The Great Montale in English

Eugenio Montale—born in Genoa in 1896, died in Milan, 1981—is one of the twentieth-century Europeans who has spoken most meaningfully to American and British poets. His first published poem, written when he was twenty, already exhibits distinctive characteristics of his work: strict rhythm, dissonant music, richness of allusion, and focused, realistic images, deployed to express an anguished temperament, convinced of the inimical nature of “all life and its torment”:

Sit the noon out, pale and lost in thought
beside a blazing garden wall,
hear, among the thorns and brambles,
snakes rustle, blackbirds catcall.

In the cracked earth or on the vetch,
spy the red ants’ files
now breaking up, now knitting
on top of little piles.

Observe between branches the far-off
throbbing of sea scales,
while the cicadas’ wavering screaks
rise from the bald peaks.

And walking in the dazzling sun,
feel with sad amazement
how all life and its torment
consists in following along a wall
with broken bottle shards embedded in the top.¹

From the first, Montale’s work has an inimitable decisiveness and originality of tone, discernible even in translation. But how did he become one of the poets most widely translated into English; how did Montale’s private, intensely Italian work become part of our poetic conversation?

Harry Thomas, in the introduction to Montale in English (2004), gives a concise history of the Italian poet’s introduction to Anglo-American letters.² Starting with early notices by the Italian critics G.B. Angioletti and Mario Praz in the late 1920s and publication in T.S. Eliot’s Criterion, Montale by the 1930s was already seen as “one of the best-beloved of present-day Italian lyricists,” “the poet with most to say to contemporaries who would heed him.”³ This involved a firm rejection of the posturing style of the great and histrionic Gabriele d’Annunzio, and a painstaking search for poetic and moral “good usage,” often by way of a via negativa (“what we are not,/what we do not want”). As Montale’s work progressed over the following decades, from Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones) of 1925, through the trauma of Fascism (Le occasioni [The occasions], 1939) and the cataclysm of the war (La bufera e altro [The Storm and Other Things], 1956), it evolved into a complex mythic drama that overwrites the Italian lyric tradition to portray a quasi-religious struggle between private experience (exemplified in the poet’s love for the woman he called Clizia, inspired by an American scholar, Irma Brandeis) and the hostile external reality of the war: a kind of cosmic battle between good and evil. In the prolific poetry of Montale’s old age, beginning with Satura (Miscellany, 1971), he revisits his themes from an ironic, disabused, almost postmortem perspective, often questioning the means and matter of poetry itself.

The young Samuel Beckett translated a few of Montale’s poems in 1930. After the war, some British Italianists, among them Bernard Wall, Bernard Spencer, and Edwin Morgan, produced restrained and responsible if not exactly inspired versions. But it was the 1961 publication of Robert Lowell’s Imitations, with eleven major texts by Montale, more than by any other modern poet, that gave the Italian a felt presence in poetry in English. Lowell effectively presented Montale as the great inheritor of Europe’s symbolist tradition, placing him alongside Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Rilke and tacitly anointing him, in true Lowellian style, a modern classic.

Lowell, whose familiarity with languages other than English was spotty, had discovered Montale’s great lyric of regenerative eros, “The Eel,” in 1948 in Botteghe Oscure, and had struggled with a translation of it. While in Florence in 1950–1951, he and Elizabeth Hardwick had met Montale for what Hardwick later described as “several sweaty, mute evenings of language difficulty and great displays of blundering affection.”⁴ With the help of two Italian friends, his translator Rolando Anzillotti and later Alfredo Rizzardi, and with George Kay’s 1958 Penguin Book of Italian Verse as a trot, Lowell eventually made versions of fifteen or sixteen of Montale’s major poems.⁵ As he wrote Rizzardi:

I include him along with Valéry and Apollinaire and Rilke and Pasternak as one of the most powerful poets of our time…. I’m struck by the fact that Montale…is able to take an old theme—a portrait, an erotic poem, an elegy and apply a stupefying, agile, unpredictable, almost surrealistic style. Next to him, most of today’s English stuff seems very tired. Most of the best French poets after Apollinaire are tired and domesticated as well…. In France, the old symbolist tradition has become thin and methodical, the old dynamite of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Corbière, etc seems terribly weakened….⁶

Rizzardi tried in vain to help Lowell with his versions, but came to realize that Lowell was not interested in producing “accurate” translations; instead, he was “devouring and assimilating a new experience according to his poetic physiology.” As Lowell wrote him, “The versions are very free; in any case, they are somewhat different from my old translations, they are in free verse and have no religious additions. I mean, they are Montale and not Lowell, but they try to be strong English poems….”

