Falling at the Waterfall

 

 

At the foot of the waterfall,

I slip on the rocks and topple

backwards into private dark.

 

The water mutters sorry, sorry,

but I've stumbled over dry stone

because of age and clumsiness.

 

In a whirl of day-night sky

rich with unkempt promises,

I’m outside myself looking in.

 

The spring forest mumbles

its half-formed melodies,

mocking the absent songbirds.

 

Voices of a school group hiking

up a nearby peak retort

to the wind-speak with their shrills.

 

I feel malformed lying here

with bruises flowering and bones

intact but freshly resentful.

 

Upright again, I’m a challenge

to myself. I climb the ledge

to the fork in the trail and choose.

 

I’m too old to hike alone,

but no one’s ever quite alone

on these trails in sprightly weather.

 

The murmur of the waterfall fades

and one authentic thrush critiques

my concern for mutual extinction.

 

My little fear subsides. Only

a couple of rotten spots to prove

I’m still human enough to hurt.

 

 

Eugenio Montale, Montale in English

 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

 

 

Against Silence, by Frank Bidart.

 

This review originally appeared in Harvard Review Online

 

“To further the history of the SPIRIT is our work,” observes Frank Bidart’s persona in “Mourning What We Thought We Were.” In Bidart’s newest collection, Against Silence, the history of the spirit is as much the individual story of the self, as seen in particular landscapes, as it is a larger story of general demise. This new book is elegiac, lamenting the poet’s old age, America, and the dying natural world. He argues, “Every serious work of art about America has the same / theme: America // is a great IDEA: the reality leaves something to be desired.” Poems looking back on Bidart’s childhood in California note the racial and ethnic prejudice earlier generations voiced openly. Even in childhood, he reports sensing the exploitation of California’s fragile landscape: “we have succeeded at last in killing NATURE” (“At the Shore”). Various Bidart personae blurt out rhetorical proclamations like this one, but the voice in this instance is an early one of “California Plush”—the poet speaking for himself, as himself, in the self-effacing tones his friends would hear in conversation.

 

This temperate voice recurs throughout Bidart’s work. Usually it’s in dialogue with the poet’s past, specifically the landscapes of Bakersfield and the Mojave Desert. That dialogue continues in the present collection, in Bidart’s unique style: words are capitalized for emphasis and italicized for sotto voce and digressions; punctuation is individualized and sometimes weaponized. Some readers have found this aspect of his poetry distracting: reading a Bidart poem aloud, while trying to follow its cues, can be a challenge. Bidart has gradually become less dependent on this technique; the longer poems or sequences in Against Silence pose few such typographic or punctuational challenges. Still, Bidart’s method of combining lyric compression and contingency with an essentially dramatic structure is still at the heart of his poetics.

 

This dramatic approach allows Bidart to risk making bald statements that, on their own, might embarrass the reader, but which are often sieved through remarkable metaphors. Take his definition of poetry in “The Fifth Hour of the Night, part 3”:

 

            Dark anti-matter whose matter is

words

in which the seam and the crack (what Emerson

 

·          

 

called the crack in everything God made) are in

 

fury

fused, annealed, ONE.

 

This long poem about Bidart’s harsh childhood and early adulthood deals with the grief, terror and emotional blackmail inflicted on his by his confused, bigoted, and uneducated family. Much of the poem consists of aphoristic, three-line units that function like heroic couplets:

 

            The rage I felt at what she demanded did not

preclude

my furious but supine eventual acquiescence.

 

The fragmented quality of much of Bidart’s verse derives from the compaction and finality of such self-contained stanzas. The spaces between them allow readers to catch their breath and prepare for the next emotional onslaught. Even those that are grammatically linked stand, momentarily, alone, separated by elbow-sharp enjambments. Memory comes in individual packets, each one to be unsealed, examined, and suffered through all over again.

 

This collection is as much about mortality as it is about memory. “Why the Dead Cannot Answer,” the opening dirge, expresses the fear of absolute extinction familiar to those of us approaching the ends of our lives:

 

            A light, just now living, that has

            never been, in its mortal life, turned off—

 

            ON, it has never been, in its mortal

life, not ON,—

 

The fear of the dark, embodied by the light switch, permeates Bidart’s work, from 1990’s In the Western Night, through his long sequence on the hours of the night, and the poem “Dark Night” (after St. John of the Cross). The title of his 2016 collected poems, Half-Light, indicates a partial reckoning with mortality—but only partial, as the final poem in Against Silence once again demonstrates. “On My Seventy-Eighth” finds the speaker seated alone, paradoxically, with his dead self or double. He cannot make peace with this self—its place at the table is empty, and nothing can change that.

 

While the poems in this collection revisit Bidart’s familiar themes of sex, spirituality, strained family relations and personal inadequacies, framing them as he does with poems of mortal dread forces us to read them afresh: the family poems (“Mourning What We Thought We Were”) read like final accountings; poems of lust and longing (“Poem Beginning with Lines by Lisel Mueller”) seem more poignant. Bidart, like all strong poets, is continually reinventing and rediscovering himself; even at the brink of dissolution he refuses to be silent.