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DELTA: MONTALE'S 20 MOTETS & NERUDA'S 20 LOVE POEMS
This is an Afterword to my translations of these
two poets.
For the poems and further notes see translations.
I’ve called this book Delta because the two
sequences of poems in it come from one common river of poetry addressed
to the female as muse. The river divides into two equal streams, each
immediately breaking into twenty complicated courses. One sequence is
written by a student, the other by a man in his forties. Pablo Neruda
(1904–1973) was twenty years old when he published Twenty Love
Poems and a Song of Despair in Chile in 1924. The Italian Eugenio
Montale (1896–1981) wrote most of Motets in 1938 when he was
forty-four, publishing them a year later as part of a collection, The
Occasions, which spanned ten years of writing. Of the two sequences
Neruda’s is the better known, far more widely read, I would guess,
than his later prolific output. Montale is well-known but for much more
anthologised pieces like The Eel, Hitler Spring, Arsenio
and many others, not for Motets. The reason is not hard to find.
Neruda’s love poems are about a popular topic and written in a
charmingly reckless and open style. Montale’s motets are tighter, more
deliberate and cerebral, and at first blush don’t seem to be about the
same subject as Neruda’s. In fact one theme is the same in both.
And the theme is not love. For most of both sequences
the beloved is remote in spirit and even, much of the time, absent in
body. Neruda appended A Song of Despair to the end of his twenty
‘love poems’, but despair is more prevalent in his twenty than
happiness is. As far as love goes, it’s the pain of loving someone who
seems not too forthcoming which both poets contemplate. But neither poet
treats the beloved wholly and consistently as a real woman. To both she
is that figure deeply entrenched in European poetry since the Middle
Ages, the female as goddess and muse.
These are not synonymous archetypes. A goddess is a
presence in the mind with attributes like immortality and power over
things; a muse is a figure, real or invented, who inspires. To Neruda
and Montale she is both these things but in very different measure. In
very simplistic terms I’ll start by saying that Neruda celebrates the
goddess and Montale the muse. I’ll return to these in a moment. Before
I do it’s obvious that the female in both these sequences is also real
flesh and blood.
Poets are always writing about lovers. When they put
a batch of love poems together, especially as a sequence, they often
make it look as if the beloved is the same person throughout. However,
wherever real people are reflected in love poetry, it’s usual, I’d
say, for poets to have experienced fondness, jealousy, wretchedness,
desire and so on with regard to a number of people, with not all of whom
they will have had a significant relationship. I’d venture a guess
that even the most famous sequences avowedly or ostensibly written to
one person have in fact been inspired by many unrecorded encounters. Who
knows what other women Dante had in mind aside from his out-of-reach
Beatrice, or Petrarch despite his Laura, or Shakespeare in addition to
his young man and dark lady, or Baudelaire apart from Jeanne Duval?
Whatever the truth in these instances, it is known that Neruda and
Montale derived their sequences from at least a brace of ladies each,
with probable colouring from others.
Knowing who the main lovers were, how emotionally
deep, how lasting, how committed on both sides, how compatible and how
sexual each relationship was doesn’t help me to appreciate the poems
more acutely than I did at first without this kind of information. Yet I’m
as curious as the next person, and I’d be lying if I said that the
personal background to the poems didn’t interest me at all. What I
have found, however, is that discovering the nature of the relationship
that informed this or that poem in nearly every case merely confirmed
what I took to be the case when I’d read the poems without the
biographical details. That of course is not surprising, since when
writers are not being honest, by praising beauty too highly, implying
more intimacy than there was, it’s usually pretty clear what’s going
on. I never forget that poets, even at their most autobiographical, are
writing stories. Their attitude to their own lives is the same as any
good author’s to the characters of his imagination: they are telling
the truth about their natures as required by the action or theme they
are developing.
Pablo Neruda had, in the Chile of the early 1920s
when he wrote the Twenty Love Poems between the ages of sixteen
and twenty, had had a number of adolescent crushes and had enjoyed sex
fleetingly with partners who were not the two objects of his passionate
idolatry. The two girls were Teresa Léon Bettiens and Albertina Rosa
Azócar.
Teresa, or ‘Terusa’ as he called her, was a
girlfriend from the southern provinces where he grew up. In 1920 she was
Queen of the Spring Festival in the shabby and damp frontier town of
Temuco where she and Neruda grew up. They first saw each other in the
local cinema and spent summers in the same seaside resort, Puerto
Saavedra. Her family belonged to a higher level of the minutely graded
Spanish society of the small town. Neruda was considered a young man of
dubious background whose family wasn’t known.
Neruda’s train conductor father was able to send
him to college, though with the poorest of allowances. It was at the
Santiago Teachers’ Training College where he studied French for four
years from sixteen to twenty that the young poet met his other love,
Albertina. She and he were among students who lived a bohemian life in
grinding poverty, devoted to leftwing politics. She is the silent
comrade with the grey beret. (He favoured a wide-brimmed black hat and
short cape.)
There is no evidence that he was allowed sexually to
‘go the whole way’ with either girl. The first piece in Twenty
Love Poems which suggests that he did:
But now comes the hour of revenge: I have fallen for you!
Body of skin, of moss, of steady and insistent milk…
Oh these breasts, vases! And your eyes, full of absence!
