Collected Poems 1920-1954

by Eugenio Montale

A white dove has landed meamong headstones, under spires where the sky nests.Dawns and lights in air; I've loved the sun,colors of honey, now I crave the dark,I want the smoldering fire, this tombthat doesn't soar, your stare that dares it to. --Eugenio MontaleOpera's loss was poetry's gain. Eugenio Montale, the 1975 Nobel Prize winner in literature and one of Italy's greatest poets, originally aspired to be an opera singer. Born in Genoa in 1896, Montale was a delicate child, his health precluding him from getting a formal education; instead, he spent his youth reading philosophy, literature, and Italian classics, and training as a baritone. World War I found him serving as an infantry officer on the Austrian front. Upon his return to civilian life, Montale took up singing again, but after the death of his voice teacher in 1923, he abandoned his operatic hopes. Just two years later, he published his first collection of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones . Over the next 50 years, Montale would produce many poems in between his work as a journalist; Jonathan Galassi's Collected Poems 1920-1954 , however, concentrates on three collections that are, arguably, his Cuttlefish Bones (1925); The Occasions (1948); and The Storm, Etc. (1956). In addition to Galassi's excellent translations, two other things stand out about this one is that both Italian and English versions can be read side by side; the other is that Galassi has thoroughly annotated these poems, placing Montale's challenging work in its historical, cultural, and personal context. We are told, for example, that "Leaving a Dove" is, in part, about the poet's abandonment of an old lover for a new one. Such information adds piquancy to the imagery and depth to the reader's appreciation. --Alix Wilber

Genres: Poetry, Italian Literature, Italy, Nobel Prize, Literature, 20th Century, Classics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Eugenio Montale was born on October 12, 1896 in Genoa, Italy. He was the youngest son of Domenico Montale and Giuseppina (Ricci) Montale. They were brought up in a business atmosphere, as their father was a trader in chemicals. Ill health cut short his formal education and he was therefore a self-taught man free from conditioning except that of his own will and person. He spent his summers at the family villa in a village. This small village was near the Ligurian Riviera, an area which has had a profound influence on his poetry and other works. Originally Montale aspired to be an opera singer and trained under the famous baritone Ernesto Sivori. Surprisingly he changed his profession and went on to become a poet who can be considered the greatest of the twentieth century’s Italian poets and one who won the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975 "for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions."

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I have read Montale poems in the past, this collection, the largest I have read, still left me stunned at the concentrated power of his language, which was quite simply breathtaking. It's poetry to take over mind, body and soul. He conquers with enigmatic images, the sort of which could invade ones dreams, and if one of the main functions of a poem is to offer an alternative to dominant ways of thinking and feeling, and even on occasion to offer an alternative to its own alternatives, then Montale's 1920-1954 collection of poetry is of the not to be ignored kind. It may not fit in with one's world overview, but somehow is still very much accommodated.

Like many creative people, Montale started on a different path in life, first training as a baritone before being drafted into the Italian army in 1917. 'Cuttlefish Bones' his first collection of poems, published in 1925 (just over two years after Mussolini came to power) was the turning point, making him one of the greatest Italian poets. He was a fan of the lush, lyrical incantations of Gabriele D'Annunzio (another Italian poet, 1863-1938) and Montale wanted to offer his own lyrics of negation, in the style of a stony, whispered countereloquence, a rhetoric freed of Italian poetry's orotundity. Flashes of salvation, often in the form of a beautiful but remote woman, appear and vanish, but the primary sensation is of stimulating frustration, an awareness of something always near yet endlessly out of reach. In some ways there is an other-worldliness similar to that of Pablo Neruda.

