This spring, New York Review Books simultaneously published two volumes by Eugenio Montale: Butterfly of Dinard and Late Montale. Montale is a poet I have revered for decades, using a line of his — “There are those who live in a time that’s touched them” — years ago as an epigraph. I first read his work in Pequod: A Journal of Contemporary Literature and Literary Criticism, in an issue devoted to Montale and guest edited by Jonathan Galassi in 1977. The two books under review expand and deepen our appreciation of this poet who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.
The new translation of Butterfly of Dinard collects 50 personal essays written for the Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera. Montale joined the paper “after ten years of unemployment due to political reasons.” As for his aesthetic approach, he says, “I brought along with me a long trail of memories.” His goal was “to write about those silly and trivial things which are at the same time important: to project the image of a prisoner who is at the same time a free man: in this lies whatever merit these instantaneous flashes which are The Butterfly of Dinard, may have.”
The only other English translation was by G. Singh, published by the University of Kentucky in 1971. I’m grateful for Singh’s work; he knew Montale’s work well, wrote a full-length critical appraisal and translated books of his poems. His translation at that time was very welcome and captures Montale’s spirit. But this new edition by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky surpasses Singh’s in its imaginative phrasing, idiomatic ease and liveliness of the prose. A few comparisons:
“… some fashionable beach where even the sea seems to be served in tin-pots.” (Singh)
“… some fashionable beach where even the waves looked gift-wrapped.” (Moffa and Stransky)
and:
“Do you hear?” — Micky inquired. (Singh)
“Hear that?” Micky asks him. (Moffa and Stransky)
It also adds five new essays: “In a Florentine Buca”; Dancers at the Diavolo Rosso”; “Limpid Eyes”; “Stopping in Edinburgh” and “Marmeladov’s Second Period.” The latter is a particularly hilarious account of a man who buys an ugly painting, paints over it, and before dawn is awakened by the barking of a dog whose image he has covered. When a critic is impressed by the work, the narrator lies that it is by Marmeladov (a humorous, jam-like name) from his “Primatist” period. The impressed critic hopes to make a deal.
These essays pull back the curtain on Montale’s world and reveal the landscape he lightly touched on in his poems; his concerns in his poetry were much weightier. Here, he wrote for a general audience, under the constriction of a word count. He says he welcomed both.
Butterfly is grounded in gravity even as it embraces absurdity. In “Laguzzi & Co.,” we meet “wobbly Uncle Ugh, so named because of his repeated grunts (Ugh! Ugh! Ugh!) as he labored to push his ice cream cart up the hill.” But the piece is ultimately about class. When the narrator returns to his old neighborhood in the company of people of means, he is told the inhabitants of his former residence are “common folk, riff-raff …”
Many of these pieces are written in the first person, but Montale often appears under the name Zebrino or Federigo. He meets an assortment of characters, like Dominico, “the most voracious annihilator of cream puffs anyone had ever seen at a public function.” Here, too, the stakes are raised. At the end, Dominico fails to understand that “to be fully human, a person must engage with other people; a being must accept other beings.”
There are also moments of surprise, as when we meet Honey — “one of those women who, when asked how old they are, replied, ‘of legal age.’” Montale himself appears twice as the self-effacing, anonymous “man” — “There’s a man in his pajamas pacing up and down the hallway” of a hotel. And when a taxi crashes and flips over, “there’s a man inside.” Again and again, he’s the victim of some absurd happenstance or encounter.
In “The Guilty Party,” Federigo is summoned to the office of one of Mussolini’s henchman and asked for his letter of resignation from his post as a reference librarian. The reason: he has not signed a document stating his political allegiance. This is a strictly autobiographical piece, and the reason he wrote these columns in the first place. In awarding Montale the Nobel prize, the committee’s citation noted, “he became head of the famous Vieusseux Library in Florence. In 1939 he was abruptly dismissed; not having a fascist party membership card, he could not be regarded as an Italian citizen.” Montale takes his revenge in this short piece describing the draconian, threatening and ultimately stupid ways of the fascist regime. The framed mottos on the wall of the minor tyrant who summoned him are: “Keep Visits Short” and “To Live Is Not Necessary.” Federigo asks what will happen if he does not submit the letter, and is told: “We will aim low. Don’t fool yourself.” Despite the threat, Federigo returns to his office and continues to work. Adding to the complexity of the situation is that Federigo’s work is completely trivial: he is answering a letter writer from Seattle asking if the podiatrist Fruscoli, who, he visited 20 years ago, still has an office on the Via del Ronco. The story ends with Federigo going to the post office, mailing his reply. We don’t know whether he will resign, or what will become of him.
Montale wrote that for “news about my life,” the source would be this book. And also revealing is the state of his love life. The title piece, about the butterfly and the woman he misses, is an exquisite prose-poem, different from the rest in its tight focus and depth of feeling.
Jonathan Galassi’s introduction is a treasure trove of information, not only about this collection, but about the poet in general. Galassi’s own translation of Montale’s Collected Poems 1920—1954 comes with almost 200 pages of notes and a chronology. His introduction here is an exacting account of the book’s maker and its making. He analyzes each of the collection’s four sections and his unequaled knowledge of Montale is delivered with an editor’s diligence and a poet’s sensibility.
Which brings me to the poetry. The poems in Late Montale, written in the poet’s final years, have been selected and translated by George Bradley. The collection of almost 250 pages (including over 20 pages of notes) was originally published by The Waywiser Press in 2022.