Oh the vaginal rose! And your voice, slow and melancholy!
But it’s more likely that his experience of sex was
acquired from a tumble in the hay with a wife of a harvest hand who took
a fancy to the virginal young man when, aged fifteen, he was sleeping
one night with the workers in a barn. In describing this encounter in
his Memoirs he tells of grabbing her pubic hair, which was ‘like moss’.
Or there was the sex he seems to have had with a handsome widow in his
student days at the back of a laundry. It’s even possible, given his
ardour, though there’s no evidence or it, that he tried the
prostitutes of Santiago and Valparaiso; after all, it was not unusual
for bohemian males in Latin countries to dabble in this way. In his Memoirs
(called Confieso que he vivido) he writes:
Valparaiso was … bright
with lights, and humming, edged with foam and meretricious.
Night in its narrow streets filled up with
black water nymphs. Doors lurked in the darkness, hands pulled you in,
the bedsheets in the south led the sailor astray. Polyanta, Tritetonga,
Carmela, Flor de Dios, Multicula, Berenice, Baby Sweet packed the beer
taverns, they cared for those who had survived the shipwreck of
delirium, relieved one another and were replaced, they danced
listlessly, with the melancholy of my rain-haunted people.
translator: Hardie St Martin
Albertina was also from the south, from a family
connected with education in Lota Alto. Halfway through her course her
father took her from the Neruda’s college and sent her to the
University of Conceptión, three hundred miles from Santiago. She was
one year older than the poet so their time together was brief: just one
year, Neruda then seventeen to eighteen. Handsome, thin and taciturn and
would escort her to the boarding house where she lived with her brother.
At vacation times he would go home to Temuco and his
other girlfriend, ‘Terusa’. His correspondence with Albertina
continued for eleven years but she never answered his letters very
regularly.
On the subject of the identity of the women in his
sequence, Neruda should have the last word. This is from his Memoirs
again, where he gives one to believe that his lovemaking with Albertina
was complete. Before modern contraception people could write of
lovemaking as fulfilled (‘requited’) without intercourse taking
place, but who knows what really happened?
Those Veinte poemas de
amor y una canción desesperada make a painful book of pastoral
poems filled with my most tormented adolescent passions, mingled with
the devastating nature of the southern part of my country. It is a book
I love because, in spite of its acute melancholy, the joyfulness of
being alive is present in it. A river and its mouth helped me to write
it: the Imperial River. Veinte poemas is my love affair with
Santiago, with its student-crowded streets, the university, and the
honeysuckle fragrance of requited love.
The Santiago sections were written between
Echaurren Street and España Avenue, and inside the old building of the
Teachers Institute, but the landscape is always the waters and the trees
of the south.
…
I am always being asked who the woman in Veinte
poemas is, a difficult question to answer. The two women who weave
in and out of these melancholy and passionate poems correspond, let’s
say, to Marisol and Marisombra: Sea and Sun [mar y sol], Sea and Shadow
[mar y sombra]. Marisol [Terusa] is love in the enchanted countryside,
with stars in bold relief at night, and dark eyes like the wet sky of
Temuco. She appears with all her joyfulness and her lively beauty on
almost every page, surrounded by the waters of the port and by a
half-moon over the mountains. Marisombra [Albertina] is the student in
the city. Gray beret, very gentle eyes, the ever-present honeysuckle
fragrance of my foot-loose and fancy-free student days, the physical
peace of the passionate meetings in the city’s hideaways.
translator: Hardie St Martin
When Eugenio Montale published The Occasions,
in which the Motets were incorporated, he was forty-two. It was
October 1939; the Second World War had begun the month before, and less
than a year later, in June 1940, when the Italian dictator Mussolini saw
the rapid gains of his friend Hitler, Italy entered the war on the
German side. Montale had fought in the First World War, when Italy had
been on the side of the Allies against Germany. A year before the Second
World War began Montale had already lost his job as head of the
Vieusseux Library in Florence because he wouldn’t join the Fascist
party.
In April 1939 Drusilla Marangoni, whom Montale called
‘Mosca’ left her husband and moved into a flat with him. He’d
known her for ten years ever since he became, at thirty-two, a paying
guest in her house. They remained together until her death from a fall,
very shortly after they had belatedly married, when he was sixty-six.
Montale’s relationships with women were very
different from Neruda’s. The Chilean poet went on to have three
marriages and many affairs: he was a great celebrator of life and its
pleasures, and a champion of the common man. Montale, on the other hand,
was always sombrely philosophical, alienated, no lover of the masses,
and a man to whom women were archetypes and muses. The American poet
Anthony Hecht wrote this of him in the Summer 1998 Wilson Quarterly:
Montale’s poetry is deeply personal, at times
almost hermetic. Often it is addressed to an unknown “you” who, not
infrequently, is dead, or to certain women, presented under fictive
names (in the manner of classical and Renaissance poets), who played
important roles in his real and imaginative lives. They are called
Esterina, Gerti, Liuba, Vixen, Dora Markus, Mosca, and Clizia. Liuba,
for example, was someone he glimpsed for only a few minutes in a railway
station, where she was fleeing from Italy’s Fascist, anti-Jewish laws.
Dora Markus was someone he never met; she was, he explained, “constructed
from a photograph of a pair of legs” sent him by a friend.
