Eugenio Montale: La Bufera e Altro ed. by Ida Campeggiani and Niccolò Scaffai (review)

The edition of La Bufera e Altro annotated by Ida Campeggiani and Niccolò Scaffai is part of a wider initiative that aims to annotate Eugenio Montale's entire body of poetic works. The Bufera edition ends the series opened by Ossi di seppia (2003) and continued by Diario del '71 e del '72 (2010), Occasioni (2011), Quaderno di quattro anni (2015), and Satura (2018). Two prose volumes edited by Niccolò Scaffai—a selection of Prose narratives (2008) and Farfalla di Dinard (2021)—enrich the range of annotated works, while Quaderno di traduzioni (2021) edited by Enrico Testa is unfortunately devoid of notes. All the volumes included in the Mondadori series share the same organization, which reflects the desire to address an informed but non-specialist readership of, among others, university students and secondary school teachers, offering them a popular and educational edition of a contemporary classic (see Introduzione, CXV). The result is a threepart structure: two or more authoritative critical essays at the edges, typically one recent academic essay at the beginning of the volume, and one personal contribution, chronologically contiguous to the annotated works, by a relevant critic, often a poet, at the end of it; a second, paratextual section, including a chronology, an extensive bibliography divided in sections, a list of the abbreviations, an introduction and a brief note from the editors; then, the annotated text. In the specific case of Bufera, the opening essay is written by Guido Mazzoni (Il posto di Montale nella poesia moderna; already published as part of Mazzoni 2002, 29–61), while the volume is concluded by two famous essays by Gianfranco Contini (Montale e La bufera, 1956) and Franco Fortini (Di Montale, 1974); the introduction is written by Niccolò Scaffai. For all six volumes, the critical text is obviously the one established by Rosanna Bettarini e Gianfranco Contini in L'opera in versi (1980), the large final section of which, Varianti e autocommenti (see Bettarini-Contini 1980, 937–72), is used in the commentary.

As we are told in the editors' note (CXVII), Campeggiani annotated the first six sections of the book, while Scaffai worked on the last section (Conclusioni provvisorie), oversaw the final revision and, as mentioned above, wrote the introduction. Some distinctive features of the annotations depend strictly on elements that the two editors consider structural traits of Montale's third collection. First, the mannerist and hyper-literary identity of Bufera, which is displayed in several ways: as an allusion and explicit reference to high literary models; as a relation of intertextuality and amplification with Occasioni; as a reflection on the "canzoniere" form and the reuse of traditional metrical forms (such as the Elizabethan sonnet, madrigal, ballad); as the symbolic and allegorical nature of the objects, whose ultimate meaning is culturally mediated. This entails the inclusion of many sources and cultural references, as well as the continual pointing out of connections with Occasioni (already in Isella 2003), both in the introductions and in the notes. Then, Bufera is also a work that deeply interweaves the two threads of collective history and of individual, private and emotional experience: hence the need to integrate the primary text by turning to Montale's letters, self-comments, and other kind of records to correctly identify the objects that inhabit the text. Finally, the style of Bufera plays with a plurality of tones and registers, from sublime to colloquial, and with a variety of field specific lexis, from the technological to the literary; this requires the commentary not only to clarify the exact meaning of the single lexeme (denotation), but also to indicate their tone (connotation).

The structure of the commentary is in itself traditional: the introduction proposes a series of data and a hypothesis of global understanding of the text; the text follows, in turn followed by the notes. As with Occasioni (de Rogatis 2011), the commentary also contains a brief introduction to...