In his 1975 Nobel Lecture, the Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) raised the question: "Is poetry still possible?" The same question is often raised about poetry translation, and hostile critics like to quote Robert Frost's famous definition of poetry as what gets lost in translation.
Montale referred to the translator's work as mestiere vile, a worthless job - a job which none the less he practised intensely. His Quaderno di traduzioni, or "translation notebook", mirrors the complexity of his original poetic voice, which he built not only on the works of the Italian classic tradition, but also on the work of European poets.
Galassi points out echoes of Shakespeare and the Anglo-American Romantic tradition, Shelley, Keats, Browning; Dickinson and Hopkins; Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme; and Italian, French, Spanish and English near-contemporaries, the most influential being Valery and Eliot.
The creative presence of such echoes in the original work of one author, and especially of a poet, exposes the translator to an even harder challenge than, in the words of Patrick Kavanagh, "the familiar blank of the page".
Galassi's richly annotated volume includes three of Montale's major collections: Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925), Le occasioni (The Occasions, 1939) and La bufera e altro (The Storm etc., 1957). He argues that these works describe "a complete arc, one of the greatest in modern literature". In addition to printing the original poems with facing translations, the translator provides an essay entitled "Reading Montale", a Chronology of Montale's life, a huge scholarly apparatus of Notes including bibliographical references, and Acknowledgements which generously cite the work of 14 distinguished predecessors including Robert Lowell, Edwin Morgan, Jeremy Reed, Charles Wright and, above all, William Arrowsmith, whom he describes as "a goad and a challenge."
To this list of Montale translators we may add some Irish names. Samuel Beckett produced an English version of "Delta" (1926), one of Montale's "stylistically most concentrated" and most difficult poems (This Quarter 2, Paris, April-May-June 1930; see Galassi's note to the poem. Recently, the young Irish poet Conor O'Callaghan found echoes of Montale in the seatown landscape of Dundalk. His first collection, The History of Rain (Gallery Press, 1993), contains several variations on the theme of Montale's "Portami il girasole" ("Bring me the sunflower", 1923).
IT is always reductive to choose one particular poem as representative of the work of a poet, and equally reductive to select one translation to represent a translator. We should read and appreciate a collection of poems as a whole. In the case of Montale, Galassi tells us, there are many indications that his poetry "can be constructed as a novel".
The opening poem in this poetic narrative, "In limine" ("On the Threshold", 1924, from Cuttlefish Bones), seems especially suggestive as a metaphor for poetry translation. Its closing quatrain seems to remind us of the translator being the prisoner of the original - of its history, its memories, its message, its echoes - and striving for some form of ultimate freedom that can grant an independent identity:
Cerca una maglia rotta nella rete
Che ci stringe, tu balza fuori, fuggi!
Va, per te l'ho pregato - ora la sete
Mi sar lieve, meno acre la ruggine
Look for a flaw in the net that binds us
Tight, burst through, break free!
Go, I've prayed for this for you - now my thirst
Will be easy, my rancour less bitter
The same sense of imprisonment emerges from the last poem in the book, "Il sogno del prigioniero" ("The Prisoner's Dream", 1954, from The Storm etc), coupled with feelings of existential uncertainty as the prisoner is suspended between ambiguous nights and dawns, and amid uncertain complicity in his own oppression. The poem ends:
E ancora ignoro se sar al festino
Farictore o farcito. L'attesa lunga,
Il mio sogno di te non finito.
And I still don't know if at the feast
I'll be stuffer or stuffing. The wait is long,
My dream of you isn't over.
Like the prisoner, the translator is caught in existential uncertainty between the "light" of the original and the "darkness" of its translated meaning. In "Portami il girasole" ("Bring me the sunflower", 1923, from Cuttlefish Bones) we find, condensed into a few lines, the complete message of Montale's poetic achievement. The central quatrain, in particular, can be referred to as his aesthetic and ethical manifesto:
Tendono alla chiarit le cose oscure,
Si esauriscono i corpi in un fluire
Di tinte: queste in musiche. Svanire dunque la ventura delle venture.
Galassi's version finds a new English conciseness which is as powerful and as convincing as the original:
Dark things tend to brightness,
Bodies fade out in a flood of colors,
Colors in music. So disappearing is
The destiny of destinies.
Another great Italian poet, Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), believed that only a poet could translate a poet. This assumption is arguable but certainly appropriate to the work of Jonathan Galassi, who is not only a translator but also a poet (and president of the Academy of American Poets) as well as being a distinguished editor. All three skills contribute to making this volume unique, the biggest and the best bilingual edition of any major European poet.
Through his creative responses and his meticulous annotations, Galassi strengthens our belief in the "exact art" of translation. His book, which was a worthy winner of the 1999 Montale Translation Prize, is fundamental for experts and lay-readers alike, and although it does not include the later collections, can be rightly considered, for the moment, the definitive English Montale.
Marco Sonzogni is a doctoral student in translation theory and practice, Department of Italian, Trinity College Dublin