Nevertheless, as one of his finest translators, William Arrowsmith,
declares, “the poem devoted to her is no mere exercise in virtuoso
evocation; it is the objectification of the poet’s affinity for a
personal truth, the existential meaning of a given fragment. ‘The poet’s
task,’ Montale observed, ‘is the quest for a particular, not
general, truth.’” His poems almost always deal with fragmentary
experience, the meaning of which is either obscure or, possibly,
terrifyingly absent. As a poet, he had a preoccupation with images of
limitation. This is manifested, Arrowsmith writes, in the form of “walls,
barriers, frontiers, prisons, any confining enclosure that makes escape
into a larger self or a new community impossible. Hence too his
intractable refusal to surrender to any ideology or sodality, whether
Communist or Catholic.”
It’s not Drusilla, however, who is addressed
throughout the Motets. The woman, a much admired intellectual
com-panion, who was his main muse in the 1930s (and muse she was, a
presence he sorely missed whenever they were parted) was the
Jewish-American Italianist and Dante scholar Irma Brandeis, whom he
named Clizia. His acquaintance with her lasted her from the day she
walked into his library in 1933 until 1938, when anti-Jewish Fascism
caused her to return to America.
The presence of another woman is said to feature in
some of the Motets, namely Anna degli Uberti, whom he called Arletta,
the daughter of a Reserve Admiral whom he first met in 1920 when he was
twenty-three and she sixteen. As the ‘motets’ do not profess to be
love poems in the same way that the Neruda’s sequence does, Montale’s
sexual experience—with Arletta, Clizia or anyone else—is sublimely
immaterial. Both poets are tormented by the absence of the beloved, but
on the whole for quite different reasons.
It’s not my intention to provide résumés of the
lives of these poets beyond what might throw a light on the poetry in
this volume. Suffice it to say that each is regarded as among the very
best poets of his own generation in his own country. Both were devoted
to their art, both were in the mainstream of 20th century
experimental Modernism, both received the Nobel Prize for literature,
Neruda in 1971 (when he was 67) and Montale in 1975 (when he was 78).
They were highly honoured at home and abroad, meeting other
internationally famous artists of their day.
Their lives were otherwise extremely different.
Although Montale saw active military service in the First World War, he
was not otherwise a man of action. Coming from a well-off family, he
worked for a publishing house, was head of a library and then a literary
and music critic for a newspaper until he was 77. He was a literary man
through and through, devoting much effort to journalism and to
translating works from English into Italian. Although an anti-Fascist,
Montale’s personal and political temperament was the opposite of
Neruda’s. The Chilean, a lover of life and people, was an active
Communist all his life. And where Montale was the reclusive literary
luminary, an Italian T.S.Eliot (whom he met and translated), Pablo
Neruda (born Neftalí Ricardo Reyes y Basoalto) was employed mainly in
government jobs—for the Chilean consular service in Asia, Latin
America and Spain; in the Chilean Senate (in 1970 he was nominated his
party’s candidate for the presidency); and as ambassador to France.
Poetically they had some important things in common,
though as a whole, as even the small sample in this volume shows, the
impact of their work is very markedly not the same. What they have in
common, in the instances here and elsewhere, is the symbolist component
of their writing. In neither is the symbolism worked up into a
coordinated system.
The first thing that strikes me about Neruda’s
poetry, even when he deals with suffering, his own or others’, is that
he is, on balance, life-affirming. I say that as one who hesitates
between praise and pessimism. Although the young Neruda says more about
loneliness and sexual frustration than I’ve ever felt, he works for
me. He also works for me when he’s more jubilant, because there’s
his success with language, for one thing. Take his symbolism. It’s as
hazy at the edges as good symbolism should be. It overflows any jug I
try and pour it into; these few paragraphs will be no more than
pointers.
I’ll examine his use of espiga. This word
designates the tuft, frond, spike, tassel or ear of cereal plants like
wheat. In Poem 11 Neruda directly associates it with his beloved:
But you, girl, question in smoke, flower-frond, radiant,
were what the wind was shaping with illumined leaves.
Elsewhere she is ‘the force in the frond’.
Poem 19:
Agile brown girl, nothing brings me near you.
Everything carries me from you, as if from noontide.
You are the hot juvenescence of the bee,
the euphoria of waves, the force in the frond.
But there is more than a one-to-one correspondence
between the woman and espiga. In Poem 3 he has:
Ah your mysterious voice, pealing and suffused
with love, in the resonant and dying dusk!
Just so, in the deep hours, across fields, I have seen
flower-fronds rocking in the jaws of the wind.
The word ‘frond’ connotes more than his woman, it
suggests everything that is beautiful, soft, slender and swaying. The
night itself, for Neruda a time for love (not at all symbolic of death),
actually creates these willowy forms. Poem 7:
The night gallops on a dark mare
spreading blue fronds on the landscape.
