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Poems from the Italian of

EUGENIO MONTALE

Correspondences Twenty Motets

For the Album

From ‘Mediterranean’

From ‘Cuttlefish Bones’

On a Letter Never Written

THE MAGNOLIA’S SHADE

The shade of the Japanese magnolia tree

dissipates now that the nearly purple buds

have fallen. An intermittent vibrato

of a cicada rises. It is no more

the moment of a unison as of voices,

Clizia, the era of illimitable godhead

which devours its faithful and restores their blood.

The being consumed was easier, the dying

at a wing’s first shudder, at the first encounter

with the enemy, that was play. Now commences

the harder way: not you, however, devoured

by the sun and rooted, yet a delicate

thrush able to flutter high above the freezing

wharves of your river’s edge,—it is not you, frail

fugitive for whom zenith nadir Cancer

Capricorn remained undistinguished, unmarked,

so that the war might be in you and in who worships

the esteem of your Bridegroom for you, that the sharp

frost forces to curl . . . . The others fall to the rear

and buckle. The file which insidiously

grates away will be silenced, and the empty shell

of the man who sang will soon be pulverised

glass underfoot,—the shadow is like a bruise now,

it is autumn, it is winter, the beyond

which guides you and in which I fling myself, a fish

hopping clear of the sea in the full moon.

Goodbye.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

MOTET

The known: again must lose you. Cannot!

All actions, noises—marksman shots—

panic me—as do salt heaves

which overbrook

harbour mole and make spring fazed

in Netherbrook.

Site of rowlocks, steel shipmasts,

in the evening’s dustmote wood.

Long hum numbs from out there, harrow,

nails dragged down glass. The search for that

lost sign, the promise you once graced me

with.

And made hell certain.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

DELTA

I’ve ligatured the life that’s broken off

secret transfusions to you:

what battles with itself seems almost not

aware of you, your suffocating presence.

As the flood of time engorges its breakwaters

you tune your fate to its immensity;

now, more pellucid, memory, arise

from those dark regions to which you descended,

as in rain’s aftermath the green in trees,

the ochre-wash on walls, intensify.

About you I know nothing save the mute

message which sustains me on my journey:

whether as form you exist or hazed delusion

of dreams which feed upon

the trouble of the feverish shore, thrashing

about in the heaving tide.

Nothing of you in the vacillating hours

grey or sundered by a sulphurous flame

except for the hooted warning of a tug

which from a hard fog ties up in the gulf.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

WIND IN THE CRESCENT

Edinburgh, 1948

The big bridge did not lead to you.

I would have reached you, navigating

even sewers at your behest, except already

my energy, along with the sunlight on

the crystal windows, was slowly dissipating.

The man preaching on the Crescent asked me,

‘Know where God is?’ I did indeed, and told him.

A spasm crossed his face. He disappeared

in a great wind which snatched up men and houses

and elevated them into pitch darkness.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

HITLER SPRING

Nor her whom to look on the sun turns round...

(Dante(?) to Giovanni Querini)

Dense the albino cloud of lunatic moths

twirls round the fading lamps and on parapets,

spreading the ground with a sheet on which feet

screech as on sugar; now imminent summer frees

the night-time chill which has been held

in the secret quarries of the dead season,

in orchards slithering from Maiano to these sandbanks.

On the high street, a short time back, hell’s delegate zoomed by

surrounded by a ra-ra of mobsters; a mystic pit, aflame,

bannering crossed claws, grabbed and gulped him;

shop-fronts are shuttered up, poor

and inoffensive but armed, even they,

with guns and war-toys;

the butcher has barred up—he used to deck

baby goats’ heads with bright berries;

the ritual of gentle killers, still ignorant of blood,

is transmogrified into a filthy dance of torn wings,

lugworms on mud flats; the water goes on gnawing

its banks, and no one any more is inculpable.

All for nothing, then?—and the firework display

by St John’s Cathedral, which slowly whitened

the skyline, and the pledges, and the long goodbyes

strong as baptism in the mournful waiting

of the horde (but a gem streaked the air, scattering

on the ice and on your esplanade beaches,

Tobias’ angels, the seven, the seed

of the future) and the heliotropes born

from your hands—all burnt and sucked dry

by a pollen which hisses like fire

sharp as driving snow...

