by Tim Parks
Arremba su la strinata proda
le navi di cartone, e dormi,
fanciulletto padrone: ehe non oda
tu i malevoli spiriti ehe veleggiano a stormi.
Nel chiuso dell’ortino svolacchia il gufo
e i fumacchi dei tetti sono pesi.
L’attimo ehe rovina l’opera lenta di mesi
giunge: ora incrina segreto, ora divelge in un buffo.
Viene lo spacco; forse senza strepito.
Chi ha edificato sente la sua condanna.
E’ l’ora ehe si salva solo la barca in panna.
Amarra la tua flotta tra le siepi.
Even those who cannot read Italian will immediately be aware of the poem’s careful rhyming, almost chiming, which finally breaks with the very last word ‘siepi’, the boat, the lyric, being brought to prosaic ground at last. Montale loves to end on a dying fall and Galassi is astute here to close not with Arrowsmith’s alliterating ‘brush’ but with a word quite outside his translation’s sound pattern: ‘canes’. The original also has a great deal of internal rhyming, some of it at least potentially, significant: cartone - padrone (cardboard - master), rovina -incrina (destroy - crack), and the weighty half-rhyme, svolacchia -fumacchi. These latter words are difficult to translate. The rare ‘svolacchiare’, borrowed perhaps from D’Annunzio, whom Montale at once rejected and ransacked, suggests sudden clumsy flight, while a ‘fumacchio’ is a fiimarole or a smouldering log, the one suggesting an infernal connection with those evil spirits, the other giving us a picture of the domestic roofs as themselves alight, the houses slowly burning themselves out from within, as almost everything in Montale’s world consumes itself in fire.
While you can’t expect a translation to measure up to a rhyme pattern, it’s odd that both English versions ignore the implications of ‘fumacchi’. In any event, internal rhyme is ubiquitous in Montale’s verse and usually in combination with enjambment. It transmits an uneasy sense of an imprisoning mesh, or a series of short circuits, the poem being brought to sudden halts, often in mid-line. The reader will frequently have the disorientating sense that something connects, while remaining uncertain as to where and with what, for often the inner ear picks up the rhyme without immediately finding its earlier partner.
There is no place here to examine the complex mix of Montale’s diction, its weaving back and forth between literary and prosaic, but one or two observations on how the poem achieves its deprecating resonance are apropos. For consistency of metaphor, ‘fanciulletto padrone - ‘little boy master’ - has to be translated as ‘little captain’ or ‘little commodore’, but read in Italian the line cannot help but recall the Wordsworthian idea that the child is father to the man. The lines invite the boy to retreat, to sleep, not to risk it, not to grow up perhaps. For those spirits are not just ‘evil’ they are ‘malevolenti’, they wish him evil. And the ‘tu’ of the first stanza is important. Redundant in standard Italian syntax, the personal pronoun is introduced (in the most prominent of positions) for emphasis and contrast. The idea is ‘sleep, so that at least you may not hear those ill-wishing spirits’, who, rather than ‘setting sail’ or ‘putting in’, ‘veleggiano’. This is a word that can mean to ‘soar in flight’ or to ‘sail about’ and it allows Montale to maintain his nautical image while increasing the sense of menace: the air is full of swarming spirits. But if the boy is to be spared hearing those spirits, who will hear them? The poet? The builder? Or the adult whom the child will give birth to as he sleeps? Even with this simplest of lyrics, the essential nub winds off into a cloud of possibilities.
There is more. A few pages earlier, in a poem dedicated to fellow poet Camillo Sbarbaro, Montale imagines his friend as a boy launching paper boats - his poems - and invites a kind passer-by to pull them safe on shore with his walking stick. So this later lyric cannot help but gather whimsical associations from the first. Is Montale suggesting that these early years of Fascism are not a moment for poetry, but for keeping one’s head down? Delicate verses have little chance out there. Haul the boats in, they’re only paper. Or is he talking about youth coming to consciousness, addressing his younger self perhaps? Or simply expressing a momentary loss of confidence?
