A poet in splendid translation

Translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 640 pp. $30. nolead ends

nolead begins The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale: 1925-1977
nolead ends nolead begins Translated by William Arrowsmith; edited by Rosanna Warren

W.W. Norton. 832 pp. $49.95.

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by John Timpane

What

a state of affairs!

Two excellent translated collections of poetry by Italian poet Eugenio Montale. One is by William Arrowsmith, the other by Jonathan Galassi. Galassi, a fine poet and devoted Montale scholar, concentrates on the three books of Montale's central period: Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, and The Storm, Etc. Arrowsmith, also an eminent translator, gives us more Montale, including the later poetic diaries and notebook. Both do very well. Differently but very well.

So, what am I supposed to tell you?

Get at least one. That's what.

These two books assemble smaller, previous collections these translators published. Each is exquisitely edited, with copious notes, teaching us a great deal about both the poems and the poet.

Montale was the most important Italian poet of the 20th century - according to me, but most who read a great deal of poetry would agree (and Italy had many fine poets in those 100 years). Soldier in World War I, journalist, well-traveled literary and music critic, he was awarded the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature, six years before his death. It wasn't until the 1970s that readers and translators in English began to wake up in numbers to his precise, somber voice.

Who is he like? Himself, although you can feel him reacting to another, congruent sensibility: that of T.S. Eliot. His poetry is unlike Eliot's: Montale writes short lyrics, not the huge, sprawling, agonized canvases of Eliot. But you can hear Eliot in the Montale voice: out of tune with existence, a voice in a world in decline.

Arrowsmith, who died in 1992, was a very accomplished editor (he founded the Hudson Review) and translator of ancient texts (Greek drama), canonical works (Nietzsche), and contemporary work. Galassi, no less accomplished as poet and translator, is the head editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. This year is a Galassi explosion: He has a fine collection, Left-Handed, out this month. His translations of Montale strike my ear as sweeter and more musical than Arrowsmith's, so I give Galassi an edge there. For inclusiveness, the Arrowsmith gives you the broader sweep. Both Galassi and the poet Rosanna Warren, who edited the Arrowsmith book, give us fabulous, detailed notes.

Often, a Montale poem takes place at or near the ocean; the Ligurian coast, where he grew up, figures large in his imagination. Themes include isolation, alienation, sorrow, or longing. Some of his most famous poems are addressed to "Clizia" (a troubadour senhal or amorous nickname for his longtime amour, Irma Brandeis).

Italian is remarkably, intrinsically, relentlessly rhythmic. At home in this dactylic dressage, Italian poets are expert - Montale is an effortless master - at commandeering it in ways you can't and shouldn't try to bring across into our splendid mutt of a Germanic tongue, with its thumping stresses and end-stopped consonants. Italian is a rhyme festival, hundreds of thousands of words ending in the same vowels. Native poets can leverage that, but English translators shouldn't try. Neither Arrowsmith nor Galassi does.

Here is a stanza in the original Italian, from the superb early poem "Low Tide":

Sere di gridi, quando l'altalena

oscilla nella pergola d'allora

e un oscuro vapore vela appena

la fissità del mare.

Arrowsmith:

Evenings of cries, when the swing

rocks in the summerhouse of other days

and a dark vapor barely veils

the sea's fixity.

Galassi:

Clamorous evenings, when the swing

sways in the pergola of then

and a thick mist barely veils

the fixedness of the sea.

Both are pretty good. Evenings of cries is more faithful to the Italian, but Galassi's ear finds it awkward, so he tries to invest the meaning in the discordant Clamorous. I like the startling start, but I'm enough of a slug to prefer faith to fancy. Galassi gets a point for the sw- in swing and sways, which gets the back-and-forthness of oscilla. Pergola d'allora really does mean "pergola of then," as odd (yet so beautiful) in Italian as it is in English. Nostalgic. Galassi stays with it, but Arrowsmith finds it awkward and renders the phrase in the full, lovely summerhouse of other days. Maybe overfull? The Italian is clipped and postmodern; I'm thinking Arrowsmith's lacks the slight exotic edge of pergola, and I miss the awkward nostalgia of then.

Arrowsmith does better on the third line. I don't understand why Galassi sacrificed that weird, repeated v- in vapor and veils, available in both languages. Mist doesn't get there. But Galassi makes the better choice for the fourth line. We need to end with the sea, because Montale so often does, and I find Arrowsmith's the sea's fixity awkward: the pinched internal rhyme takes the guts out of the image; an inanimate noun is made possessive; and we end with the less concrete word. I also admire (at least in this case) the more Germanic fixedness as being the more rooted, the more fixed.

You could do this all day. If you want to, buy both books. It's a gladsome thing to see so much of Montale's work well-rendered in one place. Or two!