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
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