Whichever way we read the poem, the line that takes on the most rhetorical and rhythmical force, to a large extent lost in the translations, is the very last line that rhymes: ‘E’ Tora ehe si salva solo la barca in panna’ (literally: the hour has come when only the grounded boat will be saved). This pessimistic invitation to inaction pulls together the odd collage of images which, while still refusing to be pinned down, establish an all too recognisable cocktail of emotions: fear, inadequacy, desire to sleep, desire to spare another’s disappointment, or see one’s own disappointment destroy another. From all of which Montale extracts himself with the quiet skill of one who knows that the poem’s poignancy is generated precisely by its refusal to insist too much, its capacity to remain as light and precarious as a paper boat. The translations, which are probably as good as translations can be of such a poem, remind us that for all Montale’s determination to distance himself from Italian’s aulic vocation, a poem nevertheless remains a felicitous event above all in its own language. The little boat bobs and dips and is eventually beached into prose rather more convincingly, more attractively, in the original.
It is generally agreed that the core of Montale’s work consists of three major collections: Cuttlefish Bones (1925), The Occasions (1939) and The Storm, etc. (1956). Galassi chooses to publish all three together, separating them from a body of work of almost equal length that came later. He defends this decision in an inspired afterword that offers the best short account I have yet come across of the nature, import and elusive content of Montale’s work. Above all he has a firm grasp of its bewildering interconnectedness both inside itself and within Italian and European culture as a whole. This is the key not so much to understanding Montale - ‘understanding’ is the wrong word but to appreciating his vision of what contemporary poetry might be and do.
The passage from Cuttlefish Bones to The Occasions is crucial. At its simplest, Montale drastically reduces a first-person presence in the poems together with any obvious autobiographical reference, concentrating on constructing small groups of images, events, exhortations which will generate a complex emotional state without revealing the personal situation that sparked it off.
Since the poet is living in Florence now, the vivid coastal landscape that gave an easy homogeneity to the first collection is gone. Everything is more fragmented, harder to get the mind round. The change in direction inevitably led to accusations of hermeticism, while critics, and for that matter Montale himself, theorised at length about objective correlatives and the like.
Such talk seems less interesting now than reflections on the whys and wherefores of the change and the direction it would ultimately lead Montale to take. Perhaps if poetry is to be a vehicle of consciousness and if the poet’s own consciousness is the only one immediately available to him, the twin problems of retaining privacy and of making the poems carry weight for a wide audience were beginning to make themselves felt. Montale is older. There are various relationships. Poems are addressed to different women. Then political considerations are growing daily more serious: while preparing this collection the poet would lose his job for failing to join the Fascist Party. So one might remark that any artist whose form of expression requires a semantic content will take steps to preserve that double life without which it often seems any life at all is impossible. Certainly in his essays on Dante and D’Annunzio Montale is attentive to such problems, pondering at length on the extent to which poets hide or fail to hide the biography behind the verse. No doubt his decision, as the work progresses, to draw on the Renaissance convention of a sequence of poems to an ideal beloved is taken partly because it will serve to cover tracks. Actually, I can think of no major figure who, without resorting to the provocative, almost showy secrecy of contemporary writers like Pynchon or Salinger,
has more successfully and unspectacularly kept the exact nature of his private life out of the public domain. Although we now know their identities, the roles played by the two women addressed in his poems as Clizia and Volpe, or by the woman with whom he lived while addressing poems to those others, remain quite obscure.
Such reflections are, I hope, appropriate, but inevitably reductive. Montale remarks that in writing Cuttlefish Bones, ‘I felt I was close to something essential. A subtle veil separated me from the definitive quid. Absolute expression would have meant breaking that veil … but this remained an unreachable goal.’ Yet, referring to The Occasions, he then claims, “I wanted to go deeper.’ How can one go deeper if, while being able to think of the world as a veil, one can never penetrate it? What does Montale understand by ‘going deeper’?
