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"Virtually incomparable. . . . [Arrowsmith] has quite literally distilled this poetry's essence in order to recompose it with all of its colors, scents, and exquisitely understated potency intact." —Rebecca West ... Read more

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Fine translation
If you can't read Montale's stunning poetry in Italian, this is the next best thing, and for those new to Montale's work the fairly extensive notes will be very helpful. I've not read every one of the translated poems, but the ones I have read retain the poet's voice.

Astonishing poetry
Montale is the great Italian poet of this century, and this is his bestbook. English Horn is of a stunning beauty. It ends, in Italian, with theverse "Scordato strumento, cuore!". The translation is beautiful:the poetry is, definitely, not lost! ... Read more

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Satura, Montale's fourth collection of poems, experiments with dialogue, journalistic notation, commentary, and aphorism, and presses Italian literary language into terrain it has never touched before. These are poems whose reductions and sacrifices define a new lyric art.Amazon.com Review
Although Eugenio Montale is one of the indisputably great poets of the 20thcentury--and among the most deserving of Nobel laureates--he's never quiteentered the pantheon for many English-speaking readers. Perhaps WilliamArrowsmith's supple new translation of Satura will help to remedythe situation. First published in Italian in 1971, the volume dates fromthe last decade of the poet's life. Yet there's a strong argument to bemade that this playful, improvisatory sequence, which Montale meant to beread straight through, is the place to begin reading his work.

A quarter-century after its first appearance, Satura remains so canny, and sotuned in to the Zeitgeist, that it could have been written yesterday. Thenomenclature of the electronic age may have changed, for example, but thatdoesn't keep us from responding to Montale's witty and rueful ambivalenceabout technological progress in "Late at Night": "There's no conversingwith shades / on the telephone. / No loudspeaker or mike boom / appears inour mute dialogues." The volume also contains "Xenia," one of the mostpainful, incisive, and moving poems ever written about married love.Montale addressed his earlier books to the Petrarchan figure of "Clizia"--acomposite of an ideal woman and a real one, the American scholar IrmaBrandeis. Here, in "Xenia," he addresses his dead wife, Mosca:

Your arm in mine, I've descended a million stairs at least,
and now that you're not here, a void yawns at every step.
Even so our long journey was brief.
I'm still en route, with no further need
of reservations, connections, ruses,
the constant contempt of those who think reality
is what one sees.

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Montale's highest work and his most pointed poetry
Although not as popular as his first period ("La ossi di seppia" through "La bufera"), Satura is Montale's best work, and his lyrics are considerably more pointed and biting than they were before. I'drecommend this to anyone who is interested in Montale's work, and the"Selected Poems" published by New Directions is a helpfulintroduction to his first period. My personal favourites:"Xenia," "La repertorio." This is a facing-pagetranslation from the Italian done by William Arrowsmith, which he'dpublished after his death although the footnotes were added by anothercritic. ... Read more

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Locating the greatest Italian poet of the twentieth century, Eugenio Montale, firmly within European Modernism, this book examines the struggle with language that is central to his work. In its unravelling of the inexpressibility paradox, the book offers a new reading of Montale's early verse, and reveals how in articles and metapoetic comments Montale gives us insights into both his poetics and the whole process of expression. ... Read more

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Winner of the Weidenfeld Translation Prize and the Premio Montale, an acclaimed translation of Italy's greatest modern poet

Eugenio Montale is universally recognized as having brought the great Italian lyric tradition that begins with Dante into the twentieth century with unrivaled power and brilliance. Montale is a love poet whose deeply beautiful, individual work confronts the dilemmas of modern history, philosophy, and faith with courage and subtlety; he has been widely translated into English and his work has influenced two generations of American and British poets. Jonathan Galassi's versions of Montale's major works--Ossi di seppia, Le occasioni, and La bufera e altro--are the clearest and most convincing yet, and his extensive notes discuss in depth the sources and difficulties of this dense, allusive poetry. This book offers English-language readers uniquely informed and readable access to the work of one of the greatest of all modern poets.
Amazon.com Review
A white dove has landed me
among headstones, under spires where the sky nests.
Dawns and lights in air; I've loved the sun,
colors of honey, now I crave the dark,
I want the smoldering fire, this tomb
that doesn't soar, your stare that dares it to. --Eugenio Montale

