Selected Poems

by Eugenio Montale, Jonathan Galassi (Translator), Charles Wright (Translator)

Montale's poems range from daily life through history and myth, and on to questions of metaphysics and divinity. As a love poet, a landscape poet, and a spiritual pilgrim he has few equals. Translators Galassi, Wright, and Young recreate the distinctive music of a poet whose poems prove rich and compelling to an ever-growing body of readers.

Genres: Poetry, Italy, Nobel Prize, Italian Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

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 4 out of 5]

A selection of poems taken from Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, and The Storm and other Things.
Not as good as the Collected Poems, but considering Montale's work can be difficult to translate, this selection is rendered into English really well.

[Atri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bring me within your hands that flower which yearns
Up to the ultimate transparent white
Where all of life into its essence burns:
Bring me that flower impassioned of the light.

***

In the future that opens up,
the mornings are moored
like boats in the harbor.

***

I have learned my wisdom,
and much more from that still flame
which burns and makes no sound,
your long and desolate and noonday trance.

***

The flower that repeats
from the edge of the crevasse,
forget me not,
has no tints fairer or more blithe
than the space tossed here
between you and me.

***

Life that enfables you is still too brief
if it contains you.
The luminous ground unfolds your icon.
Outside it rains.

***

I have thought of you.
I have remembered for everyone.
Now you return to the open sky
and everything changes.
This cliff-line still tempts you?
Yes, the wave-reach is the same as it always was,
the sea that joins you to my earlier beaches does not break up.

Calling to mind those shores,
I have arrived with the coots
to take you away from yours.

Memory isn't a sin so long as it does some good.

[Edita · Rating 4 out of 5]

Memory
isn’t a sin so long as it does some good.
[…] before it can lock
onto the images, onto the words, onto the dark
remembering senses of the past, the emptiness
we once occupied which waits us again,
when it is time
to take us back, to take us in.

[Jenna Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I have only this rainbow glow / to leave as testimony / of a faith contested / of a hope that burned more slowly / than an iron-hard log on the fire.”

Loved this collection. Will be reading all of Eugenio’s work!

[Robert Hamilton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've owned this selected volume for probably a decade and a half and while I've leafed through it many times, nothing could prepare me for reading it cover to cover. I had no idea, first of all, how damned difficult Montale could be, especially in his middle period (the late 30s and early 40s). In particular, the poems called "Motetti" from Le Occasioni are as dense as any koan. The work selected from Ossi di Seppia (first book) and La Bufera e altro (later in his career) is certainly less opaque, but only in a relative sense. A difficult English poet like Eliot or Geoffrey Hill can often be tamed a little by simply looking up the allusions, but this is not so easily done in a foreign language, and besides, according to the preface, Montale's allusions tend to be more along the lines of "a Dantesque word" rather than anything more substantial (this is just one of many reasons why I question the constantly-invoked Eliot comparisons).

Nevertheless, these poems are astonishing. Every image, however, inaccessible it might be, is breathtaking in its originality and power. The voice is one of authority, profundity, and sorrow—often intensely personal, rarely "public" as comparable English poets tend to be. It's been noted before that Montale tends to begin in medias res, which is one thing in an epic but quite another in lyric poetry; many of the events and images are presumed to be entirely private to Montale and his circle, although we do know the identity of some of the absent women in the poems, such as Irma Brandeis, who gets the Catullan (or Petrarchan) alias "Clizia." But Montale rejected any association with "hermeticism," and it's true that with a few exceptions, the intensely personal image tends to broaden into a reflection that works on a broader level. The difficulty never repels; indeed, it calls one back to go over and over the lines. These finely-wrought poems (Montale was by no means prolific, and I presume this reflects his craftsmanship and tendency to revise) are the sort that will keep on giving.

Just a brief note—especially since Montale picked up the Nobel, much of his work has gone through multiple translations. This volume relies on several, and in two occasions, offers two separate translations of the same poem. The Italian is provided on the left for reference, and while my Italian swiftly drowns in Montale's deep waters, I know enough to tell, for example, that Robert Lowell's translation of "Notizie dell'Amiata" is so loose as to be nearly a recomposition (beautiful in its own right). So you get about as wide a range as you can get in English—literal, loose, and in between. A few translators have an annoying tic of dropping into a kind of Elizabethan English, with verb endings like -est and the pronoun "thou." I can only presume this is meant to address a use of a T-V distinction that English has lost, or perhaps a use of archaism on Montale's part, but the effect is strange and extremely jarring in English, and some kind of explanatory note would be very helpful in those places. Otherwise, the experience is of reading fine English poetry throughout.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

The brilliant British translator Tony is in top form with this outstanding collection of English-language versions of poems by the great Italian poet Eugenio Montale. Readers less familiar with Italy might want to start with Hitlerian Spring which is let on the eve of the American landing which will liberate Italy from both Hitler and Mussolini. Using imagery from Dante with his American friend Irma Brandeis assuming the role of Beatrice, "Hitlerian Spring" is heady stuff that albeit has more power than finesse.

