Author: By Christina Robb Globe Staff
Date: Friday, February 6, 1981
Page: ?????
Section: LIVING
When starlings take over from humans
IT DEPENDS: A Poet's Notebook, by Eugenio Montale, translated from Italian
by G. Singh. New Directions. 170 pp. $12.95.
Modern art and modernism are old. The Empire State Building is 50 this
year. Picasso is dead. Joyce is a monument. But their graceful, witty,
skyscraping iconoclasm lives.
Eugenio Montale won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975, half a century
after he published his first book of verse. Now, at 85, Montale gives us his
latest collection of nearly 100 lyrics published in Italian as "Quaderno di
quattro anni" ("Notebook of Four Years") in 1977. Here the Italian originals
face English translations, which Montale has worked on with G. Singh, an
Ulster professor of Italian.
"It Depends" is the new modernism of an old man. You can tell because the
way it touches old people is so bald and forgiving: If the world is going to
the dogsit isn't only the fault of menso said a gaunt old woman sipping a
crushed-ice drink througha straw at the Cafe de ParisI don't know who she was
At timesGenius is almost a paltry thing,a bout of coughing.
You can tell Montale is modern because of his suave irony, which begins as
self-effacement and flips into sprezzatura - carefree sophistication - with
the baffling ease of a Mobius strip. You can tell he is old because he is
grieving for his wife who died as an old woman, after a long life, and he is
in Prospero's shoes: Every third thought is of the next step, the one that
will be taken for him, death.
Of his childhood, he remembers bearded housemaids and neighbor's dogs, and
he regards these memories with the poignant interest of someone who is trying
to learn what life means when so much of it is past. He thinks of
acquaintances who have died before him and can't tell which were of value to
life.
Birds comfort him. They are always alive, and they miss him when he goes
away for a few days. He thinks of the human race, poised for extinction,
perhaps to be survived by starlings. This is not necessarily a sad thought,
and if it is sad, the sadness isn't unbearable.
Why are we here? Is it true "that only nonidentity supports the world,/
creates and destroys it in order to/remake it increasingly more spectral/ and
inscrutable"? But what about this poem? What about an old man feeding birds,
or his image of Renaissance maidens waiting for a cavalier?
"It isn't much," Montale writes, feeling his way to the end with
indomitable sensitivity, "and perhaps/it's everything." It depends.
ROBB ;02/04,12:19 DRISC;02/06,12: B07956925
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