Bradley has chosen poems from three of Montale’s final volumes — Satura; Diary of ’71 and ’72 (Diario del ’71 e del ’72) and Four-Year Notebook (Quaderno di quattro anni). Additionally, he has included the entire Other Poems (Altri Versi) and “all of The House in Olgiate and Other Poems, a collection assembled from material discovered in a university library and published posthumously.”
Bradley’s translations are clear and supple; he has fulfilled his “hope that the versions … can stand on their own in English.” In his introduction, Bradley says that the later poems reveal “the essential features of the aged poet’s cast of mind: his sardonic self-deprecation; his skepticism regarding grand theories … his Shakespearean conviction that life is a theatrical performance of, at best, indeterminate import.”
He has selected just three sections of Montale’s “Xenia” from Satura. These love poems to Drusilla Tanzi, known as “Mosca,” whom Montale eventually married, are rendered beautifully. I would have welcomed the entire sequence, but this has already been done well by several hands. Bradley channels Montale’s tone which is often wry and understated and yet bursts with surprise.
The diaries and notebooks have been translated in full by G. Singh, who gave the title It Depends: A Poet’s Notebook to Quaderno di quattro anni, and William Arrowsmith (to whom we are indebted for The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale 1925-1977) who titled that book Poetic Notebook 1974-1977.
Below, I’m including the poem “Aspasia” from Bradley’s Four-Year Notebook because it contains Montale’s hallmarks. The subject is a person of “lesser” stature. She is explored through memory. Her name has an historical reference. There is speculation about her fate. She is compared to a butterfly, as in Dinard, and described as one who has nothing. Nothing, that is, except for a name given to her by another. A puzzle is posed in the final lines that takes the dramatic situation of the speaker and the figure into universal terrain.
ASPASIA
Late at night the men
used to enter her room
through the window. It was on the ground floor.
I used to call her Aspasia and it made her happy.
Then she left us. She worked as a barmaid,
a hairdresser, other things. Occasionally
I happened to run into her.
“Aspasia!” I’d cry out to her then in a loud voice,
and she’d smile without stopping.
We were coevals, she probably died a while ago.
When I enter into hell, almost out of habit,
I’ll scream “Aspasia” at the first smiling shade I see.
She’ll sidle off quickly of course. We’ll never
know who she was and who she wasn’t,
that butterfly who possessed no more than a name
I chose for her myself.
So much is said in so few lines. About the speaker, the tenant, their lives and their fates. The confidence with which the speaker enters the afterlife is nearly comical—they are both clearly bound for the underworld.We never learn her real name but she smiles twice in sixteen lines. Bradley points out that Aspasia (470 B.C.—410 B.C) “was a courtesan and consort of Pericles … admired for her sagacity .. .one of the few women in ancient Greece of known political influence. Perhaps predictably, she was accused by detractors of being a procuress and brothel keeper.”
I first came across Bradley’s translations in the Paris Review’s Winter 2021 issue and was immediately struck by them; they were new to me. The reason: they were from The House in Olgiate and Other Poems which had not been available in English. An example:
XXXI “When I Enter the Cemetery …”
When I enter the cemetery
of San Felice a Ema
I have to go past many tombstones
and must actually walk across the grave
of Enrico Nencioni
a distinguished writer of whom I know little.
I don’t hold out much hope for our voyage together
my dear, knowing as I do how a few bones
preserve less than nothing of what we are.
It remains almost impossible to imagine
our duet in dust having a prominence here
it never had in the melodrama of life.
My role is patience: a patience never eager
to suffer fools or worse, and yet not a role
deprived of bodily substance. But your part
is almost invisible to those without your eyes,
which are the only ones that count, even if less
able than others’ to see distances and roads.
Bradley’s translation coveys Montale’s wistfulness, longing and imagination. The House in Olgiate is 40 pages long and yet the poem above is only one of a handful over 18 lines. The rest are more notations than poems, off-handed and pithy, characteristic of the poet’s sensibility, but minor works nevertheless. Two examples:
IN SOMEONE’S SPARE TIME
If an explosion produced
the universe,
might not another bang
undo it?
and:
ON THE VERANDA
On the veranda,
stretched out on ease on the chaise lounge,
you scrutinized the work of Saint Bonaventure
and other of the greats, famous and obsolete.
Later, you were welcomed by a world without rules,
I by the jaws of bureaucracy.
But what matter? Love isn’t destroyed except
by disdain, and that never had lodging in ours.
As I said, the collection shows the workings of the poet’s mind and perhaps his method. Bradley’s introduction addresses this explicitly in describing their origin: “Handwritten in two notebooks the poet gave his housekeeper Gina Tossi, who donated them to the manuscript collection of the University of Pavia, this material was edited into publishable form by Renzo Cremante … Cremante transcribed fifty-six poems — some of them fully independent, some clearly drafts, some no more than fragments—and the result appeared from Mondadori in 2006.” He says, “those that are only drafts or fragments often show us the poet working through ideas that reach their definitive form elsewhere.” And he reminds the reader that Montale did not “consider any of the material in this excavated collection to be finished work.” Yet, Bradley rightly points out, neither did he destroy them. Any reader who treasures Montale’s writing, his company, his wit and moments of darkness, will find The House in Olgiate enlightening about the work at best and at the least, just very good company.
A quick look at my bookshelf shows that many of the books of poetry I’ve bought recently come from The New York Review’s Poets and Classics series: Songs of Kabir; Elise Partridge’s Collected Poems; Pierre Reverdy and Elizabeth Willis. These two volumes by Montale continue to burnish NYRB’s reputation.
[Published by New York Review Classics on May 14, 2024. Butterfly of Dinard, 232 pages, $16.95 US/$22.95 CAN, paperback; Late Montale, 264 pages, $20.00 US/$26.00 CAN, paperback]