Later Montale

By Eugenio Montale

Selected and translated by George Bradley

NYRB Poets 2024

The New York Review of Books “Poets” line here reprints George Bradley’s 2022 volume translating and annotating the books of Eugenio Montale’s poetry that fall on the latter side of the near-decade hiatus Montale took from publishing his work. His career, and his 1975 Nobel Prize, was born of his earliest meteoric successes, Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, and The Storm and Other Things, but he wrote more or less steadily from his “return” with 1962’s Satura to his death in 1981. Bradley presented a bilingual edition translating Satura, Diary of ‘71 and ‘71, Four-Year Notebook, Other Poems, and the entirety of The House in Olgiate and Other Poems, plus ample notes on everything. 

“I have done my best to cast light on the poet’s obscurities,” Bradley writes, and he largely succeeds. Sometimes his copious, conversational endnotes forget that most people aren’t going to read the notes sequentially but rather reference-by-reference; full context of one note sometimes can’t be found without consulting some much earlier note. But mostly he does a superb job not only clarifying most of Montale’s typically wide-ranging allusions but also, more importantly, in conveying the at times very odd tone the poet adopted in these later poems. The appearance of this volume alongside the new NYRB edition of Montale’s Butterfly of Dinard (translated by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky) feels almost like a mini-revival, always a welcome idea when it comes to this poet.

“The later work is ironic rather than sublime,” Bradley writes in a heroic but of course doomed attempt to convey the evanescent graveyard-awareness of any author’s late style. “It is less grand and more intimate, less rhetorical but perhaps more moving, less dazzling yet often more revealing.” The lack of grandeur was a distinguishing property that Montale himself advertised but could never quite manage, since even his most trivial verses tend to read like they were carved in Carrara marble. 

Bradley handles the tonal shifts and elephantine attempts at whimsy, and although later Montale isn’t particularly demanding to translate, Bradley nevertheless does a smoothly confident job giving English-only readers a real sense of the man, as in “In a Northern City”:

As a copy of our progenitors’ Garden of Eden,

Well, we lack the original for comparison,

But it’s certainly acceptable. Squirrels leap

From their trapezes, branches high overhead.

A very few children, each with more than one parent. 

Even if it isn’t cold out, the air feels glacial.

In springtime, one has to guard oneself

Against foxes and other furry creatures. 

That’s what my driver tells me, brought here

By chance from Galicia or Navarre.

He can’t stomach democrácia. Which is just

How the Marqués de Vllanova would put it. 

I stare off and pretend I’m thinking. You pay a high price

For the modern soul. I might even give it a try.

Bradley dutifully appends a note: “Rafael Lasso de la Vega, Marqués de Villanova (1890-1959), was a Spanish poet who lived in Florence from 1942 to 1948 and was one of the authors who frequented the LeGiubbe Rosse café,” and neglects to a quick mention at this location that LeGiubbe Rossa was a Florence literary cafe and nerve center of two or three literary sets a century ago. 

Naturally, not all the annotating in the world can vitiate the moral outrage of the book appearing in the first place, much less being reprinted to the NYRB’s much wider audience. Montale very clearly didn’t want these poems published, which Bradley readily acknowledges. “It should be said, however, that Montale did not consider any of the material in this excavated collection to be finished verse, and that many of its holograph pages in fact bear cancellation marks,” he writes. “Yet if he did not choose to print these poems during his lifetime, neither did he destroy them.” 

This is inexcusably thin gruel. So if a poet doesn’t have a grand bonfire of vanities in the back garden and incinerate all his keepsakes, everything’s fair game, including poems he unambiguously marked as off limits? Ridiculous, and shameful. Bradley’s extensive annotations are invaluable in shedding light on the thinking and creativity of the aging poet, but the poems themselves, however adroitly translated, were never meant to have readers. So Later Montale is both welcome and illicit, with all the contradictory payoffs and deficits. 

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News