Knocking on the Doors of the Impossible

Distinguished poets (Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Charles Wright) have had a go at Eugenio Montale, and a distinguished translator, the late William Arrowsmith, has already had more than a go--call it a stay--at these volumes, which comprise the initial (and central) achievement, all nervous anguish and precise acedia, of the Ligurian poet’s oeuvre until his 60th year (he received the Nobel Prize when he was 79). Yet so elusive, so helplessly mordant is Montale’s work (he evinces something of the same muttering persistence in default, the same commitment to unattainable ideals, ungrateful landscapes and compulsive forms as his obsessed contemporary, the painter Giorgio Morandi), that these new and powerfully annotated translations by Jonathan Galassi and Arrowsmith fill, as the poet himself might say, a much-needed gap.

Moreover, Galassi had already translated “Otherwise,” a volume of Montale’s first and last poems (the latter a group comparable to the Arrowsmith volume under review here), as well as a sizable swatch of his critical prose (though by no means all: Montale’s literary and musical journalism, his essays and stories and lightly sketched fables are something like Leopardi’s vast Zibaldone, that prose repository of inexhaustible cultural discourse). Furthermore, Galassi’s extending grasp of the figure he has translated anew with such effective tenacity includes a wide range of the intricate Italian scholarship and criticism of Montale (already an academic cottage industry: neither a communist nor a Catholic nor a fascist, the poet affords his ambitious exegetes a riot of good clean fun) as well as sustained reference to Arrowsmith’s invaluable though tendentious notes. Galassi’s summative essay, “Reading Montale,” modestly sandwiched between the text and about 200 pages of commentary and chronology, is the most searching study of the poet I know. Along with Joseph Brodsky’s essay “In the Shadow of Dante” ( “. . . out of the inertia of intimate speech emerges a private mythology . . .”), it constitutes the best introduction, suitably, to the major poems he has translated with such insistence on clarity and intellectual comprehension.

There are two reasons for emphasizing, in praise of Galassi’s enterprise, clarity and comprehension rather than, say, poetical affinity and verbal “inspiration.” The first is to be found in the character of the poet: Montale (who began life with aspirations of being an opera singer) was a defensively learned man, a poet eager to epitomize all the secret energies of Italian poetry from Leopardi to D’Annunzio, as well as a discerning critic (as early as 1925 he introduced the novelist Italo Svevo to an Italian public) who for 11 years served as the director of a private library and cultural center in Florence; dismissed for nonalignment with fascist authorities, he supported himself during the war by translation (from Shakespeare to Steinbeck, by way of Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Faulkner and Lowell, among others) and incidentally provided Umberto Saba and Carlo Levi a hiding place in his apartment when the Germans occupied Italy in 1943. Elusive and allusive at once, his poetic tonality--elliptical yet precise, diffident yet impassioned--is hard to render, and the sense of the poems, therefore, easy to miss.

The second reason is the consequent character of the poems themselves, clogged with references to his own verse, to that of his immediate predecessors and to the great past of European poetry; the address to a highly symbolic nature, as in the early “Mediterranean,” needs all the explication it can get. Here Arrowsmith, apparently concerned to be poetic (“seeded . . . seasoned . . . salt-sea”), omits from his invocation the literal (and Homeric) reference:

And a day will come when these unvoiced words,

seeded in us by you,

nourished on silence and fatigue,

will, to some brotherly soul, seem seasoned

with salt-sea brine.

It is only in Galassi’s version that we are now granted translation of the key words sapide di sale greco, as well as certain blessed literalisms that so clarify the passage:

And one day these noiseless words

we raised beside you, nourished

on fatigue and silence,

will taste of Greek salt

to a brother heart.

How characteristic of this poet to address that central sea in his search for a responsible voice; Montale’s desire has always been “to interrogate life”: “I have knocked desperately on the doors of the impossible, like one who awaits an answer.”

Yet Arrowsmith is skillful too, and in his versions of the later Montale, he has supplied us with a necessary document; in “Satura,” a fourth volume of poems, constituting a sort of satyr-play (the real sense of the title, I believe) to the “major phase,” which both Arrowsmith and Galassi have so strenuously translated, the old poet has transformed the voice that serves his vision, and Arrowsmith has caught the refractory and contingent resonance. In the last years of his life, Montale indulged his own failure to find the meaning and the myth of his own powers as a poet (“I would not dare to speak of the myth of my poetry. . . . I am a poet who has written a poetic autobiography,” as the titles of so many of the late works testify, the “Diary,” “Notebook” and “Letter” poems). The profound dissatisfactions from which the hard, passionate statements, in Galassi’s version, had come.

“I’m after the lost sign, the single pledge I had from you. And hell is certain”--these have been turned into refractory and contingent complaints, irritations rather than irradiations. It is the volumes of 1920 to 1954 that make Montale the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi, and how welcome Galassi’s scrupulous and pondered versions of them prove to be. As Walter Benjamin observed about Baudelaire--a poet almost as continuously present to Montale as Dante himself--a translation comes later than the original, and because the important works of world literature never find their chosen translator at the time of their origin, their later translations mark stages of their continued life. With Galassi’s carefully studied translations, another link, a powerful one, has been added to the chain.