Oberlin College Press

Eugenio Montale

SELECTED POEMS (translated by Jonathan Galassi, Charles Wright, & David Young)

Paper $19.95 (ISBN 0-932440-98-3)

By the time that Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) received the Nobel Prize in 1976, the world was beginning to acknowledge that he was among the greatest of the modernist poets, author of a poetic canon that spanned much of the twentieth century. Profoundly rooted in the Italian landscape and culture and with an enormous sensitivity to his language and its heritage, Montale shaped poems throughout his life that were mysterious, resonant, and layered with meanings. His poems range from daily life through history and myth, and on to questions of metaphysics and divinity. As a love poet, a landscape poet, and a spiritual pilgrim, he has few equals.

This volume, which draws on the entire corpus of Montale's work, brings together three of his most experienced and effective translators.

SUMMER

The falcon's cross-shaped shadow's scarcely known
to the young shrubs it grazes.
And what does the cloud see? Multiple faces
that form in the brimming wellspring.

Maybe you come back to me, dead girl,
Arethusa, at my feet,
in the silver wriggle of the trout
swimming against the current.

Here's the sunburned shoulder, here's the gold
nugget, upturned in the sun,
the crazy cabbage moth, the thin
spider's thread across the boiling foam--

some things manage to make it through
the needle's eye, but most do not . . .

Too many lives go into the making of just one.

--Eugenio Montale
translated by David Young

Translation copyright c 2004 by David Young. May not be reproduced without permission.