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Montale: Poems: Edited by Jonathan Galassi (Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series)
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About Montale: Poems: Edited By Jonathan Galassi
Product Description A beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets selection of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Italian poet Eugenio Montale, one of the giants of twentieth-century poetry. Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) is not only Italy’s greatest modern poet but a towering figure in twentieth-century literature. His incandescently beautiful body of work is deeply rooted in the venerable lyric tradition that began with Dante, but he brilliantly reinvents that tradition for our time, probing the depths of love, death, faith, and philosophy in the bracing light of modern history. Dynamic innovation and a coiled, fierce energy fuel the poet’s quest for liberation from the self. Marked by musicality and rhythmic variety, Montale’s poems manage to be buoyant with allusion and metaphor while also densely studded with things—with concrete, elemental images that keep his complex and restless musings firmly tethered to the world. Montale’s reputation is international and enduring; his widely translated work has profoundly influenced generations of poets around the world. This volume contains selections from all his greatest works, rendered into English by the accomplished poet and translator Jonathan Galassi. It serves as both an essential introduction to an important poet and a true pleasure for lovers of contemporary About the Author EUGENIO MONTALE (1896-1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is widely considered the greatest Italian lyric poet since Giacomo Leopardi. JONATHAN GALASSI is the president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He is the author of three poetry collections, including Left-handed: Poems (Knopf, 2012), and has published his translations of the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. from the Introduction by Jonathan Galassi READING MONTALE The story begins in an enclosed garden, an orchard to be precise. The wind enters, bringing the sound of thesea, which arouses dead memories. Suddenly the garden is not a garden but a graveyard, a mortuary, and the solitary strip of coastline where it lies has become a crucible, where history itself is forged. The story is being told to someone else, a ‘‘you’’ who, unlike the storyteller, may be able to take flight out of the constricting enclosure with the assistance of an intervening apparition, a creature out of a dream. The one hope of salvation imaginable to the anxious, disaffected storyteller is that his own existence may somehow be justified in helping his interlocutor escape the surroundings he finds so inimical. The story continues, rippling out from here, gathering density, specificity, and color, growing in complexity and resonance. The elemental coastline is vividly evoked: churning sea; impenetrable azure sky; blinding, hallucinatory sun; unforgiving cliffs and shoals – outward manifestations of the narrator’s inner landscape. We get to know him in other ways as well. He is melancholy, solitary, obsessed with death and his past, preoccupied with limitations, both his and his world’s, and he shoulders the burden of an overriding sense of universal wrong. He is an old young man, desperate for a counterpart, a companion who will recognize him and tus rescue him from the prison of himself, who will belie his conviction that he is extraneous to life. Gradually, this other, too, emerges out of the haze of the shore; but she is more absent than present, a phantom herself. Later her nature will be clarified, but by then she has more or less left the narrator behind. Yet his one possession is his anxiously posited faith in her reality, and her capacity not to be saved herself now, but to redeem him. This character so doubtful of his own existence has come to stake his life on the conviction that she is the only real being in an alien and insubstantial world; outside her – and himself – is no one and nothing. The st