He is not setting out to create a network of signs
which always have the same meaning and the same relationships with one
another. I expect to come upon opposing and contradictory usages of his
favourite symbols. That said, I’m surprised at how consistent he
actually is, for one who appears so often to write with spontaneous
abandon. With his four treatments of espiga there is little
deviation from one single area of feeling. She is identified with these
soft, slender fronds (‘spikes’ has completely the wrong
implications, and ‘ear’ is not as readily understood in this context
in English as it should be). At another point something outside her, the
night, creates ‘blue fronds’, but this is a small matter, easily
settled by a small exercise of poetic logic. He cannot, after all, be
saying that she is really a wheat-ear or that she is really the ‘force’
within it. This piece of Nature merely symbolises her and she in turn
symbolises the life within it. It still remains there, this espiga,
a part of Nature to be referred to as itself. The night makes the fields
of soft wheat-ears look blue.
I’d like to examine how he deals with a larger set
of images, used more frequently, the group associated with night, blue,
darkness, black. Night is mysterious like his beloved. Poem 2 has:
The great roots of the night
twist violently in your soul,
and things hidden in you re-emerge to the outside.
The outcome: a new-born race, pale
and blue, that is suckled by you.
Thirteen of the twenty poems mention night directly
(1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 20). This mysterious,
dark presence can be creative, as above, or associated with melancholy
loneliness, as in Poem 20:
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her and at times she loved me also.
On nights like this I took her in my arms.
So many times we kissed beneath the infinite sky.
Moreover, it’s often blue in colour. Evening,
herald of night, is blue. In Poem 10:
No one saw us holding hands tonight
as the blue evening fell upon the world.
And poets have anyway often written that scenes lit
only by moonlight or starlight are blue. The colour suggests the
coldness of night. Does this poetic custom go further in these poems, I
wonder? Does blue add a quality to Neruda’s night symbol that it would
have lacked otherwise? Well, he also associates the colour with the blue
part of a flame. Poem 6:
Bonfire of wonder within which my thirst was blazing.
Sweet blue hyacinth curving over my soul.
And there’s Poem 11:
Forge of blue metals, night-times of silent struggles…
And Poem 17:
You, woman …
… You were as distant as now.
Fire in the forest! Burn in blue crosses!
Stars are indeed blue, many of them anyway. The
hottest are white, the next hottest blue, the coolest red. Not that I
had to know about astronomy’s Hertzsprung-Russell diagram graphing
luminosity against temperature, but it helped once I’d looked it up.
Blue then is not only accurate when applied to starlight, the colour is
also cool and beautiful, though paradoxically metallic and the
appearance, sometimes, of flames in a forge. Night is cool and
beautiful.
But it also conceals. It hides lovers; in
Poem 9:
My robe of kisses shudders in the wet
night, charged with electrical acts,
Neruda has the originality to make the sun black too,
calling surrealism to his aid in Poem 19:
A black and passionate sun coils in the threads
of your black mane when you stretch out your arms.
You play with the sun as with a stream.
It leaves in your eyes two dark pools.
Not only is night the natural time for love, the
concealing place where passion resides, it is also dark like the
subconscious, like his women—all of these fructifying.
His woman is threefold: an amalgam of all the real
women he has known; Woman as all things feminine; and sometimes she is
all or part of Nature. That is: the particular, the general, and the
goddess. The parts of this huge symbol shade into one another. To give a
rough idea, take the particular first. There seems to be little doubt
that he is addressing a specific person in Poem 6:
I remember you as in that final autumn.
You were grey beret and calm heart.
In your eyes rippled the flames of twilight.
Into the water of your soul fell the leaves.
—and even more so in Poem 9:
Drunk on turpentine and long kisses,
founded upon a solid sea frenzy,
I pilot a summer sailboat of roses,
steering towards the death of a slender day.
…
In upstream waters, amidst oncoming waves,
your parallel body holds on to my arms
like a fish infinitely fastened to my soul
in sub-celestial energy, swift and slow.
There are numerous other examples: ‘I have been
marking with crosses of fire / the white atlas of your body’
(Poem 13); ‘A black and passionate sun coils in the threads / of
your black mane when you stretch out your arms’ (Poem 19), and so on.
But I get the feeling even here that he could be stirring his general
experience got with numerous girls into a mix of feelings for one or
other of his particular favourites. This happens, for me at least, in
the very powerful opening poem:
Body, my woman, I will keep myself in your favour.
My thirst, my boundless desire, my unknown path!
Shady riverbed where thirst endlessly wanders,
where weariness wanders, and also infinite pain.
In many parts of most poems, what he says could be
used to address anyone, which is why these poems have been so successful
as a sort of lover’s manual, ready-made exhortations employable by
young men as appropriate, if their girls are soppy enough to listen to
sweet-talk. Example (from Poem 15):
Let me speak to you with your silence,
which is bright as a lamp, as pure as a ring.
You are like the night, hushed and constellated.
Your silence is a star’s silence, distant and unassuming.
Even in Poem 1 she is, for all his macho talk
about forging her as a weapon, already on her way towards apotheosis:
you could pass for the world itself, feigning submission,
and this sort of talk doesn’t just creep in when he
has ‘not the words’ (Poem 11), it’s fundamental. Poem 14
captures the Nature Goddess:
You play every day with the light of the universe.
Subtle inspector, you reach into water and flowers.
You are more than this little white head that I press
like a cluster between my hands every day.
You are like no one so long as I love you.
Let me lay you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke in the southern stars?
Oh let me remember you as you were then, when you did not even
exist.
She is indeed more than a little white head (and what
happened to his dark beauties?—There was more than one.) Here she is
in Poem 12:
In you is every day’s illusion.