Opera's loss was poetry's gain. Eugenio Montale, the 1975 Nobel Prizewinner in literature and one of Italy's greatest poets, originally aspiredto be an opera singer. Born in Genoa in 1896, Montale was a delicate child,his health precluding him from getting a formal education; instead, hespent his youth reading philosophy, literature, and Italian classics, andtraining as a baritone. World War I found him serving as an infantryofficer on the Austrian front. Upon his return to civilian life, Montale took up singing again, but after the death of his voice teacher in 1923, heabandoned his operatic hopes. Just two years later, he published his firstcollection of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones. Over thenext 50 years, Montale would produce many poems in between his work as ajournalist; Jonathan Galassi's Collected Poems 1920-1954, however,concentrates on three collections that are, arguably, his masterpieces:Cuttlefish Bones (1925); The Occasions (1948); and TheStorm, Etc. (1956).

In addition to Galassi's excellent translations, two other things stand outabout this book: one is that both Italian and English versions canbe read side by side; the other is that Galassi has thoroughly annotatedthese poems, placing Montale's challenging work in its historical, cultural,and personal context. We are told, for example, that "Leaving a Dove"is, in part, about the poet's abandonment of an old lover for a new one.Such information adds piquancy to the imagery and depth to the reader'sappreciation. --Alix Wilber ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Great Find
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.

Modern madrigalists! Here's the poet to set to music!
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.

Seek a better translation than this
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!

A great collection with useful annotations
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.

Read the translations by Arrowsmith instead
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 about 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. ... Read more

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Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) was the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi, perhaps since Petrarch, and is generally acknowledged as one of the preeminent European poets of the last century. His lyrical, mysterious poems abound in natural images—the high cliffs and inlets of the Ligurian coast, golden sunflowers, scolding blackbirds, and sun-scorched landscapes. Indeed, in the view of James Merrill, whose superb translations of several of Montale's poems appear in this volume, Montale was "the twentieth-century nature poet," in whose lines "any word can lead you from the kitchen garden into really inhuman depths." Also full of mythological and literary resonance, Montale's poems poignantly explore the connection between nature, the individual, and the divine.

Montale in English draws on the poet's eight major collections, bringing together translations, adaptations, and homages by fifty-eight American, English, Scottish, Australian, and Italian poets and scholars, including Samuel Beckett, David Ferry, Jonathan Galassi, Jorie Graham, Robert Lowell, Edwin Morgan, and Charles Wright. The editor's introduction gives a precise account of the history of Montale's reception in English, and by providing an analysis of four translations of a single poem, contributes to the controversial issue of poetic translation. ... Read more

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By the time that Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) received the Nobel Prize in 1976, the world was beginning to acknowledge that he was among the greatest of the modernist poets, author of a poetic canon that spanned much of the twentieth century, including the advent of Fascism, two world wars, and the Cold War. A quiet man, profoundly rooted in the Italian landscape and culture and with enormous sensitivity to his language and its heritage, Montale shaped poems throughout his life that were mysterious, resonant, and layered with meanings. His 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.

This volume, which draws on the entire corpus of Montale's work, brings together three of his most experienced and effective translators. ... Read more

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Best
This is the one that should come up first when you type in "Montale." It's the best selection, best translations, best introduction. And it's a bargain. A great poet, thoughtfully presented . . . ... Read more

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One of the major collections of poetry in the twentieth century, and certainly the most important single volume by Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale, The Storm & Other Poems is now available in its entirety in English for the first time, in an especially impressive translation by the noted American poet Charles Wright. Montale's gathering of his work from 1940 to 1956, this volume won the prestigious PEN Translation Prize.