Lowell’s versions are often excited, approximate, seemingly offhand where Montale is chiseled, decisive, and rhythmically exact. For the Irish poet Paul Muldoon, Lowell has a “tendency to overstep the mark,”⁷ or, as he himself put it, “to be reckless with literal meaning,” working “hard to get the tone,” or rather “a tone, for the tone is something that will always more or less escape transference to another language and cultural moment.”⁸ What Lowell responded to in Montale was rhetorical power, a “dynamite” with at least as great an impact as his own, worthy material for his own rapacious talent to gnaw on.

Unsurprisingly, Lowell tended to favor Montale’s more expansive narrative performances, which gave him room to exercise his own “powerful” tone, over the Italian’s more gnomic and inward briefer lyrics. The results show Lowell battling an indomitable antagonist. Montale is the undisputed winner in their wrestling matches; but despite the imitations’ excesses and awkwardness, something of the originals’ austere grandeur does come through, as here in “Dora Markus,” an anguished fictional portrait of a displaced Jewish woman from Carinthia, in southern Austria, awaiting the war:

It was where a plank pier
pushed from Porto Corsini into the open sea;
a handful of men, dull as blocks, drop,
draw in their nets. With a toss
of your thumb, you pointed out the other shore,
invisible, your true country.
Then we trailed a canal to the outlying shipyards,
silvered with sun and soot—
a patch of town-sick country, where depressed spring,
full of amnesia, was burning out.

Here where the world’s way of surviving
is subtilized by a nervous
Levantine anxiety,
your words flash a rainbow,
like the scales of a choking mullet.

Lowell’s Imitations was followed in 1962 by an issue of the Quarterly Review of Literature dedicated to Montale and edited by Irma Brandeis. In this and a 1965 New Directions Selected Poems, Lowell’s muscle-bound intensity is unfortunately rarely matched in the efforts of Cid Corman, John Frederick Nims, or even James Merrill. Words like “cigale” “withal” and “calotte” and lines like “it grows too stuffy, this day” show us that we remain largely in the realm of translationese, far from Lowell’s blustering fire, and even farther from the tonal and metrical force of the poet himself.

The problem was, if anything, exacerbated by Edith Farnsworth’s Provisional Conclusions (1970). This contains all the poems from Montale’s first three collections not selected for the New Directions volume. But for this reader, Farnsworth’s versions often demonstrate a lack of full understanding of what is going on in Montale’s sentences and they use a fusty, outdated “poetic” vocabulary.⁹

Charles Wright’s translation of The Storm (1978) offered a more inward reading. Wright, a gifted young Tennessee poet, had been bowled over by Italy—and by Ezra Pound—while serving in the army after the war, and his early poetry fairly drips with Montalean influence. His version offers the most internally cohesive response to Montale’s poetry after Lowell’s, aiming at tautness of expression and eschewing Lowell’s externally applied style. If Wright’s Italian is not always perfect, his focus is sharp. Like Corman and other “objectivist” devotees of Montale, Wright gives priority to the image in the Italian, developing an insistent way of hearing Montale’s music that counters Lowell’s dramatizing tone.

And then came William Arrowsmith. A classicist who translated Euripides and Aristophanes, he conceived and edited the Oxford University Press series that assigned contemporary poets to create versions of classical plays with the collaboration of scholars; he was also an enthusiast of Italian cinema and literature, and an admirer of the mid-century Italian novelist and poet Cesare Pavese, translating his Dialogues with Leucò with D.S. Carne-Ross. In 1976, his version of Pavese’s powerful first collection of poems, Lavorare stanca, was published under the title Hard Labor, winning praise for its intense, prose-influenced directness.

Arrowsmith’s first Montale translations were of his greatest book, The Storm and Other Things (1985), and The Occasions (1987). Cuttlefish Bones appeared after the translator’s death in 1992, and was followed by Satura (1998). Norton has now reissued these, along with Arrowsmith’s versions of two of Montale’s three later “diary” volumes, Diario del ’71 e del ’72 (1973) and Quaderno di quattro anni (1976), in a compendium edited by Rosanna Warren.¹⁰

What one appreciates most, reading through this collection, is the largeness of Montale’s project, the Dantean singularity and multifarious unity of what he called his “one book,” and the consistency of Arrowsmith’s faithful engagement with it. Warren has omitted his elegant prefaces to the original volumes, but kept some of his idiosyncratic notes, which draw on classical and Italian scholarship; and she has added annotations of her own to the posthumous volumes. Arrowsmith is a committed Europeanist, a proponent of the larger culture of which Montale is one of the last great protagonists, and his notes convey his sense of what he calls Montale’s “tradition-saturated” way of writing—a perfect description of the simmering broth of associations, borrowings, and echoes from the grab bag of past and present—from Dante to Petrarch, Leopardi, and Baudelaire, to name only the most obvious—that is the substratum of Montale’s style.