You arrive as dew comes to corollas.
Your absence undermines horizons.
Like a wave eternally escaping.
Like Nature she is everything (‘you occupy all’,
Poem 5). Like Nature she is fruitful (‘magnificent and fruitful’,
Poem 2) and terrifying (‘sometimes from your look emerges a
coastline of horror’, Poem 7). She is both aloof (‘your
silences harass my hours, tormented’, Poem 3) and yielding (‘your
parallel body holds on to my arms’, Poem 9). He doesn’t have to
be precise. He is relaxed and even slack when it comes to consistency.
He is reaching for effect, not hammering out a philosophy. She is either
the world or a part of it, and that’s good enough.
Then there is the voice of the poet, itself symbolic.
He does not claim for himself what he does for the female, for only
rarely in these pieces does his voice equate itself with anything larger
than itself. It is not Nature or even mankind, beyond the male part of
it. The ego-persona is presented as a bunch of feelings concerning lust
and loneliness, set up in relation to nothing beyond the female, and
only then insofar as she can assuage both.
In his opening shot, as Neruda has arranged these
pieces, the I-voice asserts itself with rough masculinity; its brutal
body undermines the female and makes her into a weapon (an archer’s
bow, it turns out later). In the next breath this voice is in the
opposite mood, practically obsequious, in love with the woman and eager
to stay in her favour. Indeed, the speaker doesn’t again manifest
macho confidence with anything like his initial force.
The second poem is about the female herself,
entirely; the I-voice is devoted to describing female grandeur with
ambiguous wonder; she is ‘replete with lives of fire, / pure heiress
of the day that lies in ruins.’ She is also a bow which will fire his
arrows of hope. The speaker yearns and is tormented by her silence. In
Poem 4 his voice is smothered by the wind and then by the woman’s
kisses. There’s more hope than reality here, I always feel. It’s
hardly necessary to know the biographical background to sense that these
poems, magnificent as most of them are, express adolescent obsession and
frustration.
There is a brief attempt on the part of the voice to
speak of itself generically as the whole of male disappointment: ‘In
my pained voice you listen to other voices, / the wailing of ancient
mouths, blood of old entreaties.’ Great stuff, great hyperbole, but
not over-confident. In Poem 6 the voice segues into that of an
unusually honest and very present person, not least because the female
is individualised too; she is, or had been, ‘grey beret and calm heart’:
I feel your eyes travel, remote the autumn—
grey beret, bird-voice, heart of a house
towards which, émigrés, my acute desires
and kisses fell, delighted as embers.
But in the next piece the voice is plaintive and
bereft again, that of a large presence casting sad, ineffectual nets to
try and capture her. This voice is at home with the sea. In Poem 9
the poet pictures himself as a sailor steering the body of his beloved
as he makes love to her. It is ecstatic (‘drunk on turpentine’),
melancholy (‘clothed in … a sad crest of abandoned foam’), virile
(‘tough in passion’); he is, we are to imagine, an experienced
sexual guide that her body clings to.
Soon, however, she has deserted him and is only a
memory: ‘Where were you, anyway? / With whom? / Murmuring what words?’
He is all at sea in a different sense, in lovelorn pain again, but
interestingly he still gives her magnanimous praise: ‘oh, I have not
the words! You were made of all things.’ He is a voice that must extol
her: ‘I’ve said you have sung in the wind / like pines, like ship
masts’ (Poem 12), and : ‘Oh to celebrate you with the entire
language of bliss!’ (Poem 13).
There are times when he is more confident in his
carnal pleasures: ‘I love you, and my joy bites the plum of your mouth’,
and he asserts that it is he who gives her meaning, not the other way
round: ‘You are like no one so long as I love you.’ He makes decided
efforts to look on the best side of things, turning the seemingly
eternal remoteness of woman into something commendable: ‘Let me speak
to you with your silence, / which is bright as a lamp, as pure as a
ring.’ (Poem 15). He is the voice of passionate longing, mere
poet and lover, no more a person than these attributes allow. It suits
him to paraphrase Rabindranath Tagore in passionate self-effacement:
My soul is born on the beach of your mournful eyes.
In your mournful eyes commences the country of dreams.
Even when he experiments with surrealism or
fragmentary expostulation the ego-voice doesn’t change. In
Poem 17 he follows the quiet wholeness of:
Your presence is alien, strange to me as a thing.
I ponder, I go over at length, my life before you
with a staccato wreckage of half-sentences:
My life before anyone, my hard life.
The cry confronting the sea, among rocks,
running free and crazy in the sea’s vapour.
The sad fury, the cry, the loneliness of the sea.
Bolting, violent, outstretched towards the sky.
There is no doubt that the ‘The sad fury, the cry,
the loneliness of the sea’ is the fury and loneliness of the
poetry-making persona. It’s the same voice in Poem 18:
My life wearies, uselessly famished.
I love what I don’t have. You are so remote.
Tedium struggles with my slow evenings.
Even when he is ecstatically, erotically realistic,
as in the magnificent Poem 19:
Agile tanned girl, the sun that forms fruit,
brings on the grain and puckers seaweed,
made your body, jubilant, and your bright eyes,
and your mouth, smiling like water…
he is still not far from sadness. She appears to be
with him but she hasn’t really given herself to him, even if we are to
believe that in the overall story the conglomerate female has succumbed
to him sexually, a few times at least: ‘My gloomy heart searches for
you, however.’
