Six Poems by Eugenio Montale
PN Review 4, July - September 1978
Translated by Jonathan Galassi
From Diario del ‘71
THE DIVER
The diver seen in slow motion
describes a spider-shaped arabesque
and in that figure perhaps his life
identifies itself. He who stands on the board
is still dead, dead is he who swims
back to the ladder after the dive,
dead he who takes his picture, never born
he who applauds the venture.
And is the space alive
in which each moving thing lives?
Mercy on the pupils and on the objective,
mercy on all that displays itself,
mercy on the leaving and on him who arrives,
mercy on him who returns or has returned,
mercy on him who's ignorant nothing is everything,
they're two veils of the Unpronounceable,
mercy on him who knows it, on him who says it,
on him who doesn't know and gropes in the darkness
of words! (17 May 1971)
WING SHOT
You ask me why I navigate
in insecurity and don't try
another route? Ask
the bird who returns unharmed
because the shot was long and the
force of the blow too diffuse.
For us without wings
there are also diffusions
not of lead, but of actions,
not of atmosphere but collisions.
Whether a loss of weight saves us
remains to be seen. (4 June 1971)
THE LAKE OF ANNECY
I don't know why my memory links you
to the lake of Annecy
which I visited several years before your death.
But then I didn't recall you, I was young
and thought myself the master of my fate.
Why such a silted-up memory can escape
I don't know; you yourself
doubtless buried me and didn't know it.
Now you appear, alive, and you're not here. Then
I could ask for your boarding-house,
see the young girls file out,
find a thought of yours from when you were
alive, and didn't think it. Now that it's useless
the picture of the lake is all I need. (6 June 1971)
THE POET
It's rumoured that he lives giving others
power of attorney, proxy, or I don't know what.
Still the delegant presses something
into his hands, not the delegate.
They didn't tell him at the crossroads
that he had to choose between two separate
and never-intersecting lives. He didn't do it.
It's been the Case that even absent-minded
he stays on guard over the indivisible. (7 June 1971)
IMITATION OF THUNDER
It seems every living thing
imitates its own model
without knowing it, unsuggestible venture.
But the worst falls to him who believes
he has his in front of him like a statue.
Men, don't imitate marble. If you can't
be still, then model yourselves after bran,
after the wind's hair, the rasp
of the cicada, the unlikely
inkling of thunder in a clear sky.
Model yourselves, I say, after nothing even,
if you delude yourselves you can still
approximate the likeness of that wholeness
which is not in you! (10 June 1971)
THE TONGUE OF GOD
If god is language, the One who created so many others
in order then to confound them
-how shall we manage to interpellate him and how
believe he has spoken and will speak
indecipherable for ever, and this
is better than nothing. We're certainly
better than nothing and we're
still babbling. And woe be it if one day
the voices dissolved. Language,
be it nothing or not,
has its shrewdnesses. (17 June 1971)
These translations are printed by kind permission of Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milan.
Eugenio Montale (1896 – 1981) was an Italian poet, writer, translator and editor, born in Genoa, Italy, in 1986. He served as an infantry officer during the First World War. Montale co-founded literary journal Primo Tempo in 1922 and his first book, Ossi de seppia, was published in 1925. Considered one of the most important Italian poets of the 20th century, Montale was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975.
Jonathan Galassi is an American poet and translator. He serves as the president and publisher of publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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