READING LATE MONTALE

1 4 1 R R E A D I N G L A T E M O N T A L E R O B E R T B O Y E R S Is it true that the distinction between ‘‘competence and greatness in poetry’’ is at once ‘‘elusive, yet unmistakable,’’ as one very brave critic recently suggested? It is the sort of question certain to inspire disdain in some quarters, where the very notion of greatness is regarded as a throwback to a time when people wasted their time arguing over what was ‘‘best’’ and what was not. And yet it is not easy to ignore the thought that, in reading the late poems of a master like the Italian poet Eugenio Montale, we are confronted with works decidedly inferior to the masterworks by which he has long been known, both in his own country and in the United States, where we have long had access to several versions of the famous earlier poems. Of course, even the slightest poems of a writer like Montale have more than a little to recommend them, in part because they fill out our understanding of his P o e t i c D i a r i e s , 1 9 7 1 a n d 1 9 7 2 , by Eugenio Montale, translated by William Arrowsmith, edited by Rosanna Warren (Norton, 240 pp., $16.95 paper) P o e t i c N o t e b o o k , 1 9 7 4 – 1 9 7 7 , by Eugenio Montale, translated by William Arrowsmith, edited by Rosanna Warren (Norton, 288 pp., $16.95 paper) 1 4 2 B O Y E R S Y range and the durability of his interests. But then there is also the fact that Montale late in life revised his sense of what a poem might accomplish and radically adjusted his rhetoric to accommodate the moods and insights of a man no longer young, a man given, much of the time, to retrospection. Not to mention the fact that a good many of the late poems are quite impressive, sustaining a seductive music in spite of the poet’s commitment to measures more prose-like, direct, and unadorned than those he had favored in the volumes that made his reputation. Not much, perhaps , to charm the ear in the opening lines of a very brief untitled poem which begins, ‘‘Fifty years ago / cuttlefishbones appeared / says a foreign Ph.D. / meaning to congratulate me.’’ Nor are the lines of the Italian original any more promising. And yet here and there, even in the English translations by the late William Arrowsmith , there is something more, another frequency, a casual eloquence that can be oddly moving, if only for a line or two, as in these lines from ‘‘Soliloquy’’: this is the palazzo where Tristan was composed and here’s the hole where Henry James savored crepes suzettes The translation here is from two recent volumes of late Montale edited by Rosanna Warren and translated by Arrowsmith, who had earlier translated Montale’s major work. We must be grateful for Arrowsmith’s Montale, as well as for the more recent versions of the earlier poems published by Jonathan Galassi. And yet it is hard not to feel that in Arrowsmith’s hands, Montale is not a consistently thrilling poet, and that he would be much better served by a translator who is a poet, as Arrowsmith clearly is not. Improbable, perhaps, that Montale first became known to most American readers in Robert Lowell’s eccentric 1961 volume Imitations , in which Lowell had given fair warning (in his introduction) that his versions of poems by a wide range of poets, from Homer and Rilke to Valéry and Pasternak, were ‘‘free,’’ that is, ‘‘partly self-su≈cient and separate from [their] sources.’’ Thus did American readers have every right to suppose that the ten Montale ‘‘imitations’’ Lowell composed were by no means faithful to their Italian originals, their music and demeanor more a reflection of R E A D I N G L A T E M O N T A L E 1 4 3...