Over the last 50 years, no other Italian poet except Dante has been so often translated into English as Montale. Googling Amazon for book publications confirms this guess. And that’s not to speak of the innumerable one-off versions by contemporary poets, nor of the burgeoning critical industry in English, let alone the mountainous one in Italy. This kind of fame hasthe effect of flattening out the context his poems emerge from as well as crowding out the reputations of several remarkable contemporaries and successors. It’s a monument that fills the whole piazza.

Writing about Edgar Allen Poe, Montale asked: ‘Has he been favoured by his myth, the legend made of him? We have no difficulty in believing that, but the destiny of poets is also a part of their work.’ Criticism should have some ‘difficulty’ with this belief, and should surely try to disentangle the work from its reception. Montale’s reputation is distinct from Poe’s in that his eminence abroad corresponds to his fame in Italy, even if, there, it isn’t bestowed nearly so exclusively. The Nobel Prize can only have helped, though Salvatore Quasimodo, an earlier winner, hasn’t taken, over here, (or taken over, here,) to anything like the same extent. In Montale’s case there may also be some kind of a return of favours: Italian critics often remark, sometimes rather vaguely, on the ascendancy of Anglo-American influences on his work, from Hopkins and Dickinson to Eliot. These claims are unconvincing, but there is a kind of muted irony, a use of barbed understatement, in his writing that might specially recommend him to an Anglo-Saxon readership. The fact that it comes accompanied by sun-baked Ligurian coastal views, by a sense of nature in midday, Dog-day extremis, especially in his first and most translated work, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlebones), only serves both to exoticize and to authenticate the mode.

Ossi di seppia, first published in 1925 when the poet was 29, must be one of the most astonishing debut poetry volumes of the last century. The earliest poem included, written when he was 20, ‘Meriggiare pallido e assorto’, is a hymn to stunned inertia:

To shelter at noon, pallid and rapt,
back against a scalding orchard wall;
to hear from in the thick of briars
blackbirds’ blatter, the slither of adders.

To spy how over the tares’ stalks, along cracks
in the earth, lines of red ants that break
and close ranks, intertwine
atop miniature haystacks.
To observe through boughs the sea’s
distant shimmering of scales
while from bald heights the cicadas
unleash their tremulous calls.

Then walking out in the dazzling sun,
to feel, grimly amazed, how all
of life and its drudgery is in
this act of following a wall
whose top is harled with jagged glass.

This translation of mine falls some way short of the complex acoustics of the original. Although Montale’s poems will tend towards subtler and more oblique effects, the very stated moral in the original poem’s last stanza is offset and facetted by an ingenious series of interlocking rhymes (abbaglio / meraviglia / travaglio /muraglia / bottiglia). The poem’s structure is basic: static infinitives organize each of the four stanzas — meriggiare, ascoltare, (st. 1) spiar, (st. 2), osservare, (st.3), sentire, (st. 4). But the senses they call on, especially that of hearing, are vividly alert to a bristling panorama of small-scale activity. The ‘k’ ‘g’ ‘ch’ and ‘sh’ sounds (schiocchi, frusci, veccia, s’intrecciano, formiche, biche, scaglie, cicale, calvi, picchi) are superbly orchestrated in the final line ‘che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia’. (It’s worth remembering that in Italian the double consonants are sounded.) Though the form looks at first conventional, there are irregular lines, and even the rhyming has odd qualities such as the already noted final stanza and the hypermetric rhyme ‘veccia / s’intrecciano’. The harsh consonantal quality of the writing and rhyming is reminiscent of Dante’s ‘rime petrose’ (stony rhymes), which particularly in this section of the book (the actual ‘Ossi brevi’) might be termed ‘bony rhymes’.

