The Name of the Void

SELECTED POEMS by Eugenia Montale; translated by Glauco Cambon, G. S. Fraser, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, Mario Praz and others. 161 pages. New Directions. $5.

"I have lived under a glass bell," says shy old Poet Eugenic Montale. Italy's intellectuals have long since discovered that by putting an ear to the bell they can hear a harsh recondite music of commanding originality. Foreigners have been less fortunate. At 69, Montale has only recently made the cultural scene in France and Britain, and in the U.S. his poetry is virtually unknown. Transatlantic ignorance is now relieved by the first volume of Montale in translation to appear in the U.S. With quiet force the book discloses what the poetry public has been missing: a European writer of enduring importance, indisputably the most profound Italian poet of the 20th century.

Montale has been called "the Italian Eliot," and the comparison is not an idle one. Like Eliot, he stood during the '20s in the vanguard of the poetic revolution that introduced the vernacular into verse. Like Eliot, he has written very little (three volumes of verse and three of criticism), but that little he has written with iridescent precision. Like Eliot, he was infected with the century's accidia, sank into morbid pessimism, rose again in religious hope. Unlike Eliot, however, Montale has not trained his spirit to the lattice of traditional theology; his God is a rough diamond hewn from the igneous rock of experience.

Born in Genoa, Montale was raised on the rugged impoverished Ligurian coast, the Waste Land that most of his poems inhabit: "Boulders . . . marshes . . . blistering suns and low air fogged with midges . . . waterspouts like giant trumpets of lead on the flogged horizons." At 21, he exchanged one desolation for another: the trenches of World War I. At 25, he witnessed the collapse of Italian culture under Mussolini. At 29, when he published his first volume of verse (Cuttlefish Bones), he was an apocalyptic pessimist who experienced "existence as entropy" and expressed the experience in language as acrid and compact as Dante's:

Today an iron will abrades the air,

Rips up the thickets, exhausts the trees.

Every shape is shaken in the melee

of elements; all is a shriek, a bellow

of deracinated existences; everything is torn apart by the passing hour . . .

Too late now to be yourself!

And yet, to be himself, to perpetrate in language "the gestures of a life that is nothing but itself," was Montale's singular obsession. His entire poetic corpus is a relentless meditation on the mystery of the self, on the continuing conversation of the self and the Other, on the tragic predicament of the self in time. Even on brief vacations from eschatology in lyric gardens where

the yellows of the lemon blaze

and the ice in the heart dissolves and songs into the breast

pour from the golden trumpets of

solarity,

he could never find "the thread that ravels finally/into the interior of a truth." Even in himself he could not find himself. Before Sartre and Heidegger, he described the fallacy of memory, the treason of time, the existential anguish of alienation.

The well's pulley creaks;

the water rises to the light.

A memory shimmers in the brimming pail,

in the pure ring an image laughs.

I touch my lips to evanescent lips:

The past is distorted, it ages,

it belongs to another . . . The wheel

creaks, restores you to the dreadful depths.

Out of the depths, Montale in the prime of life cried out to his fellow man for help. His fellow woman answered, but Montale found sex to be an arm of the elemental octopus and love itself a surrogate ("your life, your blood in my veins"), not a solution. In despair, he turned away from human amenity and stared into the abyss of unbeing. In horror he demanded: "What is the name of the void that invades us?"

He has spent the second half of his life answering that question in metaphysical verses of rare power and poignance. In his last published poem, the last one in this volume, he offers with the modesty of a sage a luminous summa of his long religious experience: Little Testament.

Only this rainbow can I

leave you as a witness

to a faith hard fought,

to a hope that burned more slowly

than a hard log in the fire.

Reduce it to a fragrant dust

and keep it in an amulet

against the day when all the lights go out and in the darkness the infernal

sardana begins and a shadowy Lucifer upon a prow descends the Thames, the Seine, the

Hudson, shaking great wings of soot half

wrecked by weariness, to tell you: time is up.

A life endures in ashes alone; the only persistence is extinction.

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