Galassi’s afterword presents Montale’s work as an autobiographical novel. What initially are relatively simple constructs in which man or woman are seen as involved together in a search for some form of overcoming, become progressively more complex. Montale loves a Jewish American, Irma Brandeis, a Dante scholar, who leaves Italy at the outbreak of war. The poems to her, or to her memory, slide from intense personal pain and pleasure to visions of individual, then even universal salvation, drawing on the symbolism of centuries past and Christian and Jewish traditions, not to mention relatively obscure heresies such as Nestorianism.
Here, in a constant construction and deconstruction of fantastic allegory, clearly fuelled by the catastrophic events occurring all around him, each poem is built on those that have gone before, to the extent that it is hard to read any one of them separately. Later, arriving at the work addressed to Volpe, a younger woman whose sensuality usurps, though never completely, the position of the more spiritual Clizia, it will be impossible to read the poems without a thorough knowledge of all that has gone before and indeed without some wonderment as to the nature of the poet’s relationship with Mosca, the lifetime companion he eventually married.
Meanwhile, Montale’s contact with Florentine and later Milanese literary circles, his enviable familiarity with a huge range of European and American literature, his personal difficulties with Fascism and mass culture in general, are all drawn together in work that, in his role as translator, Galassi despairingly describes as characterised by a remarkable ‘over-determination’. That is, a single reference may take us back to Dante and Browning, or Baudelaire and D’Annunzio, another to the contemporary inferno of war and a girlfriend, or compound of girlfriends, while almost everything will gain resonance from its connection with any number of earlier poems.
Thus intensity is achieved not through revealed meaning, or lyric flight, but via a prodigious density that encourages the reader to grope for ever more complex levels of consciousness, evoking the finest shadings of emotion coloured by every variety of thought. This is what the poet meant by going ‘deeper’. The strategy and its effects are difficult to summarise and if Montale is always interesting but never exceptional when he writes about poetry in prose, it is no doubt because he senses that poetry presents ideas which, as he laconically puts it in ‘A Dialogue with E. Montale on Poetry’ ‘are acceptable only in that form’. As a result the following brief lyric, ‘The Fan’ from the collection The Storm, etc. merits more than a thousand words in Galassi’s excellent notes.
Ut pictura … The confounding lips,
the looks, sighs, days now long since gone:
I try to fix them there as in
the wrong end of a telescope,
silent and motionless, but more alive.
It was a joust of men and armaments, a rout
in smoke that Eurus raised, but now the dawn
has turned it purple and breaks through those mists.
The mother of pearl gleams, the dizzying
precipice still swallows victims, but
the feathers on your cheeks are whitening
and maybe the day is saved. O raining blows
when you reveal yourself, sharp flashes, downpour
over the hordes! (Must he who sees you die?)
The notes begin:
Another highly allusive ‘pseudosonnet’ (Montale to Contini, June 6, 1942) (Op, 943), its title drawn from the ‘éventails’ of Mallarmé (Greco, 142-43, finds parallels with Mallarmé’s first ‘éventail’ - Avec comme pour langage, which is also an Elizabethan sonnet). Its occasion is another ‘Petrarchan’ attribute of Clizia’s, drawn from her war chest of jewelry ‘a holy relic in time of war’ (Gary, 312). (According to Macri - 2, 11, the poem describes the disastrous rout of Italian forces at Caporetto in October 1917.)