I much preferred "Shadow of Magnolia" which is much more delicate tribute to the beguiling Irma. My absolute favorite piece in the volume was the "Repertoire" about the fragility of memory in a society in crisis. All in all, Kline has served us up a wonderful banquet.

[Farren · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like Neruda without the fucking. Super blah.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eugenio Montale’s poetry is built on refusal. Refusal of grand metaphysics. Refusal of lyrical excess. Refusal of consolation.

If Italian poetry once sang, Montale learnt to withhold—and in doing so, he transformed silence into a moral stance.

Montale writes in fragments, hesitations, and negations. His landscapes—dry coasts, stones, sparse vegetation—mirror an interior world stripped of illusion. Nature does not reveal truth; it resists it. Meaning flickers briefly and disappears.

His famous insistence on the “negative capability” of poetry aligns him with modernists like Eliot, but Montale is less apocalyptic and more stoically resigned.

Living through Fascism and war, Montale distrusted language that promised redemption. His poems are allergic to slogans, whether political or spiritual. Instead, he offers moments—glimpses of clarity that arrive unexpectedly and vanish just as fast.

Truth, in Montale’s world, is never possessed; it is encountered accidentally.

What elevates Montale is his ethical rigour. He refuses to pretend that poetry can fix history or heal trauma. But he also refuses despair. His resistance lies in precision, restraint, and fidelity to experience. In this sense, Montale stands alongside Miłosz as a poet of moral survival, though Montale is colder, more ascetic.

Montale’s influence is subtle but immense. He teaches us that poetry need not console to matter. Sometimes its highest duty is to say, 'This is what remains when certainty collapses.'

Sparse. Sharp. Unforgiving. Necessary.

Most recommended.

[Andràș-Florin Răducanu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Acesta este primul volum de poezie pe care l-am parcurs în acest an, ales pentru că simțeam nevoia să îmi deschid vederile asupra poeziei. Volum de față este interesant pentru poetica ideii pe care o presupune, precum și pentru model Dantesc pe care se bazează opera lirică a acestui poet italian. Viziunea asupra lumii pe care Montale o expune prin aceste poeme alese este absolut încântătoare. O poezie modernă, căreia îi rămâne totuși un simț clasic, care servește drept exponent al reinventării limbii. Montale are un ochi atent, static, o înghețare a imaginii comparabilă cu un efect cataleptic.

[Ravi Singh · Rating 4 out of 5]

''Ours, too, is the melting of the evening hour. And for us, the streak that rises from the sea to the park and wounds the aloes, too.''

A great Italian poet whose work deserves more coverage. I loved this poetry. Italian poetry generally translates well, I feel, however, many times I wished I knew Italian so I could read Montale's poetry in the original Italian language that he wrote in.

Wonderful poetry.

[Jacob Vorstrup Goldman · Rating 4 out of 5]

The plurality of the translators end up, in the end, being the biggest hindrance to fully appreciate the works of this surely deep poet.

[Cooper Renner · Rating 2 out of 5]

I guess the music of the Italian must be great. The English—blah. Knots of nouns, pictures or “scenes” which seem static representations of static states of being. Pooh.

[Alessandro · Rating 2 out of 5]

Translation wasn’t very good..

[Lisajean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eugenio Montale won the 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."

This was #91/121 on my Nobel Laureate reading challenge. I especially enjoyed this edition of Montale's poetry, as it was interesting comparing the style of the different translators.

[Christina · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good introduction to Montale's poetry, since it includes the work of several different translators. (As they say, you're only as good your translator.) Nevertheless, his work, while worthwhile, doesn't particularly speak to me, so I'm moving on.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Montale's use of imagery is masterful in both his short lyrics and his longer narrative poems,and these translations, by a number of terrific translators do justice to both his eye and his ear.

[Yelizaveta Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous collection of poetry. This was my first time reading Montale and I think he may be one of my favorites.