Oh the wounded

springtime is still holiday if it freezes

this death to death ! Look up again,

Clizia, it is your fate, you

who, changed, keep love unchanged,

until the blind sun which you carry in you

is dazzled in the Other and destroyed

in Him for everyone. Perhaps the sirens, the bells

which welcome the monsters at the time

of their sick Halloween are already mixing

with the sounds that, loosed from heaven, descends, conquers—

with the breathing of a dawn which tomorrow for all

will break again, white but with no wings

of horror, over the south’s arid gulches.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

CORRESPONDENCES

Now when afar a mirage of mists

vacillates and disperses,

the woodpecker in the trees drills out

another annunciation.

The hand stretched to the undergrowth

to tear at the heart’s web

with the ends of fodder-straw

is that which cuddles nightmare ingots

mirrored by ponds

when the noisy chariot

of Bacchus freights back the mad bawling

of rams from the hills’ burnt patches.

Do you return too, sheep-girl without any sheep,

to rest on my rock?

I know who you are, but what do you read

beyond the bird-flights over the pass?

Vainly I ask the meadows where the heat-haze

hangs in the flash and spat of scattered rooftops,

ask the hidden fever of the fast trains

on the steaming coast.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

EASTBOURNE

‘God save the king!’ intone trombones

from a pavilion stuck on a pier

that leaves a route for the tide when it rises

eradicating the damp

footprints of horses

on the shore sand.

A cold wind invades me

but the windows still show a gleam

and the white of the mica in the cliffs

shines along with it.

Bank Holiday... It brings back, creepily,

the ups and downs of my life,

rather too nicely after the lapse.

It’s growing late. The breakers widely extend

and end in silence.

In their wheelchairs pass amputees;

floppy-eared dogs lollop beside them,

or sullen kids or old folk. (Perhaps

tomorrow this will seem like a dream.) And you

appear too, prisoner voice, released

soul which went wrong,

the shout of my blood lost and restored

in my evening.

As a hotel’s revolving door

flickers light from its panels

—another answers, returns a flashing—

a carousel panics me, its gyration

upsets everything; and all nerves I

(‘my country!’) am aware of your breathing

and stand up; the day has become too crowded.

Everything will seem empty, even the force

which aggregates in its tenacious grasp

the quick and the dead, tree and rock,

and is stirred for you, by you. This holiday

has no mercy. The band gives up

its caterwauling and a disarmed goodness

creeps out in the starting dusk.

Evil transcends.... The wheel will not cease.

You know this too, light-in-darkness.

In that boiling country, where you

left me at the first bang of the bell,

is only a bitter torchlight from what was

Bank Holiday.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

From ‘MEDITERRANEAN’

Ancient of days, I am drunk with the voice

escaping the mouths that you lift

like green bells which then crash

back and asunder.

The house of my distant summers

was beside you, as you know well,

in that land of the broiling sun

and an air clouded with mosquitoes.

Sea, today, just as then, I am stilled

by your being, but consider myself no longer

worthy of the solemn admonition

upon your breath. You were the first

to tell me that my heart’s

small ferment was only an impulse

of yours; that in my depths

was your perilous law: to be vast, diverse,

and yet to be bounded:

and to cleanse myself of pollution

as you cough upon the coasts

the vain filth of your own abyss

amid cork-shreds seaweed starfish.

Wipe out, if it be your will,

this feeble and whining life

as a classroom sponge erases

trivial marks on a board.

I wait to be re-encompassed by you,

to make good my goofed-up past.

My advent was witness

to an order my journey forgot,

these my words swear allegiance

to I know not what impossible event.

Yet always when I half-heard

your soft waves on the shore

I was stiffened with alarm

as is one of weak memory

when he recalls his homeland.

Set straight by my lesson—

not so much by your raging

glory as by the pulsation

that hardly makes a whisper

in one of your desolate noontides—

to you I gave myself humbly. I am

no more than a tinder-spark. Well I know, to burn,

this, nothing else, is to be my meaning.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

FALSETTO

Little Esther, being twenty’s a menace to you,

a darkly blushing cloud

which little by little involves you.

This you know and are not afraid.

We’ll see you submerging

in a smoky haze which the wind

lacerates and violently condenses.

Then from the smother of ash you’ll emerge

more glowing than ever,

your intense face uplifted to farther

adventures, just like

the huntress Diana.

