Eugenio Montale
Sometimes
regarded as the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi (1798-1837),
Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896, was awarded the Nobel Prize
in literature in 1975, and died in Milan in 1981. He served in the
infantry in World War I, and settled in Milan in 1948, where he became
the chief literary critic for Italy's foremost newspaper, the Corriere
della Sera. He was also a music critic and a translator, and, for
his courageous opposition to fascism, was made a lifetime member of
the Italian Senate in 1967. Montale's
poetry is deeply personal, at times almost hermetic. Often it is addressed
to an unknown "you" who, not infrequently, is dead, or to
certain women, presented under fictive names (in the manner of classical
and Renaissance poets), who played important roles in his real and
imaginative lives. They are called Esterina, Gerti, Liuba, Vixen,
Dora Markus, Mosca, and Clizia. Liuba, for example, was someone he
glimpsed for only a few minutes in a railway station, where she was
fleeing from Italy's Fascist, anti-Jewish laws. Dora Markus was someone
he never met; she was, he explained, "constructed from a photograph
of a pair of legs" sent him by a friend. Nevertheless, as one
of his finest translators, William Arrowsmith, declares, "the
poem devoted to her is no mere exercise in virtuoso evocation; it
is the objectification of the poet's affinity for a personal truth,
the existential meaning of a given fragment. 'The poet's task,' Montale
observed, 'is the quest for a particular, not general, truth.'"
His poems almost always deal with fragmentary experience, the meaning
of which is either obscure or, possibly, terrifyingly absent. As a
poet, he had a preoccupation with images of limitation. This is manifested,
Arrowsmith writes, in the form of "walls, barriers, frontiers,
prisons, any confining enclosure that makes escape into a larger self
or a new community impossible. Hence too his intractable refusal to
surrender to any ideology or sodality, whether Communist or Catholic."
In 1927 Montale fell in love with a married woman, who left her husband
in 1939 and moved in with him. He called her, half-affectionately,
half-mockingly, Mosca (or Fly), a name he might have borrowed from
Ben Jonson's Volpone. She was a plain woman with poor eyesight, but
he remained devoted to her, and when her husband died in 1958, they
entered into a marriage that lasted until her death five years later.
Another woman who would figure prominently in Montale's work was an
American scholar he met in 1932 named Irma Brandeis--later to become
the author of a brilliant study of Dante's Divine Comedy called The
Ladder of Vision, an examination of segments of Dante's great epic
without recourse to any credence in its theology. In Montale's poems
she becomes his Beatrice, a woman of more-than-human gentleness and
perfection. (In an interview, Montale said the women in his poems
were "Dantesque, Dantesque," by which he meant, suggests
the poet/scholar Rosanna Warren, they were spiritualized, not fully
individualized beings.) He gave this American, a figure of majestic
spiritual importance to him, the name of Clizia (might this be derived
from ecclesia?). Arrowsmith calls her "the absent center of the
poet's life. . . . Cliziàs sacrifice of physical love"
allows her to become "her lover's spiritual salvation,"
and redeems "all those who, like Montale, were suffering the
darkness of the Fascist years and human evil generally. She 'redeems
the time,'" in a phrase borrowed from T. S. Eliot.
Montale was a learned autodidact and a highly allusive poet, a matter
that adds to the difficulties and puzzles of his poems. His literary
influences, for example, include Plato, the Bible, Dante and the dolcestilnovisti
of his circle, Petrarch, Shakespeare and the English Metaphysical
poets, Browning, Henry James, Hopkins, Baudelaire, Mallarmé,
Jammes, and Valéry, as well as Eliot.
A word needs to be said about William Arrowsmith, Montale's chief,
and among his best, translators. He was a classicist who has translated
Euripides, Aristophanes, and Petronius, as well as Pavese, and, with
Roger Shattuck, edited The Craft and Context of Translation (1961).
In addition, he has written penetrating commentary on Eliot's early
poetry and on Ruskin. He observes: "Translation, like politics,
is an art of the possible; if the translator has done his work the
best he can expect is that his reader, believing that the text has
been translated, not merely transcribed or transliterated, will feel
something of the contagion of the original."

("Eugenio
Montale" by Anthony Hecht.
Reprinted from the Summer 1998 Wilson Quarterly)