I quote this snippet with no satirical intentions, but in an attempt to tease out what the experience is of reading this collection, what it might mean for someone to have composed the original work over the course of a lifetime, for another to have dedicated years of his life to the unbelievably painstaking and ill-paid task of translating and annotating it. Like Arrow-smith’s translations, and indeed most serious contemporary translation of poetry, Galassi presents his version side by side with the original. This is no more than an honest admission of defeat from the outset. ‘Poetry is the fatal uniqueness of language,’ Celan remarked. Montale himself spoke of the untranslatability of poetry in essays that Galassi himself has translated. Here nostalgia for the original is overwhelming. Yet bravely the translator proceeds. Indeed, precisely as poetry in this century has become more cryptic, more private, more untranslatable, translations have multiplied. Why?
In Montale’s case it is very much as if the translator were seeking to continue and expand the poet’s work of interconnection, introducing into another language and tradition, with all the new connotations this inevitably opens the way for, the immense spiderweb of the man’s thought. And the voluminous notes Galassi provides - absolutely indispensable for a fruitful reading of Montale - the frequent quotations of critics and sources and letters, make us aware of a huge joint effort in which the reader is invited to take part, an effort to put everything together, to understand it all in a flash. It is in this way that the yearning for epiphany is exorcised. With each new lyric the mind is momentarily appeased, dazzled out of limits, not by the Mediterranean light, but by the complex expression of its own and by extension everybody else’s experience.
In his book Ka, Roberto Calasso tells how the first Indian god, Prajapati, did battle with Death. On the point of succumbing, he was consoled by the reflection that if he went under the connections his mind had made would nevertheless survive, for how can a web of thought be killed? Later, when his body had been broken and dispersed into all existence, the same Prajapati taught the younger gods that to overcome death they must construct the altar of fire. The bricks required numbered the hours of the year. It was a task that would take all the time there was. So much so that, moving onwards to historical time, the brahmans of the Vedic texts were still involved in the same enterprise. Calasso comments: ‘By creating an edifice of such connections, the brahmans imagined … they had beaten Death … And thus died the more serene.’
Reading Montale, watching with what admirable stubbornness he sets out to arrange and rearrange the same elements over and over again, to thicken his web, and then observing the translators and critics as they minister about him with the commendable solemnity of priests, one cannot help feeling that the altar of fire is still under construction. Why not? And as the eye moves from original to translation - Arrowsmith’s, Galassi’s, but Charles Wright’s too, and Edith Farnsworth’s, an uncanny connection floats to mind. The original stands to these translations as the impossible communion of self and other to the young Montale. Each translation re-enacts the yearning the poet expressed, the frustration of another attractive but not quite successful attempt to overcome barriers - in this case that between Italian and English.
Yet the absence of the définitive version at least allows us to fill our time by trying again. One of the great pleasures of reading a bilingual edition is that you can a
llow yourself the liberty (as I have in the first quotations in this essay) of imagining different approximations to the impossible perfect solution. Montale’s third and most ambitious collection, The Storm, etc., closes with a poem whose title, ‘The Prisoner’s Dream’, might well be applied to all his work. In Galassi’s version the last lines are as follows:
Slow-witted, sore
from my sharp pallet, I’ve become
the flight of the moth my boot
is turning to powder on the floor,
become the light’s chameleon kimonos
hung out from the towers at dawn.
I’ve smelled the scent of burning on the wind
from the cakes in the ovens,
I’ve looked around, I’ve conjured rainbows
shimmering on fields of spiderwebs
and petals on the trellises of bars,
I’ve stood, and fallen back
Into the pit where a century’s a minute -
And the blows keep coming, and the footsteps,
And I still don’t know if at the feast
I’ll be stuffer or stuffing. The wait is long,
My dream of you isn’t over.
In 1985 Arrowsmith offered:
I’ve risen only to fall back
into that gulf where a century’s a second -
and the beatings go on and on, and the footsteps,
and I don’t know whether I’ll be at the feast
as stuffer or stuffing. It’s a long wait,
and my dream of you isn’t over.
In 1978 Charles Wright tried:
and still I don’t know when the banquet is finally served, if I shall be the eater or the eaten. The wait is long; my dream of you is not yet over.
