro) lies where Liguria meets Tuscany. That is to say, it lies at the extreme south-eastern end of the arc of coast on which important parts of Montale’s boyhood were spent and also at the northern fringe of Tuscany, in whose capital, Florence, Montale had lived since 1928. In 1939, however, his employment in Florence had been ended because of his refusal to join the Fascist party, so that by the date of this poem he was in effect in internal exile. The poem ambiguously overlays a present located at Bocca di Magro with details drawn from summers spent before World War I at the family villa at the north-western end of Liguria. The woman, too, remains ambiguous, fusing some characteristics of an early Muse figure with those – the dominant ones, it may be – of a later figure (Irma Brandeis) from whom he was by then separated. The boatman, Duilio, was not an imaginary person; by naming him Montale honoured his existence. His difficult crossing of the river recalls similar motifs in other poems where crossing boundaries may offer an escape from a claustrophobic past. Here, by contrast, the traverse is dangerous and may indeed be impossible. Likewise, the riverside path echoes similar paths in other poems, though here it is lost to the muddy torrent and is marked by ‘poisonous fungi’ – Erinyes: Several elements merge: the Erinyes (the three avenging Furies of Greek mythology, Megaera, Alecto and Tisiphone, who were depicted as having snakes for hair) and an echo of the famous aria by the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, who, in the Italian translation of the German libretto that Montale knew, sings of  ‘Gli angui d’inferno’ she feels in her breast (i.e. the serpents of Hell) and of being beset by ‘Megara’ and ‘Aletto’. The poetic effect is complex and disturbing.

The Storm

‘Les princes n’ont point d’yeux pour voir ces grand’s merveilles,

Leurs mains ne servent plus qu’a nous persécuter…’ 

Agrippa d’Aubigné, ‘À Dieu’

 

The storm that dashes the magnolia’s

tough leaves, long drum-rolls

of March thunder, volleys of hail –

 

its crystal pattering startles you

in your nocturnal nest:

of the gold that died on the mahogany,

on the fore-edge of the new-bound books,

a sugar-grain still burns in the shell of your eyelids –

 

the flash that whitens trees and walls

and startles them in that everlasting instant –

marble, manna and destruction –

which you bear engraved within you

for your judgement, strange sister,

binding you to me more than love,

then the loud crash, the sistra,

the shaking of timbrels over the pit of thieves,

the tramp of the fandango and, above,

wild groping gestures…

 

…as when you turned, cleared the cloud

of hair from your brow, raised a hand

 

in greeting and passed on into the dark.

 

This poem first appeared in February 1941 with a bland epigraph in Spanish (‘Porque sabes que siempre te ha querido’: ‘Because you know that I have always loved you’). The French epigraph was added when, in 1943, with other poems written in the early years of the War, it was published in a chapbook in Lugano in neutral Switzerland under the title Finisterre. This group of poems had been smuggled out of Fascist Italy by a friend. The new French epigraph (‘The princes have no eyes to see these great marvels: their hands serve only to persecute us’) would have made it unpublishable in Italy. Thus, the Finisterre poems represent an act of defiance of the Fascist state, though that does not exhaust their depths. In Italian, the title of this, its opening poem – it would also be the opening poem in Montale’s third collection, The Storm and Other Things of 1956 – is ‘La bufera’.  ‘Bufera’ is a word with richer connotations than more common near-equivalents, such as ‘temporale’ or ‘tempesta’. It is the word Dante uses in the famous scene in Canto 5 of the Inferno where Paolo and Francesca suffer their eternal damnation, driven along on a fierce gale as punishment for surrendering to their illicit passion. Montale later wrote that ‘the storm is the war, in particular, that war after that dictatorship … but it is also a cosmic war, forever and for everyone.’ The military imagery of the first three lines (‘drum-rolls’, ‘volley’; March is named for Mars, the God of War) reflects this, as does the wild energy of the dancing, suggestive of the unrestrained and violent enthusiasms provoked by Fascist ideology. A version of the same image occurs in other poems of the period: in ‘New Stanzas’ (above), in ‘Hitler Spring’ (referred to in the note to ‘New Stanzas’), and in ‘Little Testament’, the next poem in the sample. Of ‘marble, manna and destruction’ Montale remarked that these are ‘the components of a character; explain them, and you kill the poem’. Notable is their blend of classical (marble) and Jewish (manna) elements. The addressee here is again a fictionalized Irma Brandeis, who was Jewish. The stairs, clearly a Dantean allusion, are a common Montalean motif; they appear also in  ‘The Return’. Finally, ‘The Storm’ illustrates Montale’s penchant for list-poems.

 

Little Testament

This gleam that flickers at night

beneath the skullcap of my thought,

this snail’s mother-of-pearl trace,

this emery of glass crushed underfoot,

is not the light of church or factory

fed by those twin clerics,

the red and the black.

Still, this rainbow is all I can leave you

as witness to a faith that was hard-won,

a hope that burned more slowly

than a stout log in the hearth.

Keep its powder safe in your little compact

for the day when all the lights go out,

when the sardana turns demonic

and a shadowy Lucifer descends on a prow

on the Thames, the Hudson or the Seine,

shaking bitumen wings toil has all but severed,

to tell you This is the hour.

It’s no great legacy, no lucky charm

to withstand the monsoons

that batter the spider-silk of memory,

but a history endures only as ashes,

and mere persistence is nothing but extinction.

The sign was a true one: he who has seen it

cannot fail to find you again.

Each knows his own:

pride was not flight nor humility base,

and the faint spark struck down there

came from no match.

 

Written on 12 May 1953; from The Storm and Other Things (1956) – ‘Little Testament’ is the first of two poems that form the short final section of the volume. The section bears the subtitle ‘Provisional Conclusions’. With the cataclysm of World War II less than a decade in the past, and in the context of the fissile politics of post-War Italy and the disruption of wider European social and cultural life, these two poems offer, at best, a narrow and unconfident hope. ‘Little Testament’ – the title perhaps glances back to the ‘testaments’ of the celebrated fifteenth-century French poet François Villon – rejects the established ideologies of Communism (‘the red’), which was and would remain a powerful political force in Italy, and the Catholic Church (‘the black’) and offers instead a faith grounded in the personal. This is embodied in the poem in characteristic images of light (the rainbow, which is the title of another poem in this collection, and the ‘faint spark’ which ‘came from no match’). Montale domesticates this gleam as being of a kind with the face powder the woman might keep in her powder compact. Such talismans occur elsewhere. In a well-known poem from the Twenties the protagonist, Dora Markus, is preserved by ‘an amulet … one you keep / with your lipstick, powder-puff and file – a mouse / of white ivory: and, just so, you exist!’ But the frailty of the hope expressed in ‘Little Testament’ is clear from the countervailing force of the demonic sardana (a vigorous folk-dance) and the certainty that everything Montale hopes this ‘lucky charm’ might protect will come under severe challenge, and not in Italy alone.