In the last of the Twenty Poems of Love I
sense the beginnings of a more individualised, complex character
breaking out of the symbolic voice:
I love her no more, that is certain. Perhaps I do love her.
Love is so short. Oblivion so long.
My soul is not pleased to have lost her:
on nights like this I held her in my arms,
but only the beginnings of a distinct person. The
voice still airs its mournful theme in most beautiful music: ‘Tonight
I can write the saddest lines.’
Montale, who by his early forties was approaching his
art with a great deal of theoretical self-awareness, was interested in
associative images more as discrete signs than as many-tendrilled
symbols, though the broader type of allusion was in his bag of tricks
when he required it. For a lot of the time he is casting around for
meaningful signs; in Motet 1 he says ‘I search for that / missed
sign, the promise you once graced / me with.’ His female is a muse
too, as remote as Neruda’s but for different reasons. She is indeed
physically absent almost entirely, but this suits Montale because he can
use her in the literary tradition, going back to the renaissance and
before, of visualising an idealised female as a deliverer of revelation,
a provider of signs and omens which it is his poetic job to fathom. Look
at Motet 3, in which he recalls that she in the past was associated
with hospitals—whether as nurse, patient or visitor is not clear:
Frost on the windows; the sick
always united yet surmising
apart; and at the tables,
over the cards, their long soliloquising.
Such was your exile.
His method is to present incisive, snapshot images
with no fuzzy associations, from the frost on the windows, to the
shrapnel shell in the second stanza (a ‘bomba ballerina’ was a type
of artillery shell). These are familiar and local terms. However, in the
playing cards on the table, over which the sick soliloquise, the
familiar is wrapped in a kind of otherness which suggests meanings too
hidden, too arcane, too secret and deep to be symbolic in the sense of
images with auras which make their purport clear but tantalising and
manifold.
Life itself, in the extremely enigmatic and
grammatically obscure Motet 6, appears to be ‘a screen of
appearance / bearing signs of death or the past’. Life throws up
signs. She as muse may have conveyed them. In the same brief,
concentrated piece he plonks down such a ‘sign’ which appeared to
him once:
(at Modena, under the porches,
a furbelowed lackey was dragging
two jackals along on a leash)
and I am as bemused as he probably wanted his readers
to be. He himself is not sure, and this is the gist of this poem,
whether it is life’s appearances, or the lady’s own surface dazzle,
which cuts him off from, and blinds him to, her deeper reality.
At best the images which become stamped in memory
must mean something, if only what they say about Montale himself. He
would like to see his verses, however, not as aids to personal
psychoanalysis but as omens and revelations, tokens with historical,
even quasi-religious, delphic importance. In Motet 8 he is in his
room:
Here is the sign; it takes hold,
burning my wall with gold:
a palm-tree leaf, indented gash
scorched by dawn’s blinding flash
but again he cannot say what the sign means.
Motet 19 is a prime example of this hermetic style, where the main
images just have to symbolise something profound but where all the clues
have been brushed away.
The reed’s red flabellum
which in springtime softly
fluffs; the track
of a gravelled ditch where runs a black
rivulet hopping with dragonflies;
a panting dog that comes back home
with its trophy in its mouth:
here and now it’s not my concern to know;
but there where reflection bakes most
and clouds fall low, beyond her irises,
by now remote, only two bundles of light
in cruciform.
And time passes.
It’s not easy. The cross is a Christian
symbol of suffering and redemption. As to ‘beyond her irises, / by now
remote’, I take this to mean that the sign reflected in the sky is
even farther, deeper, more mysterious, than any message about the world
reflected in the eyes of his muse, who isn’t actually with him anyway.
In Motet 5 she physically leaves him, going off by train. Now,
perhaps, spiritually he abandons her, dispensing with his muse.
The outline of a palm-tree leaf, scorched on the wall
of his room ‘by dawn’s blinding flash’ (Motet 8); a gondola
crawling ‘upon the dazzling tar and poppy-red’ of a Venetian canal
(Motet 13); ‘a silvery gull [that] breaks off in the sunset’
(Motet 18); ‘the reed’s red flabellum’ (Motet 19): there
are many instances of extremely striking and carefully honed figures
which must mean something other than themselves. Or must they?
For all his insistence on signs, the many images
which might be taken as such do in a remarkable degree defy
decipherment. Indeed, at the end of the sequence he seems to give up the
struggle to find meaning:
The coin embedded in a piece of lava
still shines on the table where it restrains
a few odd papers. And life, which had once seemed
vast, is smaller than your handkerchief.
He would like to think of his woman as a mystical
provider of clues. And as with Neruda she is herself not just a person
(it is hard to extract any story at all about a relationship) but a
guiding presence, a figure which, after the poetic voice itself, is what
gives the sequence its unity. And as with Neruda she is remote—in
Montale’s case almost totally absent. Moreover, in Montale she is not
the object of sexual yearning. She is more a literary figment, more an
interceding angel than a goddess. When in the past she was physically
present in his life she had been a moral restorative; in Motet 2 he
says:
once you came down from the peaks restoring in me
the Knight and the Evil Dragon,
In the Italian the words are ‘San Giorgio e il
Drago’ (St George and the Dragon): they suggest the moral struggle of
good against evil, and if they imply anything beyond that it would be
the emblem of the city of Genoa, not the English St George. She awoke
him once from some kind of torpor, making him more morally alert. It
wasn’t important that he never knew her intimately: ‘I did not know
you, nor had to’ (Motet 4). As a bestower of signs she belonged
to a different order of reality. Nothing in this world can change her
mysterious otherness, as he says in Motet 9:
The lightning flash in vain
can change you into something
rich and strange. Your kind was different.
