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Eugenio Montale received many honours, including the Nobel Prize in 1975. His lyrical, mysterious poems abound in natural images - Liguria's sea-coast, golden sunflowers, scolding blackbirds and sun-scorched landscapes. Full of mythological and literary resonance, they poignantly explore the connection between the individual, nature and the divine. This volume draws on Montale's four major collections: "Cuttlefish Bones", "The Occasion", "The Storm and Other Things" and "Satura", as well as later work. It brings together translations, adaptations and homages by, among others, Samuel Beckett, Anthony Burgess, Geoffrey Hill, Robert Lowell, Jamie McKendrick, Edwin Morgan and Jeremy Reed. ... Read more

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Focusing on the most recent triad of Italian poetic genius--Umberto Saba, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Eugenio Montale--Joseph Cary not only presents striking biographical portraits as he facilitates our understanding of their poetry; he also guides us through the first few decades of twentieth-century Italy, a most difficult period in its literary and cultural development. ... Read more

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The first book of Montale's poems is one of the greatest of modern poetry.Its place is just next to "Alfred Prufrock and Other Observations," " The Elegies of Duino, " "Signe ascendant" by Andre Breton and other important books of poetry of this century. Although it has been translated into English at various occassions, Antonio Mazza's translation should be praised and recognized as one of the best. Mazza has been translating Montale for some years. this choice would seem to be a matter of faithfulness to the voice whose language, also Mazza's mother tongue, is Italian, with all its musical, rhythmical, incantatory and lexical implications. ... Read more

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This book appeared in Italy during the Nobellaureate's eighty-second year. The sardonicforce of his shrewd observations of thecontemporary scene remains unblunted even as the poet has become more involved with everyday, more private, more self-revealing. Here it gains evengreater prominence as the poet attempts to findcatchholds and constancies in an unstable world, finally to accede to 'precariousness the muse of our time.' ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Not translations, but renderings as if Jeremy Reed had written the same poems in his own time
Eugenio Montale, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975, wrote a dazzling series of hermetic poems where the social and political dangers of mid-20th-century Italy are confronted by the private acquaintances who gave the poet hope. I encountered Montale's verse in some of the great English translations, subsequently moved to the original Italian, and regard him as a life-changing figure. However, this Bloodaxe Books publication, which pairs the original Italian-language poems with English renderings by the contemporary poet Jeremy Reed, is quite disappointing.

This review of Reed's work assumes prior knowledge of Montale's poetry. I strongly advise readers new to Montale against discovering him here. Instead, I'd recommend Arrowsmith's translation of The Occasions (regrettably out of print but widely available) or Galassi's translations in Collected Poems, 1920-1954 (somewhat lesser translations, but on sale everywhere).

Early translators have generally remained faithful to Montale's poems, rendering his Italian wordings into English with as few compromises as necessary. One exception, however, was Robert Lowell, who in his volume Imitations reworked original poems by Montale, among other poets, into new poems in his own style and inspired by his own surroundings. Jeremy Reed found these an inspiration for his own approach to rendering Montale in English. I don't know about you, but I find this objectionable. Readers of Eugenio Montale all in all probably want to read Montale, not "poems from and inspired by Montale". Furthermore, translation of poetry should function only as a crib until readers are capable of reading the original, and divorcing the original from its basis in one particular language removes that which gave the poem life to begin with.

I'll give some examples of how different Reed's "versions" are from what Montale wrote. In part of the cycle "Mediterraneo" Montale wrote, "Antico, sono ubriacto dalla voce / ch'esce dalle tue bocche quando si schiudono / come verdi campane e si ributtano / indietro e si disciolgono." Here the poet chose wordings and sounds that suggest the cycle of waves rising up, crashing up the shore, and then withdrawing into the sea. Reed, however, has killed these elegant constructions, and put in material Montale never wrote, by rendering it as, "We share one language; your fluctuating / vernacular leaves me drunk on your voice, / the green waves running for the shore, / their flux and reflux heard as a vague roar."

The last couple of lines in Montale's "Il sogno del prigionero" are among the most white-hot in the poet's work, expressing his uncertainty over the political direction of postwar Italy but nonetheless retaining hope through the salvific example of a woman dear to him: "e i colpi si ripetono ed i passi, / e ancora ignoro se saro al festino / farcitore o farcito. L'attesa e lunga, / il mio sogno de te non e finito." Reed, however, removes the poet's uncertainty over two possible outcomes, and turns hope into total despair with, "The sound of stonebreaking resumes; footsteps / echo in corridors, a chink of light... / I will be meat sizzled upon a spit. / My dream of you will last all night."

A couple of poems are not too far away from a traditional translation. But elsewhere he seems to misunderstand some of the original Italian, making one wonder what his qualifications are in the language. If, for some reason, you enjoy the original poetry of Jeremy Reed, this volume may interest you. Fans of Montale would do well to steer clear of it, only I can't bear to rate it just one star when the book does at least have the original Italian.

Very, very intense.
For a poet considered one of the three greatest of the century, and a Nobel winner to boot, Eugene Montale's poems, especially the early, famous ones that make up the bulk of this volume, can be very formulaic.They follow the same pattern each time, an evocation of a land- orsea-scape conjured up in a couple of evocatively chosen images; a natural force, like a storm, or rain, descending on it, threatening to destroy it (often symbolising fascism, you feel, but Montale is never that crude); sometimes the musings of the human actors (often there is no such presence); and finally, a leap from this vividly concrete world into the metaphysical, the void, the speculative, whatever you want to call it.Calvino has called this the 'something behind a concrete wall'.

Another Calvino essay is called 'Montale's cliff', and this is a good description of the poetry - the reader is invited to walk along the solid ground of Montale's natural observation, and than make the philosophical jump.It's a jump, I'm afraid, that often eludes me, and the close of a Montale poem usually makes me feel baffled, lost and stupid, which is probably the point.But the obsessively repetitive nature descriptions have a dense simplicity and overwhelming power, while 'Times at Bellosguardo', which is like the whole of Proust compressed into a single poem, is now one of a handful of my favourite poems.

Jeremy Reed, himself a major poet, has called his translations 'versions', attempts to fuse with the original to create something now.He says this will save the enigmatic spirit of a poetry that would be deadened by pedantic transliteration.All translators say this, of course, and while Reed's work here is the only translation I have ever read to have the toughness and integrity of original verse, the clear differences between it and the original make me wish a literal version had been offered, as footnotes perhaps, so we could see how Reed came to his 'version'.That process would have been exciting. ... Read more