Twenty autumns reached their brim,

departed springtimes trail around you;

see, for you is a resonating

prophecy in the spheres of heaven.

May it not be the noise

of a struck jug cracking!;

I pray that for you it will be

an ineffable concerto

of little bells.

Dubious tomorrows do not alarm you.

Light-hearted you stretch yourself

on a rock glinting with salt

and your body tans in the sun.

Remember the lizard

dead-still on the naked boulder;

youth awaits you, and for youth

a boy’s noose of grass.

Water is for you the tempering power,

it is in water you find yourself and renew:

we think of you as a sea-plant, a pebble,

an ocean creature

salinity cannot corrode

but arrives at the shore all the purer.

And with good reason! Do not perturb

with misgivings this smiling moment.

Your liveliness already captures the future

and a shrug of your shoulders

explodes the citadels

of your obscure tomorrows.

You rise tall, advance on the narrow

springboard, above the loud swirl:

your profile is chiselled

upon durable pearl.

You hesitate on the quaking plank,

then laugh, and as if snatched by a wind

throw yourself into the arms

of your sacred lover, who hugs you.

We, of a race which is

earth-bound, watch you.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

From ‘CUTTLEFISH BONES’

To loll, afternoons, pallid, abstracted,

by a baking-hot garden wall,

to listen among the thorns and the scrub

to blackbirds clicking and the rustle of snakes.

In cracks in the soil or upon the ragwort

to discern the files of red ants

which break order and realign into order

along the tops of their minuscule ricks.

To observe through the leaves the far

pulsating scales of the sea

while a trilling screech of cicadas

emanates from the barren summits.

And walking in the dazzling sunlight

to feel with sad wonder

how all life and its labour

is in this tracing along a wall

with jagged bits of bottle on top.

Bring to me the sunflower so that I may

transplant it to my salt-desiccated soil

and make it show its anxious yellow face

to heaven’s clear blue mirror all the day.

Obscure things are tending to a clearness,

bodies self-consume in a flowing dance

of tints and shades: in music. To disappear

is the best chance of every kind of chance.

Bring to me the flower which leads right

to that spot where transparent depths surge up

and life evaporates like ghostly essence;

bring to me the sunflower mad with light.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

FOR THE ALBUM

I began before daybreak

to sling my hook (nicknamed ‘hooked-on-her’) for you;

in the scummy wells I could not

catch me a single tail-flash,

no wind arrived with evidence of you

from the hills of Monferrato.

I continued to live out my day

always on the qui vive for you, larva tadpole

fringe of rampant creeper ptarmigan

gazelle zebu okapi

black nimbus hailstone

before the wine harvest I scrimmaged

among the soaking vine-rows never to find you.

I continued until it was late

without knowing there were three bins

—SAND SODA SOAP; the dovecote

from which you took flight: and from a kitchen,—

were for opening solely for me.

So you disappeared on the vague horizon.

No man imagines that lightning can be captured

but see it flash and he will not be robbed of it.

I stretch out under your cherry-tree, I was

already far too rich to contain you alive.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

DAY AND NIGHT

Even a sidling feather can sketch your figure,

or the sunray playing hide-and-seek among sofas,

reflected in a child’s mirror from the roof-tops.

On the encasing walls are smoky streaks

prolonging the spiralling poplars, and below

on a trestle the knife-grinder’s parrot ruffles.

Then stifling night in the little piazza

and footsteps, and always this painful fight

to submerge only to rise again, unchanged

for centuries, or for seconds, unable to find

the light of your eyes in the incandescent cave;

and still the same cries and the drawn-out weeping

on the veranda, if the shot

which flushes your throat and shatters your wings

suddenly echoes, oh dangerous

annunciator of dawn

and the cloisters and hospitals awaken

at a laceration of trumpets . . .

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

ON A LETTER NEVER WRITTEN

For a swarm of dawns, for a few

wires on which are straggled

the threads of life looped into

hours and years, today dolphins in couples

leap with their young? Oh to hear

nothing of you, to run from your eyes’

dazzle! On earth it is otherwise, far.