Arrowsmith, though not a poet, is a deep reader, and like Lowell is at his best with the long breath of Montale’s more “narrative” poems. “Bello-sguardo Times,” which evokes a storied Florentine hillside, suggests what is about to be lost in the war’s gathering storm:

Sound of roof tiles being ripped apart
by the gusting storm
that taut air that widens out, uncracking,
the slanting of the garden’s
Canada poplar, three-pointed, shaking
at every wrench—
and the sign of a life that accommodates
the marble at every step like the ivy
flinching from the solitary thrust of the bridges
I descry from this high outlook here:…

Arrowsmith divides his versions into lines that mimic Montale’s, though they often read like prose transcriptions of the Italian texts; they pay unreliable attention to Montale’s rhythms, and are thus less concise than the originals. Arrowsmith’s diction sometimes diverges from aptness in rendering Montale’s images, too; instead of trying to find his own equivalents, like Lowell, he can get lost in “accuracy” at the expense of rightness, and his renderings of Montale’s shorter, more image-focused “occasions” or snapshot poems, which depend for their impact on rhythmic and, often, rhyming effects, don’t always evoke what Arrowsmith rightly calls the poet’s “iridescence”—the intermittent flaring of vision, of insight, of linguistic shock and awe that characterizes both his poetic technique and his way of experiencing the world.

Warren correctly emphasizes the importance to Montale’s poetry of his constant engagement with prose, his use of deflating directness and, increasingly as he ages, of irony, to undercut a poetic inheritance that threatens to bury him. But the confrontation with common speech is so important because it is brought to bear—as a counter, a counterweight, a countersong—on the sinuosity and nonprosaic compression, the nonlinear swerve of Montale’s lyric gift. A poet who declared himself unable ever to wholly express his meaning, Montale is always dissatisfied, always engaged in an unending “struggle to unearth another dimension in our weighty polysyllabic language.”

Nevertheless, his poetry is strictly bound by an innate metric rule, and though he can make his Italian tough and jarring, his “astringent music” is musical indeed. This Arrowsmith doesn’t always manage to embody or suggest. He is most at home perhaps in the late, more seemingly prosaic “diary” poems, themselves influenced no doubt by Lowell’s open-ended late-period sonnets, where Montale’s disabused, sourish old man’s sensibility seems to align most closely with the translator’s own:

THE NEGATIVE

Young men, yolks of a single egg, stride
into the wrestling ring of life. Venus
guides them, Mercury divides them,
Mars will finish matters. The scarce light
of this still shy spring won’t shine for long
on the Acropolis.

Arrowsmith’s versions, taken as a whole, offer a consistent, intellectually focused reading of Montale—the most extensive in English to date. They have been followed by others, including those by the present writer,¹¹ and no doubt more will come, because Montale’s poetry is amazing, as Lowell testified and demonstrated. Indeed, Thomas’s anthology gives a few tastes of the approaches of some of the post-Lowell/Wright/Arrowsmith/Galassi cadre of translators, including Jeremy Reed, Jamie McKendrick, and Kate Hughes. Great writers keep engendering new translators because new versions are constantly needed to bring the reader as close as possible to the changeless original via the soluble English of the moment. Very occasionally a translation becomes autonomous, though as Thomas hazards, perhaps none of Montale’s idolaters, Lowell included, has gotten there yet. When this happens, the realm of translation/imitation is left behind and we reenter the territory of poetry itself.

One wonders, reading an enormous volume of translations like this, if the person who benefits most from this activity is not the translator. Arrowsmith, as Warren puts it, “spent the fiercest energy of his last years” absorbed in Montale’s magisterial poetry, and the translator’s investment in the work of a greater writer enriched him in ways only he could fully know. If, as it’s said, translation is criticism by total immersion, the closest form of reading there is, the moment must come when the reader’s absorption of the text becomes so total that all he can do is regurgitate it in his own words, in a necessarily paler reflection that can only be of lesser value to another, necessarily less committed reader. But in getting there Arrowsmith learned an inexhaustible amount about his poet and about himself—far more than could ever be communicated in the lines of a mere translation, however inspired.

What follows is Montale’s most famous lyric, “L’anguilla,” with four English versions, to offer the reader some sense of the variety of responses a great text can inspire.

