ABSTRACT
Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) composed poems as hermetic as any ever written in any language. For the 1975 Nobel prizewinner, however, this obscurity was by no means gratuitous. Montale’s highly conscious private symbolism is as autobiographically specific as it is strangely applicable to our own experience, as cryptically singular as it is thematically multifaceted. It is, in brief, an exceedingly complex lyricism embodying a challenging—and perhaps to some readers, irritating—psychoanalytical and philosophical stance, at least throughout Jonathan Galassi’s superb version and edition of the Collected Poems 1920-1954 , which represents the three long volumes—Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, and The Storm, Etc.—produced during early and middle stages of his career. William Arrowsmith’s rendering of Satura 1962-1970 , which has also appeared in English (both editions are bilingual), shifts toward the terseness of the poet’s old age, a style especially associated with the rather dismissingly entitled Diary of ‘71 and ‘72 (1973), Notebook of Four Years (1977) and Other and Uncollected Poems (1981). The man’s oeuvre is thus marked chronologically—though salient counterexamples exist—by a dichotomy opposing enig matic, allegorical versifying and succinct, anti-poetic, diary-like notations.