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) won the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 1975. The major American poet Charles Wright, his translator, has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, among other honors. ... Read more

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Montale's second book of verse in a successful translation
Published in 1939, THE OCCASIONS (Le occasioni) was Eugenio Montale's second book of verse and the first to use the themes one would traditionally associate with this Italian poet. His first book of verse, CUTTLEFISH BONES, was inspired by the Ligurian landscape in which he grew up, and its poetry is mostly marked by experimentation in style and attention to the natural world. Afterwards, Montale moved to Florence, and in THE OCCASIONS his poetry has turned away from not just paeans to the Mediterranean shore to intensely personal and introspective poetry. For Montale had seen in a woman the absolute, and went immortalize her in this stunning work.

In 1933 Eugenio Montale became acquainted with Irma Brandeis, a Jewish-American scholar of Italian literature (her work on Dante's Comedy, THE LADDER OF VISION, was acclaimed upon its appearance in the 1960's). He saw he only occasionally, but his few encounters with her captured his heart until his imagination of her ceased to be literal, and she became, like Beatrice to Dante, a redemptrix and mediatrix. The key part of THE OCCASIONS, the sequence of 21 poems called "The Motets" deals solely with "Clizia", as Montale called this ideal. The Motets have been called love poems, but there is no syrupy romanticism within them. Instead, they are metaphysical poems, in which Montale adores Clizia because he sees in her the divine. A common theme is departure or distance. In the first motet, "You know: I must leave you again...", the poet expresses his despair at another departure from his beloved. Montale's transcendental imagination of Clizia is shown its ending lines "I look for the lost/ sign, the only pledge I had of your/ grace. / And hell is certain."

While the Motets traditionally have received the most attention, the other parts of THE OCCASIONS are also superb. In "Dora Markus", Montale muses on a Jewish woman he imagined at the seaside. She looks across the ocean at place that is her homeland but where she has never lived. Arrowsmith excellently translates Montale's sly irony in part as "Your restlessness reminds me/of those migratory birds that thump against the lighthouse/on stormy nights: /even your sweetness is a stoms/whose raging's unseen/whose lulls are even rarer." In "The Coastguard Station", one of his more popular poems and taught in many Italian schools, Montale reflects on a building that stands out in his memories of youth, but which his companion cannot remember.

Among the several translations in English I prefer William Arrowsmith's. While Jonathan Galassi has published the more recent collection of translations of Montale and thus has received more attention lately, I believe that Arrowsmith's are stronger poetically. Galassi was dedicated towards translating above all else the meaning of Montale's poetry and trying to make his symbolism more penetrable for the reader in English, as a result the sound of his translation do not sound very poetic. Arrowsmith, on the other hand, was a genuine poet and rendered Montale's verse in such a way that its sound was preserved rather well. Of course, no single translator can bring every aspect of this great poet across perfectly, and that's why if one is a great admirer of Montale's works, acquiring his verse translated in English by more than a single translator is a good idea. Even after I was able to read Montale's poetry in the original Italian, I remained fascinated with how various people handled the difficult task of rendering him in a language so different.

I was a bit disappointed by the notes included to shed light on a few poems. Nowhere does Arrowsmith mention, like most critics would immediately, the biographical details that led to the creation of Clizia out of Irma Brandeis. While Montale's poetry here is intensely personal and hermetic, knowing something about his life during the 1930's helps immensely. Perhaps it was because Brandeis was still alive and active in letters when this translation came out, but considering that it was publically known that she inspired Clizia for 40 years before, I don't understand why Arrowsmith was reluctant to give the same background details any translator or critic would.

The other weakness of the notes is that they are written as if for someone already quite knowledgeable in Montale criticism. However, someone who knows enough to make use of the notes would probably not be reading this layman's edition in English but would follow the criticism published in Italy.

If you've never read anything by Montale, I'd suggest getting the paperback SELECTED POEMS published by New Directions. It contains some of the strongest and clearest pieces from his three volumes of poetry up to 1965. If you like the works of this fascinating poet, I'd suggest going on to the individual volumes in these translations of William Arrowsmith. ... Read more

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This book presents a collection of essays based on papers delivered at the international conference Italian Poetry in the 1960s and 1970s. ... Read more