This early poem also introduces the idea of the wall, a limit to perceptions, which will, in a number of transformations, be a signal motif throughout his work. It appears in this volume’s poem ‘In limine’ as the ‘erto muro’ (sheer wall), as well as ‘the net’, a break in which will allow the addressee to escape. Elsewhere this image becomes a veil, a seal, a husk, and most famously ‘un’aria di vetro’ (literally, an air of glass), a glass screen. Though some of the poems are addressed to absent people, the poems are essentially self-communing, or rather enact an engagement of the self with the natural world, minutely and brilliantly apprehended, but always acknowledging some prohibiting veto, some wall that blocks human access to the primary and Edenic. Frequent bird, animal and plant imagery is constantly set against the defining backdrop of the sea. The risk of solipsism is not always averted, but the rewards of the poems are in their chaffing, percussive musicality, the precision of the imagery and the vast reach of language that blends the colloquial, even occasionally dialect words, with the offbeat and recondite (here, for example, the verb ‘Meriggiare’ is uncommon and literary).

The negative constructions that abound in his work are already fully present in this first book (most famously in those lines from another Osso, ‘Don’t ask us for the word…’: ‘all we can tell you today is / what we don’t want, what we aren’t’) and announce a sceptical, resistant sensibility. Montale is a poet of resonant negatives, an anti-rhetorical stance probably taken with D’Annunzio in his sights. This cast of mind will equip him well for the years of Fascism, and Le occassioni, (The Occasions) his second and perhaps greatest book, takes what was essentially a contract with the natural world and exposes it to the social world, to the terrafirma of culture, as he was to call it.

Le occasioni was published in 1939, its composition more or less coinciding with the poet’s residence in Florence. The move towards greater obliquity, or Hermeticism, can be seen in the sequence ‘Mottetti’, where single images, or ‘flashes’ (the English word is used by Montale) suddenly illuminate a whole psychological complex, and then, just as abruptly, vanish. The poems are more fractured, sometimes even febrile in their imagery. For all that the personal experience these poems record seems under increasing external threat, the writing itself has an unwavering assurance.

Pasolini characterized Montale’s poetry as the product of a wounded, bourgeois sensibility, but this unnecessarily limits the scope of the poems. The critic Glauco Cambon notes that though the First World War, in which Montale was a combatant, rarely surfaces in his poems, ‘the repercussion of that first holocaust of the century is to be felt in the atmosphere of hopelessness which recurrently visits his poetry’, and his refusal of any further ideological conscription is informed by that experience.

Another feature that emerges fully in these poems is the presence of a ‘tu’, often a woman, whom the poem addresses. As with the dedicatory poem of Ossi di seppia, these figures (who will come to be known as Clizia, Arletta, etc.) are often the repositories of the poet’s fugitive hopes for an alternative to the increasingly sinister world the poems register.

Those years of, and leading up to, the Second World War might not seem the most auspicious of times for a poet to try to re-animate a Provençal or ‘stilnovistic’ convention, in which a departing or absent female figure becomes a crucial — both spiritual and erotic — governing principle of the poem. But this renewal of a tradition is what Montale undertakes. And, by anchoring this principle within the menace and finely observed phenomena of the times, in ‘Dora Markus’, ‘News from Mount Amiata’ and ‘The Coastguard’s House’, for example, he achieves effects of extraordinary intensity.

For those wanting to learn more about this topic, and much else about the individual poems of the first three volumes, Jonathan Galassi’s notes to his translation (Montale, Collected Poems 1920–1954) offer an incisive summary of a range of critical material on the poet. When I reviewed the book, I objected to this long coda of footnotes the poems had to drag behind them, but have since been grateful for their existence. Still, the question remains as to how fruitful all the endless research into the symbolic properties of these addressees really is, and it’s a question about which Montale himself remains playfully sceptical.

These absent presences, though they may involve actual figures such as Irma Brandeis, a Jewish friend and Italianist who returned to the US in 1938, are also poignant residues of the poet himself, the ‘signs’ of life of a spirit that hasn’t been deadened by the times it lives in. The ‘tu’ which, Montale himself joked in a later poem, has become a critical institution, is also something that belongs within the consciousness of the poem, a fugitive other. And so much of the finest of Montale’s writing is pitched towards these curtailed impressions or flashes that vouchsafe a sense, however menaced, of a better life.

