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The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale: 1925-1977
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About The Collected Poems Of Eugenio Montale: 1925-1977
About the Author Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. William Arrowsmith was a renowned translator and classics scholar. Rosanna Warren is the author of six poetry collections and a volume of critical essays. The recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Guggenheim Foundation, she teaches at the University of Chicago and lives in Chicago, Illinois. Product Description A majestic translation of one of the Nobel Prize-winning masters of twentieth-century poetry. Hailed as one of the key poets of the modern era, Eugenio Montale changed Italian poetry forever and helped to create international Modernism. Steeped in the tradition of Dante, Petrarch, and Leopardi, yet fiercely innovative, in each new book Montale challenged the styles he had previously established. His poems chart an adventure of consciousness and conscience in response to the shocks of modernity, fascism, and two world wars, and they also present several of the greatest erotic sequences in modern poetry. The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale publishes for the first time in English William Arrowsmith’s pellucid translations of Poetic Diary 1971, 1972, and the Poetic Notebook, as well as his previously published translations of four volumes: Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, The Storm and Other Things, and Satura. With the wide range of Montale’s poetry at last available to the English reader, this collection reveals Montale to be the greatest Italian poet of the twentieth century. From Booklist *Starred Review* Besides the ancient Greeks, classicist William Arrowsmith (1924–92) loved modern Italian literature. He translated all the poetry of the archetypal Italian modernist Montale (1896–1981) that emerged before his own death. Arrowsmith also critically annotated his translations, revealing not only Montale’s poetical inspirations and philosophical aims but also the cogent opinions of the best Montale critics. This volume corrals all the translations and much of the notes and, with editor Warren’s startlingly economical (because so informative) introduction and the Italian texts of the poems across the gutter from the translations, opens Montale to Anglophone readers definitively. Montale has a reputation for difficulty, but Arrowsmith’s renderings are remarkably accessible and, for those who can sufficiently glom the Italian, seem utterly faithful. They can be pleasurably read without Warren’s and Arrowsmith’s elucidations (though even more pleasurably with them), for they manifest the sharp imagery, the simplicity of diction (Montale regretted the polysyllabicalism of basic Italian; no such problem with English), and the progressive clarification of voice, consciously approaching that of plain prose, that typify the unfolding poetic practice of, say, W. C. Williams among great American modernists. And Montale lived and wrote in a far more beautiful landscape (often the Italian Riviera), though sometimes amid much greater troubles (Mussolini’s fascism). --Ray Olson
