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Collected Poems, 1920-1954: Bilingual Edition

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Eugenio Montale is my favourite poet, and before I was able to read him in the original Italian I read the extant English translations by Jonathan Galassi and William Arrowsmith. Looking back, I would wholeheartedly recommend Arrowsmith's translations above Galassi's.

Galassi's translations are accurate as far as the meaning goes, but do not sufficiently mirror the sound of Montale's brilliant Italian, and in several poems they do not translate the mood, the essence of Montale's poetic vision. Arrowsmith's translations have always seemed wonderful to me because they capture Montale's emotion (especially the sly irony of SATURA) and remain faithful to the sound of the Italian. If one wishes to read Montale's poems in English, I would highly suggest you purchase William Arrowsmith's translations. Arrowsmith translated not only Montale's first three books as Galassi only did, but also his retrospective SATURA, some of his best poetry.

This edition by Galassi does warrant recognition, however, for one thing. His attached essay, "Reading Montale," does a great deal for the unfamiliar reader to explain the nature of Montale's "Clizia" mythos, and his analysis of the cicada symbol teaches the reader to appreciate Montale's complex symbolism.

After long search for translation of Montale's poems, this bilingual edition was perfect. Book was in perfect condition and arrived at exactly the announced date.

Some of Montale's best poems translated faithfully and presented in the original Italian. The annotations in this book are a great addition because Montale isn't as well known in the US as he should be.

There are some good translations of Montale around but this is not one of them: in fact I'd say it is the least successful of any of the translations that have been made. Galassi goes overboard to make Montale jagged and unmusical: in a word: unpoetic. The lovely, brief love poems of the Le Occasioni have been rendered as bits of broken glass that cut the mouth. Even the content is changed when it doesn't fit in with Galassi's arch-modernist convictions: words get dropped, content get changed around, religious words get omitted, extraneous things are put in. Galassi defends his vision of Montale as an anti-poet in an essay at the back of the book, but it doesn't convince, and, significantly, no evidence is cited in support. Even the arrangements of the poems on the page -- in this case probably the publisher's fault , rather than Galassi's -- manages to misrepresent them. Poems that were, in the original, meant to be separated by a page break are here represented in run-on fashion, so that one reads the parts as connected in a way that they are not intended to be. *News from Amiata* (not *Mount* Amiata, as Galassi renders it!) is a case in point: the parts should be on separate pages, not run-on as they are. The same goes for the Motets.

But this would be less jarring if the translations themselves were more faithful to the spirit of the originals. Unfortunately they completely mislead the reader as to the meaning of Montale's poems. The translations of William Arrowsmith were much, much better and Norton would do the lover of Montale's poetry a great service by putting them back into print. Arrowsmith gets the modernism of Montale right without making him sound like he just didn't know how to write. But that, sadly, is how he comes across in Galassi's versions: a fumbling amateur, certainly not someone who could win a Nobel prize!

Don't be misled by the encomiums on the back of the book. Galassi is an important New York editor: no one is going to tell him or the public the truth about his efforts at translation. The most the reader can hope for is that Norton, or Charles Wright's publisher will put out a better version of the Collected Poems so that the lover of Montale has a choice. At present we seem to be stuck with this white elephant alone!

Exchanging notes with Mike Birman about Petrarch, whose poems inspired some of the greatest composers of the 16th and 17th Centuries, I suddenly made a connection -- had an epiphany, to put it in grad school terms. Eugenio Montale (b. 1896) wrote a lot like Petrarch! That may not be such a surprise to scholars of Italian literature, or it may seem like pure nonsense to those same scholars. Che sara sara. But for the various readers of my reviews of Monteverdi and other madrigalists, the mere mention of a modern Italian poet, and an extremely good one, may be a revelation. Here's a very short poem by Montale:
LUNGOMARE
Il soffio cresce, il buio e rotto a squarci,
e l'ombra che tu mandi sulla fragile
palizzata s'arriccia. Troppo tardi

se vuoi esser te stessa! Dalla palma
tonfa il sorcio, il baleno e sulla miccia,
sui lunghissimi cigli del tuo sguardo.