In La bufera (1956), the third volume which completes his major work, a woman addressee (probably Clizia) gloriously re-emerges in one of his greatest poems, ‘L’anguilla’ (‘The Eel’). Another, more earthbound, figure, ‘La Volpe’ (the Vixen) — identified as the poet Maria Luisa Spaziani — provides a contrast to the ethereal and transcendental Clizia. Oddly, Robert Lowell’s translation of ‘The Eel’ incorporates the next, untitled poem which is addressed to ‘La Volpe’ (‘Se t’hanno assomigliato…’) as part of ‘The Eel’. I suspect this was done inadvertently through his use of George R. Kay’s Penguin Book of Italian Verse as the source. There, the second poem follows ‘The Eel’ without title, so that a reader not paying attention to the conventions of the book (first word in caps.; first letter in larger size for each new poem) might easily assume the two separate poems were two stanzas of the same poem. Had Lowell referred to an Italian text — or even looked more closely at Kay — the error wouldn’t have occurred. Apart from links in the imagery, the two poems in the Italian have interesting formal similarities, each being 30 lines long without a full-stop and ending in a question. Though the two poems seem to be addressed to different women, the deliberate formal connections between them may have added to Lowell’s conviction that the two belonged together, and may even account for the way Lowell has badly misconstrued the final question of ‘L’anguilla’. (His book, Imitations, prints both Italian ‘titles’, separated by a semi-colon, after his translation, which would suggest that by the time of printing, Lowell had been made aware of his initial mistake — but, by that stage, I suspect he was committed to the version as it stands.) Given the licence he claims for his versions, why shouldn’t he call them (make them) ‘sisters’, to reprise Montale’s question at the end of ‘The Eel’? I think the answer is that they aren’t, and Lowell, for all the energy of his version, leaves ‘The Eel’ in a sorry tangle.

Several subsequent volumes followed in a far quicker succession that wasn’t to be interrupted by his death in 1981. Beginning with Satura (1971) —effectively considered the cutoff point — these works have a drier, more casual tone. Their manner of de-mythologizing the earlier work has caused some dismay in critics such as the poet Giovanni Raboni, as if they were not just a falling-off but a betrayal. Montale himself acknowledges that the three first books constitute a complete entity, calling them his three canticles. Many of these later poems have the air of aftermath, of having outlived their occasions; and yet though they lack the pitch of intensity and the musicality of the earlier work, they can still call on his style of ‘condensed despatch’. In contrast to the shadowy, supramundane, female figures that populate his earlier poems, the elegies for his wife, Drusilla Tanzi, nicknamed La Mosca, in Satura’s ‘Xenia’ sequences, tenderly and ironically record a vivid, actual presence. Even the briefest of these work well within the sequence: ‘Listening was the only way you had of seeing. / Now the telephone bill’s a damn sight cheaper.’ (His wife’s shortsightedness is a recurrent image.)

A poem like ‘In the Window’ could represents this late manner:

Birds that bode ill — say owls of one type
or another — only turn up live
in undernourished Kasbahs or else stuffed
in the glass cases of misanthropes. And if
a swallow should happen to build its nest
in a vent or flue and an incautious tenant
snuffed it from the fumes: that would be a one-off
and not enough to change the total picture.

Considering the abundance, one could say excess, of translations of his best known work, mightn’t these canny and durable late poems — relatively ignored in the Englishspeaking world — deserve more attention?

Jamie McKendrick was born in Liverpool in 1955. He is the author of four collections of poetry: The Sirocco Room (1991); The Kiosk on the Brink (1993); The Marble Fly (1997), winner of the Forward Poetry Prize; and Ink Stone (2003), shortlisted for the 2003 TS Eliot Prize and the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award. His book of selected poems, Sky Nails, was published in 2000. He lives in Oxford, edited The Faber Book of 20th-century Italian Poems (2004), and is currently working on a translation of the poetry of Valerio Magrelli.

EUGENIO MONTALE
Collected Poems 1920-1952: Revised Bilingual Edition, translated by Jonathan Galassi (Farrar Straus Giroux £19.99)
Cuttlefish Bones (1920-1927), translated by William Arrowsmith (W W Norton £9.85)
Satura, translated by William Arrowsmith (W W Norton £9.95)
Montale in English, edited by Harry Thomas (Handsel Books £10.65)
(Prices courtesy of Foyles)

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