It doesn't surprise me Montale was also a keen traveller, as this is one of many themes explored, the poetry's genius comes out equally strongly in his intensely realized portraits of the itinerant inhabitants of modernity, this collection is most emphatic in his portraits of refugees and exiles, especially Jewish wanderers traversing the landscape, of course Montale was a poet under Fascism.
One of his most famous poems is about another migrant, this time an eel, as if for Montale, the earth itself were one vast and often tragic network in which all creatures are in circulation, endlessly migrating and returning, disappearing and reappearing. In a single, slithering sentence he describes the whiplike creature's desperate voyage from the cold Baltic to the ''Edens of generation'' in Italy. And as the poem contemplates the final stages of the eel's pilgrimage through half-expired streams, it explodes with fellow feeling, with the sense of survival as a form of poetry and of poetry as a form of survival.


Just to pigeonhole Montale as a love poet doesn't paint the complete canvas, these were deeply bewildering and beautifully crafted poems, yes, so eerily cosmopolitan, so multilayered, so distilled rhetorically, that don't seem to belong to any specific moment, as individual works they whisk and whirl confronting the dilemmas of modern history, philosophy, faith and courage, told with a deft subtlety that truly captures the imagination. This really is transcendental reading, detaching oneself from the oblivious outside world.

This collection happened to be bilingual, which for me was a shame as my Italian is pretty basic. However, I still managed to read some of the shorter poems in Italian just for that authentic feeling. I wanted to include a poem, but how do you choose from such a vast array of them?, picking one at random seemed the best option. All poems range from being very good to extraordinary.

Encounter -

My sadness, don't desert me
on this street
lashed by the offshore wind's
hot eddies till it dies; beloved
sadness in the gust that fades: and wafted
toward it over the moorings
where day exhales its last voices
a mist sails, a connorant's
wing beats above.

Beside us is the rivennouth,
waterless, but alive with rocks and lime;
but more a mouth of withered human acts,
of wan lives setting over the horizon
that locks us in a circle:
ravaged faces, raw hands, files
of horses, screaming wheels:
not lives: vegetation
of the other sea that rides the waves.

We travel on a roadway of dried
mud, no deviation,
like hooded figures in a cortege,
under the shattered vault that fell
to mirror the windows,
in a dense fog that shrouds our steps
and makes the swaying human
seaweed seem
like curtains of murmuring bamboo.

If you too leave me, sadness,
my one live omen in this haze,
a whirring spreads around me,
like clockworks when the hour's
about to strike;
and I go lifeless, waiting listlessly,
for the one incapable of fear
on this shore surprised
by the slow tide, who won't appear.

Maybe I'll find a face again:
in the glancing light a movement leads me
to a sad bough craning from a jar
by a tavern door.
I reach for it, and feel
another life becoming mine, encumbered
with a form that was taken from me;
and it's hair, not leaves, that winds
round my fingers like rings.

Then nothing more. Drowned one, you disappear
the way you came and I know nothing of you.
Your life is still your own: already scattered
amid the days few glimmers. Pray for me now
that I may come down by another route
than a city street
in the brown air, ahead of the press
of the living; and may I feel you with me, may I
come without cowardice.

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Absent one, how I miss you on this shore
that conjures you and fades if you're away

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

After devouring this collection (as an undergrad), I discovered a whole new appreciation for lemons.

[Old Man JP · Rating 5 out of 5]

The gust that lifted the bitter scent
of the sea to the valley's twists and turns
and struck you, ruffled your hair,
brief tangle on the pale sky;

the squall that glued your dress to you
and shaped you swiftly in its image,
now you're gone it's returned to the rocks
the mountain shoulders over the abyss;

and, now the drunken rage is spent,
it's come back to the garden, the gentle breeze
that lulled you in your hammock in the trees,
on your flights without wings.

Alas, time never spills its sand
the same way twice. And there's hope in this
for, if it happens, not nature alone
but our story, too, will burn in a flash.

Outflow that doesn't quicken
and now brings to life a group of dwellings
exposed to the eye on the flank of a hill
and festooned with pennants and flowers.

The world exists ... Amazement halts
the heart that surrenders to straying ghosts,
herald of evening: and won't believe
starved men are celebrating.

So many amazing poems in this compilation of Eugenio Montale's work.