He is not consistent in placing her beyond natural
forces, but it would be a poor poet who sacrificed a good trope to the
demands of pedestrian logic—the logic of poetry is itself, after all,
‘quite other’. In Motet 10 she could end the world if she
wanted to, using that very lightning which before was unable to change
her:
Nothing ends, or all does, if you as lightning
exit the cloud.
He is a privileged conduit, favoured by her (as muse)
as no one else is: ‘I speak of something other / to others who don’t
know you…’ (Motet 11). She inhabits icy regions on high, an
angel of intellect. Whereas in one place his reliance on her seems to be
total, in another place (e.g. Motet 12) he as her poet succours and
preserves her:
I free your forehead from those icicles
which formed upon you as you crossed the high
altitude clouds. Your feathers have been torn
by whirlwinds. You wake in starts.
In only a few places is she evoked as a real person,
and I find it a shock to see her emerging in the guise of an actual
acquaintance who once sang ‘The Song of the Bell from [the
opera] Lakmé by Delibes’ (Motet 14). On this occasion he
hears her voice in the concurrent ringing of a hailstorm and the notes
of a Pianola ascending from a lower room:
An underwater carillon approaches
as if you awakened it, and then moves off.
She is a quasi-religious comfort. At the time of the
political ascendancy of the Italian Fascist dictatorship in 1938, she
can create for him a peaceful moment, a ‘pause’. Motet 15:
nightfall, when
the spike which gnaws
a desk renews its
viciousness, and a guard’s
jackboot comes closer:
light and darkness, yet there’s a human pause
if you but interweave things with your thread.
Yet he’s ambiguous about her powers. Perhaps the
signs associated with her, which in some sense are sent by her, do not
mean quite what he hopes. He is so hermetic that it’s impossible to
tell how much of this ambiguity is intentional, though it is certainly
striking, as I’ve pointed out in the notes, that at least one key
symbol, ‘two bundles of light / in cruciform’ (Motet 19) might
suggest a religious revelation, like Constantine’s vision before his
battle against Maxentius, or a political omen recalling the Fascist
emblem, two crossed bundles of rods.
As I read the sequence, although there is no clear
movement from faith in his lady’s angelic powers to an outright
scepticism (he zigzags between these moods), he does end on a calm but
undoubted note of disenchantment. In Motet 20 he contemplates a
lava paperweight:
The coin embedded in a piece of lava
still shines on the table where it restrains
a few odd papers. And life, which had once seemed
vast, is smaller than your handkerchief.
Is this uncertainty built into the I-Voice? No symbol
in poetry is greater than the impression the writer creates of himself.
From the outset in Motet 1 he is desperate: ‘…again must lose
you / … / And now hell’s certain.’ He is a vassal who will, for
her, ‘submerge in a loyal / vortex that cannot cease’ because she
has restored in him a way of understanding internal conflicts (the
Knight and the Evil Dragon). His is a presence which observes goodbyes:
‘whistles in the night, coughs, gestures / and lowered grilles’
(Motet 5). He doesn’t expect to see her again in the flesh and
wonders petulantly if she dazzlingly excluded him from the reality of
herself and even of the world itself, if my reading of Motet 6 is
anything like correct. His voice is often tormented, having lost the
paradise of her presence. It’s to himself that he speaks when he
captures in a marvellous image of a flapping door the switching
black-and-white of a swarm of martins in Motet 7:
The black-white swing and latching like a door
of martins swarming from the telephone wire
on downwards to the sea
don’t comfort you in torment on the pier
or take you back to where you are no more.
Because she is absent he must often resort to
memories, to thoughts recalled which are so sharp and persistent that
they are forever part of his present. Motet 2:
Long years now, this one harder, above the foreign
stillness of tarns where sunsets incandesce:
once you came down from the peaks….
What he recalls are usually not happy moments. They
are either troublesome, like his experiences in the Great War of ‘the
rock-face spattered with / a shrapnel shell exploding’ (Motet 3),
or bizarre, like his image of ‘a furbelowed lackey … dragging / two
jackals along on a leash’ (Motet 6). The poignancy of the memory
of separation, as harsh as if recreated in a constantly recurring now,
is exquisitely captured in Motet 16, where he pictures himself
carried away from her by cable car to the other side of an abyss:
The flower that repeats
on the edge of the precipice
forget-me-not
has not a purer or a fresher hue
than the space cast up between us as it is.
A squeaking erupts and disunites us two,
the intractable blue will not come back.
In the closeness of the almost seeable air
I’m carried away, as it grows already black,
to a far halt by a grinding funicular.
Despite the pain that memory brings, he dreads losing
the vision of her and have it disappear in the mind’s habitual mist.
Motet 18:
Hedge clippers, don’t clip away her solitary
features from my dissolving memory,
do not make of her magnificent listening head
one of my usual fogs.
