Montale: Poems

A beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets selection of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Italian poet Eugenio Montale, one of the giants of twentieth-century poetry. Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) is not only Italy’s greatest modern poet but a towering figure in twentieth-century literature. His incandescently beautiful body of work is deeply rooted in the venerable lyric tradition that began with Dante, but he brilliantly reinvents that tradition for our time, probing the depths of love, death, faith, and philosophy in the bracing light of modern history. Dynamic innovation and a coiled, fierce energy fuel the poet’s quest for liberation from the self. Marked by musicality and rhythmic variety, Montale’s poems manage to be buoyant with allusion and metaphor while also densely studded with things--with concrete, elemental images that keep his complex and restless musings firmly tethered to the world. Montale’s reputation is international and enduring; his widely translated work has profoundly influenced generations of poets around the world. This volume contains selections from all his greatest works, rendered into English by the accomplished poet and translator Jonathan Galassi. It serves as both an essential introduction to an important poet and a true pleasure for lovers of contemporary

Auteur

Eugenio Montale; Edited by Jonathan Galassi

Échantillon de lecture
from the Introduction by Jonathan Galassi 

READING MONTALE
 
The story begins in an enclosed garden, an orchard to be precise. The wind enters, bringing the sound of thesea, which arouses dead memories. Suddenly the garden is not a garden but a graveyard, a mortuary, and the solitary strip of coastline where it lies has become a crucible, where history itself is forged. The story is being told to someone else, a ‘‘you’’ who, unlike the storyteller, may be able to take flight out of the constricting enclosure with the assistance of an intervening apparition, a creature out of a dream. The one hope of salvation imaginable to the anxious, disaffected storyteller is that his own existence may somehow be justified in helping his interlocutor escape the surroundings he finds so inimical.
 
The story continues, rippling out from here, gathering density, specificity, and color, growing in complexity and resonance. The elemental coastline is vividly evoked: churning sea; impenetrable azure sky; blinding, hallucinatory sun; unforgiving cliffs and shoals – outward manifestations of the narrator’s inner landscape. We get to know him in other ways as well. He is melancholy, solitary, obsessed with death and his past, preoccupied with limitations, both his and his world’s, and he shoulders the burden of an overriding sense of universal wrong. He is an old young man, desperate for a counterpart, a companion who will recognize him and tus rescue him from the prison of himself, who will belie his conviction that he is extraneous to life.
 
Gradually, this other, too, emerges out of the haze of the shore; but she is more absent than present, a phantom herself. Later her nature will be clarified, but by then she has more or less left the narrator behind. Yet his one possession is his anxiously posited faith in her reality, and her capacity not to be saved herself now, but to redeem him. This character so doubtful of his own existence has come to stake his life on the conviction that she is the only real being in an alien and insubstantial world; outside her – and himself – is no one and nothing.
 
The storyteller ventures into the wider world. It is crowded with things – props, toys, keepsakes, exotic animals: the detritus of life past and present – but these become invested with significance only when they function as signs, somehow, of her existence. The loved one appears in several guises before she takes shape as a conclusive figure, but each of her manifestations reveals her essential nature as the storyteller’s mirror and inspiration. Yet her relationship to her faithful servant is difficult and troubled; she is often harshly judgmental, quasi-parental, for she is patently superior to him, partaking as she does of divinity. Still, she is with him, even when she is not physically present; she becomes a part of him, endowing him with the courage and strength to combat an enemy – one especially dangerous for her – who has begun to intervene threateningly in the world and to menace the storyteller and his beloved. Eventually, her battle with this foe takes her far from him, and as she withdraws he sees their private drama projected against a background of universal conflict: she has become an actor not only in his story but in the history of the cosmos itself, her angelic mission now not simply to save him but to protect mankind from self destruction.
 
Eventually, the enemy is defeated; but the angel has been fatally wounded in the struggle and dies, or is translated into another reality, imitating in her own way the trajectory of the Savior who was her precursor and model. The storyteller now is left with only the memory of her splendor and his anguish and resentment at being abandoned to an existence that is even more unpalatable than before – corrupt, decaying, profane like himself. He is visited by idealized images of the closed coastal world of his childhood, which had once felt alien and cruel but which now, in memory, appears nurturing and humane. And now that his experience of divinely inspired love has ended, he consoles himself with a new, earthly love who competes with the fierce angel who inhabits his memory for ownership of his soul. This new figure, his Dark Lady, also takes on various guises before her character is definitively revealed. She is the angel’s alter ego: dark, sensual, carnal – and ever-present. With her, he knows the secular ecstasy of passion, but the experience remains an intensely private one; the dream of universal salvation aroused by the angel’s struggle with the enemy – which is also the storyteller’s dream of liberation from solipsism – remains a dream. In his mind, his new love starts to resemble the angel, and they begin to meld into one life-giving figure, for each represents an episode in the ongoing attempt to escape himself that is the storyteller’s fundamental drama. The illusion fails; finally, it cannot defeat the overpowering, innate conviction of his apartness that a lifetime of experience has confirmed. Nevertheless, the dream of faith in a saving other endures as the essential meaning of the narrator’s story: his one talisman to ward off desolate reality.
 
If Montale’s poetry can be construed as a novel, and there are many indications that he himself thought of it in these terms, this would be its plot. An existential drama, one that has much in common with the itineraries of his fellow European modernists, but with its own highly specific coloration and character; for Montale’s story is also written as a version of the canzoniere or songbook, the collection of poems addressed to a beloved woman that has been the determining form of Italian lyric poetry since Petrarch. More deeply, more comprehensively than any other modernist poet, Montale draws on the tradition that formed him, appropriating its essential story and reshaping it to serve his contemporary purposes.
 
In 1971, after a hiatus of more than fifteen years, Montale published a fourth collection, Satura, which was to be followed in the next decade by three more books that equal the output of his first thirty years of writing. But Montale’s later poetry, written in his sixties, seventies, and eighties, is largely an ironic commentary on what came before, the retrobottega, or back of …