Mottetti: Poems of Love: the motets of Eugenio Montale

by Eugenio Montale, Dana Gioia (Translator)

A series of twenty Montale poems dealing with love, loss, remembrance, and the place of humans in the natural world. Translated and introduced by Dana Gioia.

Genres: Poetry, Nobel Prize, Italy

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1939

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

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

The black and white
flight of swallows rising
and falling in a line
from the telegraph
pole to the sea
does not ease the pain
you feel by the water
nor bring you back
to somewhere
you have left.

[Eliot · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best love poems ever. Full of oblique ache and wonderful spare linguistic contemplation. Right up there with Neruda’s The Captain’s Verses.

[Jack · Rating 3 out of 5]

Evocative and resonant poetry of love.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

IV

Far away, still I was with you
when your father
went into the darkness and left you his goodbye.
What did I learn
in that moment? That until then
the ravages of the past
had spared me
only for this:

I had not meet you yet
and had to. I know this
from the pain of today, and would
even if the hours bent
back on themselves and bought
me once again to Cumerlotti
or Anghebeni, among the exploding
shells, the screams,
the panic of the squadrons.


XVI

The flower on the mountainside,
which keeps repeating its
forget-me-nots from cliff
to cliff, has no colors brighter
or happier that the space
set between us.

A screech of metal is puling us apart.
The obstinate blue sky is fading. In a sky
so sultry you can barely
see through it, the funicular
carries me back to the other station
where it's already dark.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was given this small volume by my mother late in her life. She was for fifty years a close friend of Irma Brandeis, the American Dante scholar "who half a century ago inspired these poems." Having known the charming and inimitable Irma myself makes the book more personal to me.

The excellent facing translations allow someone not strong in Italian to read in either language. The poems are about irrevocable separation through which longing persists. The most famous VI, begins "La speranza di pure rivederti m'abbandonava." Reminds me of "Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch'entrate," but Montale is not in or entering Hell in these poems. He has lost hope of ever seeing the beloved again in person, but not the memory of her. Maybe my favorite of the twenty is XI, the second verse of which begins "La tua voce e quest'anima diffusa."