Eugenio Montale

This morning we note the birth date and work of Eugenio Montale (October 1896 – September 12, 1981), Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Montale wrote more than ten anthologies of short lyrics; a journal of poetry translation; several books of prose translations; two books of literary criticism; and one of fantasy prose.

The Dead

The sea that flounders on the other shore
sends up a cloud that foams until
the flats absorb it.  There one day
onto the iron coast we heaved
our hope, more frantic than the ocean
---and the barren abyss turns green as in the days
that saw us among the living.

Now the north wind has calmed the muddied knot
of brackish currents and rerouted them
to where they started, someone hangs out nets
on the pruned branches—
faded nets that trail
onto the path that sinks from sight
and dry in the late, cold
touch of the light; and over them
the dense blue crystal blinks
and plunges to a curve of flayed
horizon.

                        More than seaweed sucked
into the seething being revealed to us, our life
is rousing from such torpor;
the part of us that stalled one day,
resigned to limits, rages; the heart flails
in the lined binding one branch
to another, like the water hen
bagged in the meshes;
and a cold deadlock holds us
static and drifting.

                        So, too, perhaps
the dead are denied all rest in the soil:
a power more ruthless than life itself
pulls them away and, all around,
drives them to these beaches,
shades gnawed by human memory,
breaths without water or voice
expelled from the dark;
and their broken flights,
still barely shorn from us, graze us
and in the sieve of the sea they drown . . .

--Eugenio Montale

[translated by Jonathan Galassi]