Vanish I cannot, nor turn again; the vermilion

furnace of night

is tardy, the evening lingers,

prayer is torture, the flask

from the sea has not yet reached you

through the jutting rocks. Waves vacantly

crash on the headland at Finisterre.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

SEA-FRONT

It’s blowing more and the dark is torn

to rags, the shadow which drops from you on

the thin palings crinkles. It is too late

if you wish to be yourself! Down from the palm-tree

the rat has thudded, lightning crackles the fuse

and the protracted eyelashes of your gaze.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

DORA MARKUS

It was where the wooden pier

juts into the ocean at Porto Corsini

and a few men, almost immobile,

drop and draw nets. A flip of your wrist

at the unseeable, opposite shore

said where your home was.

Then we followed the canal

to the town-centre dock, shining with soot,

in flatlands where an inert springtime

had sunk without trace.

And here where an old life is clothed

in a motley of soft

oriental disquiets,

your words rainbowed like scales

on a dying mullet.

Your restlessness reminds me

of migrating birds which collide with

lighthouses on stormy nights;

stormy your very niceness

churns away in hiding,

its pauses rare.

How do you keep it up

even when in that indifferent

lake of a heart you are exhausted? Perhaps

an amulet protects you, kept somewhere

with your lipstick, powder-

puff and nail file: a white

ivory mouse; and that’s how you live.

Now in your Carinthia

of flowering myrtles and ponds,

bent over the edges you study

timidly gaping carp,

or follow in the lime-trees

the evening’s ardour between those hairy

pinnacles, or in the waters where awnings inflame

from quayside and small hotels.

The evening which stretches over

the wet urn brings just

panting motors,

a goose-honk, and the inside

of snow-white majolica tells

the smudged mirror, which sees you

changed, a story of cool

mistakes and engraves it

where a sponge cannot reach.

Your legend, Dora!

But it’s already written in the stares

of men with high-brushed

weak-point whispers in grand

gold paintings, and it recurs

with each sound which the cracked

harmonica makes in the hour

that darkens, later and later.

It is written there. The evergreen

laurel by the kitchen

survives, the voice doesn’t change,

Ravenna is far-off, a ferocious

faith distils poison.

What does it want of you? Voice,

legend, destiny, none surrender....

But it is late, later and later.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

HARRY

Boisterous winds spread dust

over roofs, in circles, and over

blank spaces where hatted donkeys

snuff dirt stock-still outside

the guest houses’ window-sparkle.

From promenade, facing the sea,

you descend, the day

rain-wet, sun-bright,

its equal-paced and close-knit hours

seemingly warped by repetitious

castanets.

The signature of another world.

Follow it to the skyline

where a leaden waterspout

overhangs, more vagabond than

the churning beneath it: salt vortex

shunted against the clouds

by a rebel climate. Let your feet,

snagged by bladderwrack, grind the shingle.

This could be the hour long-awaited

that saves you from cutting short your track—

a chain-link, Harry, motionless motion,

the too-well-known inertial daze...

Listen among the palms to the tremulous jabs

of violins, drowned by the thunder’s

quivering metallic clang;

how pleasant the storm when

the Dog Star stabs white

through the mauve sky and far-off seems

the close evening: if sliced by lightning

it opens in a ruddled luminescence

like a precious tree, and the gypsy

tambourines are a silent fumble.

Descend the precipitous dark

which turns midday into a night

where lit globes swing on the beach—

and in the offing, where a solid black

welds sea and sky, from scattered boats wink

acetylene lamps—

until the sky shakes and trickles,

earth guzzles and steams,

everything near you wallows, awnings

flap loose, an immense rustle

skims the land, paper lanterns hiss

and flop down on the streets.

So, lost among wicker screens and sopping mats,

like a bulrush which never yields

its dank and draggled root-hold,

you shake with life and strain at a void

static with choked lamentation;

the dome of an ancient wave

rolls over and gulps you again,

it all reclaims you, porch street

walls mirrors, nailing you to the frozen

multitude of the lonely dead,

and if a gesture should clutch you,

a word should fall beside you, Harry, perhaps

in the melting hour it is the hint of some life

strangled and risen for you, and the wind

disperses it with the ashes of stars.

(translated by Alan Marshfield) (back)

THE HOUSE OF CUSTOMS

You don’t remember the customs house upon

the steep cliff’s edge above the rocky coast.

Lonely it waits for you since that night when

your ideas in a swarm came there and entered

and stayed awhile, restless.