[Octavio Solis · Rating 5 out of 5]

A difficult array of verse by the master of modern Italian poetry. It took me a while to get through this book since I insisted on reading not only the English translations but the original Italian poems on the facing pages. Still, this rich and demanding immersion into the complex philosophical and aesthetic constructs that Montale devised as a kind of novel of related verses connected me directly to the Divine Comedy of Dante. There is something epic lining up in the sequence he’s laying forth in these works written over decades: similar spiritual muses, similar journeys through time and across the globe, similar questions of mortality and eternity.

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Montale has stated, “I always begin with the real, I’m capable of inventing anything.” His Collected Poems demonstrate his obsession to sacrifice himself in his language, resulting in his constant search for meaning in the elusiveness of life. His work follows in the line of the revered Italian tradition of Dante and Petrarch. He attempts to free himself from the world’s existential drama, which he confesses guilt for helping to create. His work can be seen as an exorcism to aid him in escape from this world, as he calls upon the sea, the sun, the garden, and of course his angelic phantom, a beloved woman who becomes his own personal religion. He looks to her as a revelation that shall rescue him and lead his soul to paradise, a place he is unable to see and which he knows may ultimately fail him. Montale’s voice sounds like a solitary, melancholic figure clinging desperately and devotedly to an illusion of this beloved woman. He places his faith and guidance in the verses he addresses to her in hopes that she shall save him. The ruined world has solace in her mission. He seeks to unburden his soul from something seemingly impossible to convey. His oeuvre can be read as a narrative leading one on a path where finding faith can also lead to doom. The musicality of Montale’s verse regularly evokes memories and remarkable images of the natural world. He is certainly a poet of unparalleled abilities.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Montale is a marvelously lyrical writer, but somewhat too enigmatic for my taste. I gave up long ago trying to understand these poems, and instead just gave myself over to the mood and atmosphere of his work, which can be celebratory and melancholic, concrete in imagery yet evanescent in feeling. Among 20th c. Italian poets, I prefer Umberto Saba, but in certain moods, I find Montale complexly richer. I pull him off the shelf once or twice a year, and feel transported. Any more than that, I feel lost.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just lovely. Good poems; beautiful translation. A good go-back-to collection.

[Michael Haase · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eugenio Montale's poems are too obscure to be even enjoyable by more than a handful of people in the world, save those who haven't the faintest clue what the poems actually mean but think they sound pretty. The rhyme scheme is irregular, the meter is inconsistent, and the text is incoherent. If there is some complex, underlying message in the text, I couldn't grasp it. To be sure, Montale manages to convey a sense of tone and perhaps charges his writing with emotion, but the exact significance of the text is near to impossible to accurately fathom.

I love reading poetry, but what I enjoy most is fluidity and force. A poem should vocalize its meaning strongly and fluently. It should be easy to follow, melodic and pleasant to read, and be capable of being understood within a single reading. With Montale's poetry you need to constantly stop, analyze the text, read it again, consider every potential meaning behind each word, view the line from a political perspective, maybe close the book and do some research, and then continue for another two or three lines before stopping again. After finishing the whole poem, you need to reread and reread it, and even then you probably wouldn't understand it.

Perhaps Montale intended for his poems to be unfathomable, in order to avoid criticism from the Fascist Party. Maybe he just wrote down whatever came into his head and called it avant-garde (i.e. "obtuse").

Here's an example of his poetry:

"The wind picks up, the dark is torn to shreds,
the shadow that you send out on the fragile
balustrade is curling. Too late, if

you want to be yourself! The mouse
drops from the palm, the lightening's on the fuse,
on the long, long lashes of your look"

What does the wind represent? How is darkness torn and why does it curl? What is the balustrade supposed to be? What is the mouse supposed to be? What is the lightening? Who is "you"? Why does he have long lashes? Why is all this random information in only two sentences? Don't expect an answer to these questions. You'll just need to guess. All of his poems are this way. Several of them don't even have titles.

[Elisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

有好用且篇幅适中的注解。sempre più addentro, sempre più nel cuore / del macigno [...] finché un giorno / una luce scoccata dai castagni / ne accende il guizzo in pozze d’acquamorta [“鳗鱼”] 《乌贼骨》是如此易懂，如此跃跃欲试地汲取着���人的汁液，而读到《风暴》最后的部分，内心（指我的）已变得像意大利老电影里的海滨虽然植物乱长鸟乱飞仍然一片荒芜。我在泥滩上挖一个水坑即使没有闪亮的鳗鱼从里面钻出来。

[Ramzzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Of all the “collected” poems I have read—Eugenio Montale’s collection is novelistic: sustained, peremptory, one and oneiric. It is really a one piece beaming of life, love, and melancholy. A true great Italian lyric, not an opera of fragments and entropy.

[Peter Sprengelmeyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a great anthology of his work, and while his poems are quite good, what i liked best was reading the evolution of his images and thinking over time. This book samples from his collections from Cuttlefish Bones to The Storm and Other Things. Those who can read him in the native Italian will probably get a great deal more out of his use of language, timing, and meter - but the images and thinking is evocative even translated into English.

Only this is what we can tell you today,
that which we are not, that which we do not want.
-Cuttlefish Bones

[Fed · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ossi di seppia", "Le occasioni", "La bufera e altro" these are great pieces, and I like the translation, but I am still of the idea that poetry should always be read in the original language first, and resort to the translation only if necessary.

"Non recidere forbice quel volto" e' la mia preferita! Che poesia piena di simbolismo. La poesia di quel periodio e' per me' la piu' significativa e Monatle sa' come esprimere i sentimenti dell' anima con simbolismo che non solo da' una descrizione appurata emotiva, ma anche in una maniera che il lettore puo' vedersi come protagonista.

Le sue poesie sono cariche di simbolismo cosi' ordinario che ognuno puo' immedesimarsi nelle descrizioni e sentirsi come se queste descrizioni appartenessero a se stesso. Per esempio, mentre leggevo " non recidere forbice quel volto" sono riuscita ad immaginare le forbici che tagliavano il volto di una persona amata e sentivo il suono delle forbici mentre le lame venivano aperte e poi chiuse velocemente per tagliare un'immagine immortalata all'interno di me.

[Peter Crofts · Rating 4 out of 5]

A massive undertaking, the notes account for as much of the heft of this volume as the actual poetry. This is something you immerse yourself in. There is an anti-poetic component to Montale that places him, at times, in the company of other European poets like Pessoa and Machado. I'm convinced the Neruda must have been familiar with him as well. It seems to me his presence is in the mix out of which the Elemental Odes were composed. I've read this several times since picking it up and it's always a deep, rich experience. I also pull my hair out, the originals are included and it's clear there is a phonetic and rhythmic component that is completely absent from the translations. This is not a criticism of the translator, just an always present problem with the task of translating poetry.

[Scott Cox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eugene Montale won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. His poems are not the easiest for me to understand (perhaps better read aloud in his native Italian tongue?). My favorite lines from "Cuttlefish Bones:" "Don't ask us for the phrase that can open worlds, just a few gnarled syllables, dry like a branch. This, today, is all that we can tell you: what we are not, what we do not want."

[Night RPM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishing translation by Jonathan Galassi of poetry by my favorite 20th cent Italian poet. I've re-read this volume so many times, but each traversal is equally pleasurable as the last, if not more.

[Dusty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beyond a faithful translation of this modern Poet's first and most important three books, this collection also includes very extensive in-depth notes and a very illuminating essay on reading Montale's early work. This is a book I will be returning to time and time again.

[Sudarsan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely, spare and even elegant in places. A welcome respite to Jarrell.

[Mills College Library]

851.912 M763c 1998

[Matt Morris]

See my review of this & other books at http://miscmss.blogspot.com/2014/04/t...