Against the pain of absence, and of the memory of the
presence that once so inspired him, he has the works born of that
suffering, namely his verses, the poetry of resignation—though how
long will it last? Motet 18 continues:
A cold descends… The secateurs firmly snip
and injure acacia leaves so that they shed
twigs and cicada husks
into this first November mud which clogs.
In my comment on this poem I write, ‘Are these
cicadas symbolic of poetry that wishes to be immortal but, like Tithonus,
cannot be forever fresh and young? The image of moulted cicada husks,
clipped by the gardener’s shears into the mud along with the leaves
and stems of the acacia, is a grim one. … It’s not until the second
verse is absorbed that the first can be appreciated. As the gardener
works—or perhaps the poet himself wields the shears, it makes no
difference—the thought arises that it’s just as easy to trim from
the mind its most treasured images. The memory of the poet’s own muse
might fade. For will not even poetry itself diminish in a life, just as
the cicadas vanish and leave only their death-in-life masks, their last
moults, in the acacia? The note is bitter, the mood desperate and
self-reproachful.’
One thing that is particularly obvious in the Motets
is their fastidious disdain for the common herd, for what Montale
perceives as the crudeness of the masses. Look at Motet 5:
Perhaps
the robots are right after all. Look how they peer
from the corridors, immured!
… … … … … …
—Do you too add to the weak
litany of your express train this appalling
and faithful cadence of the damned samba?
The ellipsis dots are part of the poem. The ‘robots’
are the common people who peer from corridors, and the noise of their
dancing is, to the poet, appalling. He may be fond of opera but he doesn’t
seem very keen on dancing, or not the kind that’s associated with
popular merrymaking. In Motet 11 he says:
The soul that can dispense
mazurka and rigadoon with each new
season on the street sustains itself
with a recondite passion,
and although I’m fairly sure that the stateliness
of ‘recondite’ or ‘secret’ (chiusa) is ironical, it’s
not difficult also to detect a sneaking fascination for the sweaty
jollity of the common people. In Motet 13 he works his way
through a feeling that the holiday street-singing in Venice is
fraudulent or deceiving (subdola), to find that it concentrates
his mind wonderfully:
Tossing below
is an insensate muddle, but it arouses me—more
and still more—until I am absorbed
like that fisherman of eels upon the shore.
What consoles this brooding poetic presence is its
ability to capture instances in time with telling precision. These
captive moments may be just what they are, or they might just be
hermetic signs of something deeper, he thinks. I note, for example, the
hard simplicity of these lines from Motet 9:
The lizard, if it scuttles
in the scourging heat
of the stubble fields,
only to recall that the lizard and the scourging heat
are taken from Dante, so they’re not just simple observations after
all. But damn, he is good at making these observations clear and direct,
wherever they come from. Look at this from Motet 17:
and late among
the flowers the humming of beetles still
sucking juices: ultimate sounds, the greedy
life of the countryside.
These particular lines lead on, of course, to an
image which is anything but simple and direct:
A blackboard sky
prepares itself for an eruption of
skeletal horses, for sparks struck from fierce hooves.
The ominous again, the oracular. This feeling that
the mystery of life can be adequately conveyed only by being mysterious
in another way is essential to the voice of this poetry. In
Motet 3, who is to say what the ‘rough wing’ signifies? Death,
I suppose. The time for his dear friend to die had not yet come:
A rough wing slid overhead, it brushed your hand,
but your card had not yet come up, not yet—not quite.
I’ve already cited the jackals led by a lackey in
Motet 6. They are a puzzle which even the poet can’t solve. The
sight occurred and he never forgets it. And why should the flight of
martins from telephone wires towards the sea comfort him? He says they
don’t, but I’m left wondering why they might have been the comfort
he says they are not.
And almost everywhere this enigmatic, crowd-shunning,
alert shadow of a poet operates at near zero temperature. In
Motet 3 he there is frost on the windows; in Motet 8 there is
snow around the greenhouse or conservatory; in Motet 12 he frees
her forehead from icicles; in Motet 14 a hailstorm ‘desolates /
the bellflower and deracinates verbena’; in Motet 17 ‘a frozen
sun / snuffs out its flames’. If this voice symbolises or expresses
any single predominant attitude, it is an extremely fastidious, learned
and dry one.
The contrast with the voice of the young Neruda could
not be sharper. The Chilean poet in his youth is what he will remain,
life-affirming, often even jubilant, despite the prevailing sexual
frustration. And his symbolism is built upon images that are mostly
clear in intention but fuzzy enough at the edges to be endlessly
suggestive.
The mature Italian, on the other hand, is not sure that life has a
quality that must be celebrated. He is cerebral and literate, carving
cameos with an expert knowledge of poetic form and tradition. Where
Neruda is warm and instinctive, Montale is chilly and analytical. The
contrast could not be more obvious. What they have in common is their
Modernism. They both experiment with forms; both flirt with incoherence
and fragmentation; both are in the broad stream of European symbolism
which seeded Modernism; and in subject matter, of course, although the
younger poet has sex on the brain while the older man’s head is full
of abstractions, both are writing about loneliness. Each wants a
different sort of company, but company they both crave. Their poems are
written to fill a void.
Alan
Marshfield
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