But Montale lived through tougher times, and modern themes show up in his work as veins of grief through his translucent marble lyricism. Here's my own translation of his poem "La Primavera Hitleriana" :

HITLER SPRING
A thick lamp-loony mist, moths, dim as sleet
swirls down parapets, eddies, drains,
shakes down on the stones a sheet
that crackles like sugar underfoot.
When summer comes, now soon, it breaks
chill nitres loose the dying season held
hidden in coverts, quarries, orchards which
from Maiano snake down sandhills to sandy banks.

Hooked crosses, flags and flambeaux, mystic chants
of stooges gorged him in -- the hellbent henchman
cyclist who through the Corso just now
blazed. Shop fronts are shuttered, broke
and gutless though they, they too, sport
plastic cannons. Bars creak
across the butcher's counter closing, he
who used to deck his goats' heads out
with red small berries -- rite of those tender killers
who do not know blood yet, made over
in a puking reel of mashed white wings, larvae
on the mud-flats fledging, and foul water
rots its banks and no one is blameless.

For nothing is it? St. John's Eve
goes slowly blonde as roman candles streak
adios stark as baptisms to this dolorous watch
the horde keeps. Some precious something skates
your shoreline skyward, Tobias' seraph seven
spermed on ice. Heliotropes
foal from your fingers. --
Our bleeding ulcer, April,
if it freeze such death in death, is a holiday yet.
Clizia, whose fate this is, though changed, you
love unchanged until that sun that squints in you is
lacklustered in the Other, annihilated in
him for everyone. Sirens, pig iron bells,
sledging the horde's Walpurgisnacht, already
with peals broken off heaven,
descending, conquering, chime -- Oh dawn
of frosted breathing but unhorrible
which tomorrow bursts over the fried gulches of the south....

Clizia is Montale's recurrent feminine, his match for Petrarch's Laura. My translation was published some years ago in the Transatlantic Review #19. Robert Lowell included several translations of Montale poems in his book "Imitations" and Charles Wright has translated nearly all of Montale in very impressive poetic English.

Ably translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi, this revised bilingual edition of Eugenio Montale's Collected Poems 1920-1954 brings the lyrical Italian poet's work to a new generation of readers. Montale is a gifted poet who work is deeply beautiful as it confronts the dilemmas of modern history, philosophy, and faith. Day And Night: A floating feather, too, can sketch your image/or the sunbeam playing hied-and-seek/in the furniture, rebounding off/a baby's mirror or the roofs. Above the walls/wisps of steam draw out the poplars' spires/and the knifegrinder's parrot down below/fans his feathers on his perch. And then the hazy night/in the little square, and footsteps, and always/this painful effort to sink under/to re-emerge the same for centuries, or seconds,/by ghosts who can't win back the light of your eyes/inside the incandescent cave -- and still/the same shouts and long wailing on the veranda/if suddenly the shot rings out/that reddens your throat and shears/your wings. O perilous harbinger of dawn,/and the cloisters and the hospitals awake/to a resounding chorus of horns...

How bad is this book? Not the poet, the book. Montale's poetry is truly gorgeous, but this translation, slipshod, inept. I have been cherry picking my way through the poems and the very first I read is full of errors, misspellings, mistranslations. In the Italian, says my google translator, page 94 "lameggia" ought to be "lampeggia" = "flashes" and there is no doubt that "flashes" is far more poetically evocative than the translation Galassi chose, "shines". The next line or two Galassi rather irrationally breaks them and changes them from the Italian. The word "beata", which he translates as "happily", should more properly be "blessedly" giving the poem a whole different meaning. In the second line of the poem the word "maretta" meaning "swell(s)" makes far more sense than the word Galassi uses, "choppy". This was the word that put me on to Galassi. Anyone who has spent time by the sea knows that a "choppy" sea does not "talk among the rocks" and has a very different sound, but a swelling sea, moving among rocks, does "talk". There is more even just in this poem, but this is sufficient here. And a fair amount of the English is neither grammatically correct nor suitably imagistic in this translation.

The notes at the back of the book are alright I suppose, as far as they go, but for this poem, for instance, there is nothing about Montale's time there. Do notes make up for virtually having to re-translate every poem? No. And there is no table of contents of poems. How ridiculous. Wait for a better translation, which, at the time of this writing might be the Arrowsmith translation of the collected works due out in December 2011. At any rate, if you are keen on Montale, spend the time working it out with a dictionary yourself. You will get far better poetry. It is worth the effort.