Eugenio Montale

Eugenio Montale’s It Depends: A Poet’s Notebook (Quaderno di quattro anni, 1977) appeared in Italy during the Nobel laureate’s eighty-second year. The sardonic force of his shrewd observations of the contemporary scene remains unblunted even as the poet has become more involved with the everyday, more private, more self-revealing. Since the publication of Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925) over fifty years ago, the importance to our identities of links with the past has been a recurrent theme in Montale’s work; here it gains even greater prominence as the poet attempts to find catchholds and constancies in an unstable world, finally to accede to “precariousness the muse of our time.” Professor G. Singh, head of the department of Italian language and literature at The Queen’s University of Belfast, comments in his introduction to this bilingual edition: “It is the essence of Montale’s modernity that in spite of its dependence on pun and parody, satire and sarcasm, it is firmly rooted in the fundamental sobriety and integrity of his character…. He has not only tried, but tried supremely well to acquire ’a modern soul,’ and what he has paid for so dearly is our gain as well as his, a lesson for us––both morally and poetically.”

Eugenio Montale’s New Poems—a selection in English translation from Satura (1971) and Diaro del ‘71 e del ‘72, the 1975 Nobel Prize-winning author’s most recent collections—represents a new departure in this major poet’s work. After the death of his wife, Mosca, Montale wrote a series of poems, Xenia, inspired by his memory of her, which in terms of technique, style, and language are unique in Italian literature. In addition to Xenia and other poems evoked by the poet’s wife, this volume includes witty, ironical, and satirical pieces in which Montale displays his flair for linguistic innovation as well as his sharp critical intelligence. Through the extraordinary invention, formal as well as substantive, in his latest verse, Montale makes the Italian language perform in poetry in ways it has never done before, thereby demonstrating his right to be considered one of the great originators of twentieth-century poetry. The contents of New Poems were chosen in close collaboration with Montale himself. The translator, G. Singh of The Queen’s University of Belfast, aims at offering as literal a rendering as is compatible with the idiomatic naturalness in English and the rhythmic cadence any good verse translation must have.

Acclaiming the late Eugenio Montale (1897-1981) as “one of the most important poets of the contemporary West,” the Swedish Academy awarded him the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature. This selection, introduced by Glauco Cambon, presents sixty-nine poems chosen from Montale’s first three books––Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), Le occasioni (The Occasions), and La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things)––as rendered by sixteen translators, many of them distinguished poets in their own right.

Acclaiming the late Eugenio Montale (1897-1981) as “one of the most important poets of the contemporary West,” the Swedish Academy awarded him the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature. This selection, introduced by Glauco Cambon, presents sixty-nine poems chosen from Montale’s first three books––Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones), Le occasioni (The Occasions), and La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things)––as rendered by sixteen translators, many of them distinguished poets in their own right.