L’ANGUILLA

L’anguilla, la sirena
dei mari freddi che lascia il Baltico
per giungere ai nostri mari,
ai nostri estuarî, ai fiumi
che risale in profondo, sotto la piena avversa,
di ramo in ramo e poi
di capello in capello, assottigliati,
sempre più addentro, sempre più nel cuore
del macigno, filtrando
tra gorielli di melma finché un giorno
una luce scoccata dai castagni
ne accende il guizzo in pozze d’acquamorta,
nei fossi che declinano
dai balzi d’Apennino alla Romagna;
l’anguilla, torcia, frusta,
freccia d’Amore in terra
che solo i nostri botri o i disseccati
ruscelli pirenaici riconducono
a paradisi di fecondazione;
l’anima verde che cerca
vita là dove solo
morde l’arsura e la desolazione,
la scintilla che dice
tutto comincia quando tutto pare
incarbonirsi, bronco seppellito;
l’iride breve, gemella
di quella che incastonano i tuoi cigli
e fai brillare intatta in mezzo ai figli
dell’uomo, immersi nel tuo fango, puoi tu
non crederla sorella?

—Eugenio Montale

THE EEL

The eel, the North Sea siren,
who leaves your dead-pan Icelandic gods
and the Baltic for our Mediterranean,
our estuaries, our rivers—
who lances through their profound places,
and flinting portages, from branch to branch,
twig to twig, thinning down now,
ever snaking inward, worming
for the granite’s heartland, threading
delicate capillaries of slime—
and in the Romagna one morning
the blaze of the chestnut blossoms
ignites its smudge in the dead water
pooled from chiselings
of the Apennines…
the eel, a whipstock, a Roman candle,
love’s arrow on earth, which only
reaches the paradise of fecundity
through our gullies and fiery, charred streams;
a green spirit, potent only
where desolation and arson burn; a spark that says everything
begins where everything is clinker;
this buried rainbow, this iris, twin sister
of the one you see in your eye’s target center
to shine on the sons of men,
on us, up to our gills in your life-giving mud—
can you call her Sister?

—Robert Lowell

THE EEL

The eel, coldwater
siren, who leaves the Baltic behind her
to reach these shores of ours,
our wetlands and marshes, our rivers,
who struggles upstream hugging the boom, under the flood of the downward torrent,
from branch to branch, thinning,
narrowing in, stem by stem,
snaking deeper and deeper into the rock core
of slab ledge, squirming through
stone interstices of slime until
one day, light,
exploding, blazes from the chestnut leaves,
ignites a wriggle in deadwater sumps
and run-off ditches of Apennine
ravines spilling downhill toward the Romagna;
eel, torchlight, lash,
arrow of Love on earth,
whom only these dry gulches of ours or burned-out
Pyrenean gullies can draw back up
to edens of generation;
the green soul seeking
life where there’s nothing but stinging
drought, desolation;
spark that says
everything begins when everything seems
dead ashes, buried stump;
brief rainbow, twin
of that other iris shining between your lashes,
by which your virtues blazes out, unsullied, among the sons
of men floundering in your mud, can you
deny a sister?

—William Arrowsmith

THE EEL

The eel, siren
of cold seas, who leaves
the Baltic for our seas,
our estuaries, rivers, rising
underneath the downstream flood
from branch to branch, from twig to smaller twig,
ever more inward
bent on the heart of rock,
infiltrating muddy
rills until one day
light glancing off the chestnuts
fires her flash
in stagnant pools,
in the ravines cascading down
the Apennine escarpments to Romagna;
eel, torch, whiplash,
arrow of Love on earth,
who only our gullies
or dessicated Pyreanean brooks lead back
to Edens of generation;
green spirit seeking life
where only drought and desolation sting;
spark that says that everything begins
where everything seems charcoal,
buried stump;
brief iris, rainbow,
twin to the one your lashes frame
and you set shining virginal among
the sons of men, sunk in your mire—
can you fail to see her as a sister?

—Jonathan Galassi

THE EEL

The selfsame, the siren
of icy waters, shrugging off as she does the Baltic
to hang out in our seas,
our inlets, the rivers
through which she climbs, bed-hugger who keeps going against
the flow, from branch to branch, then
from capillary to snagged capillary,
further and further in, deeper and deeper into the heart
of the rock, straining
through mud-runnels, till one day
a flash of light from the chestnut trees
sends a fizzle through a standing well,
through a drain that goes
by dips and darts from the Apennines to the Romagna—
that self-same eel, a firebrand now, a scourge,
the arrow-shaft of Love on earth
which only the gulches or dried-out
gullies of the Pyrenees might fetch and ferry back
to some green and pleasant spawning-ground,
a green soul scouting and scanning
for life where only
drought and desolation have hitherto clamped down,
the spark announcing
the all sets forth when all that’s set forth
is a charred thing, a buried stump,
this short-lived rainbow, its twin met
in what’s set there between your eyelashes,
you who keep glowing as you do, undiminished, among the sons
of man, faces glistening with your slime, can’t you take in
her being your next-of-kin?

—Paul Muldoon