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2 5 R A T R A N S L A T O R ’ S C O N F E S S I O N J O N A T H A N G A L A S S I As someone partly of Italian extraction whose grandfather came to this country as a boy of thirteen in 1900 and who spent countless hours of his childhood sprawled on the living room floor poring over books like The Wonders of Italy – an album of stamp-sized pictures of cathedrals and palazzi and paintings that I still cherish today – the discovery of Italy itself, as a student in England after college, was a lightning bolt, a life-changing experience. To grasp dimly that the riches of Italian art and literature were in some way mine was overwhelmingly moving and inspiring. I remember my first visit to Rome in the spring of 1972 and the sense of disorientation induced by the messy glory of the city, the piling-on of styles, eras, entire civilizations next to and on top of one another – something not unlike the jumble of the mind itself. I would never be the same. I returned to Italy that summer, to the Università per Stranieri in Perugia, and started to learn the Italian language and to begin to try to read Italian books, and when I went back to Cambridge in the fall I began to study Dante. It was after my return to Cambridge , Massachusetts, in the summer of 1973 that I first encountered Eugenio Montale, the poet whose work has preoccupied me 2 6 G A L A S S I Y in some ways ever since. My friend the poet Frank Bidart asked me to try translating Montale’s ‘‘Xenia’’ poems, written after the death of his wife, Drusilla Tanzi, which are the centerpiece of his fourth book, Satura. Frank had read an article about the ‘‘Xenia’’ poems by the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis that had aroused his interest. Those translations were eventually published, alongside Leavis’s article, in an issue of the literary magazine Ploughshares, which Frank edited. And so the seeds of my interest in Montale were sown. My next project, embarked on slowly and tentatively, was to select and translate his essays; these were published in 1982, the year after Montale’s death, under the title The Second Life of Art. After that I was invited to translate his last published book, Altri versi, which had appeared just before he died. And eventually I decided, with trepidation, to attempt to translate Montale’s major poetry. I did it because I had come to love his work as I have no other modern poet’s, and because the other translations I read did not capture what I felt I was hearing in Montale (which is what translators always feel); but also, and perhaps most important, I felt that I could learn about writing, about making poetry, by apprenticing myself, as it were, to a very great writer. Translating has always been perhaps primarily for me a school for writing, a way of learning by putting my tracing paper over the poet’s work and making a drawing which starts from the poet’s words but which, with luck and labor, eventually becomes something autonomous , something on its own. Montale is famous with Italians, too, for his di≈culty, for the putative obscurity of his work. There is a certain closed, symbolic, even occulted quality to his poetry, part of it dictated by the times in which he wrote (he was a declared anti-fascist); part by personal circumstance, for he was often writing for and to one woman while living with another; but also partly, and I would say primarily , because of the poet’s own interior, ruminative, symbolizing cast of mind. The meanings of Montale’s work are, in the end, entirely discoverable, but the operation often involves a great deal of concentration and e√ort. One of my principal aims in translating his major work – generally agreed to comprise his first three books – was in fact to try to unpack his so-called hermetic qualities , to make clear what Montale actually...

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