REVIEW / BOOK
EUGENIO MONTALE: CANDID, IRONIC

Author: By Robert Taylor Globe Staff

Date: Wednesday, December 1, 1982
Page: ?????
Section: LIVING

Eugenio Montale, perhaps the greatest Italian poet of this century, received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. To most Americans the selection of this unknown supplied further evidence of the eccentricity of the judges. In fact, Montale was an all-round man of letters, not only a poet but the music and literary critic of Corriere della Sera of Milan, as well as a leading intellectual opponent of Fascism, and a penetrating cultural commentator.

Montale's poetry has for the most part been available in English. Finding it, however, requires an effort. (Ploughshares, the Cambridge literary magazine, in 1975 published Jonathan Galassi's translation of the Xenia poems, dedicated to Montale's wife.) There is no complete English Montale, so the appearance of Jonathan Galassi's exemplary translation and selection is particularly welcome. The volume is scrupulously footnoted, admirably translated and highly attractive, though for the non-Italian, attribution of such specialized figures as Virgilio Giotti, the Triestine dialect poet; Alfredo Oriani, Mussolini's ideal novelist; and Adolfo De Bosis, the Italian translator of Shelley, may still leave one unaware of the context.

Italian literature occupies a role, as Montale saw it, in the enduring tradition of European humanism. Hence many of his works explain the literature or art of other countries - Eliot and Pound (whom he knew and regarded as "perhaps, in flashes a great poet"), Cavafy, Malraux. Montale is candid and ironic, and the flicker of wit is never far away. When he asks the critic Albert Beguin if he understands what the poet St. John Perse is saying, "the critic looked at me with surprise and after answering, No; but so what?' began praising him again." An article describing a visit to Brancusi begins with an apology for giving the impression that the French suffer from cultural xenophobia. "On the contrary, the average French intellectual is abundantly willing to admit that there are writers, composers, creators of the first rank outside of France, though he shows no curiosity about getting to know them."

These are interesting occasional pieces and a superb eyewitness account of the Venetian premiere of Stravinsky's opera, "The Rake's Progress," but the most significant bulk of the collection addresses subjects of a specifically Italian character: Dante, Croce, the relations of the art of poetry and fascism (in which Montale brings up the concept of "neo-barbarism" which he employs frequently). Especially relevant are two articles on Italo Svevo, Ettore Schmitz, the superb Triestine novelist whose career was crucially and favorably influenced by Montale's criticism. (Svevo was a businessman who continually urged Montale to abandon poetry for prose; but Montale recognized Svevo's genius to the extent that every funeral with an indifferent train of mourners made Montale recall the scene in "The Confessions of Zeno" where Zeno suddenly discovers that he has joined the wrong funeral.)

"The poet of negation, in a period when one could only exist by negation," Montale's concern with the social context of art is still another aspect of his career - but the "second" life of art, flowing through the conscience and memory of humankind, he believed, gave meaning to the present. As this fine volume indicates, his unique sense of the past shaped his singular vision of what a literary life could be.

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