This review originally appeared in Harvard Review
Eugenio Montale, Montale in English. Edited by Harry
Thomas. New York:
Handsel Books, 2005. $17.00, paper. ISBN 1-59051-127-1.
Italy produced
numerous interesting and several great poets in the twentieth century.
D’Annunzio, Quasimodo, Bassani, Levi, Pasolini, Gozzano, Penna, Ungaretti, and
others have appeared in English translations of varying quality, but none has
been better served than Eugenio Montale, the 1975 Nobel Prize winner. His work
has tempted many excellent scholars and poets to produce versions that despite
great difficulties with tone and connotation frequently catch the intellectual
brilliance and sometimes even the melodiousness of Montale’s Italian.
Montale’s
global subject is mutual illumination through the interaction of physical and mental
worlds. His feeling for the mystery and depth of the natural world and the
nuances of our response to it place his poems among the most richly textured
and engaging of the last hundred years. His poetics unfold from the
complexities of Ossi di Seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925), his first book,
to the journal-like but actually even more oblique constructions of Saturna (1971), an elegiac collection
that eschews the self-contained anthology pieces of the earlier work in favor
of an aesthetic of contingency and incompletion. Montale is at least as rich
and complex a poet as Eliot, whom he occasionally and slightly resembles, and
his imaginative concerns chime with those of several of the other great
English-language modernists, most notably Wallace Stevens, so it is hardly any
wonder that so many American poets have been drawn to him.
Because
their sensibilities so readily entwine, Robert Lowell created the most
beguiling if not the most accurate versions of certain of Montale’s poems, and
sparked much of the ongoing interest in Montale in the English-speaking world.
However, William Arrowsmith, Lowell’s
opposite, through his dogged literalness and even his occasional grammatical
and syntactical oddities, gives a sometimes wonderful account of Montale’s strange
and sometimes unearthly tone. Arrowsmith translated Montale’s four major
collections, and his volumes are essential for their extensive notes, which
make available to the general reader a good sampling of the large body of
Montale criticism. Anyone interested in Montale will find Arrowsmith’s and
Jonathan Galassi’s editions essential for both their expert if sometimes
idiosyncratic translations and their valuable apparatus. Also, Charles Wright’s
edition of The Storm (1978) is an
important rendition of one of Montale’s four major collections, although lacking
extensive notes.
Harry
Thomas has chosen from a wide variety of translators, including Wright,
Arrowsmith, Galassi, James Merrill, David Ferry, J. D. McClatchy, Jeremy Reed,
and Samuel Beckett, sometimes including two versions of an important poem to
illustrate the possible variations. He has included only a few of the Italian
originals, but the serious reader, even lacking Italian, will attempt to puzzle
these out to get some sense of how this most sensuous of poets sounds in his
own language. Thomas’s introduction discusses the history of Montale’s
reception in the English-speaking world, which begins with the first published
translation (of “Arsenio,” by Praz) in Eliot’s Criterion, through the early efforts of Irma Brandeis and the
important publication of Lowell’s Imitations
(1962). Since then there has been a flood of Montale collections in England and the United States, from most of which
Thomas has chosen with discrimination and intelligence.
This
selection of one hundred poems intends to be representative rather than
comprehensive, and presents a convincing cross-section of Montale’s long
career. One could prefer this or that rejected translation, of course. I would
like to have seen Lowell’s “Arsenio” included,
not because I object to Mario Praz’s and Edwin Morgan’s versions but because Lowell’s is so powerful a
poem in its own right. His begins dynamically with “Roof-high, winds worrying
winds / rake up the dust, clog the chimney ventilators, / drum through the
bald, distracted little squares.” Marred by the passive voice, Praz’s begins,
“Dust, dust is blown about the roofs in eddies; / It eddies on the roofs and on
the places / Deserted, where are seen the hooded horses.” Morgan’s “Tiny tornadoes
lift the dust in the air / Till it eddies over the roofs and the empty spaces /
Deserted by all except the vizored horses” is accurate but a little flat.
Still, Thomas includes a Lowell version of “Flux” not previously published in
book form and one entitled “Eastbourne” never before published in any form, and
I am grateful for these. On the whole, Thomas has selected judiciously and with
an ear to balancing the various approaches to the problems of translating this
difficult poet. He has produced the best English-language introduction to
Montale available, and I strongly recommend it to anyone who cares about modern
poetry.
William Doreski
