Eugenio Montale

Acknowledgements

In writing this book, I have not necessarily attained specialist knowledge of Eugenio Montale’s poetry, a poet whose works have produced so much secondary criticism over the decades and in relation to whom I have felt, at times, increasingly distant and irritated by and, at other times, thankful and fascinated. Rather, I have become increasingly interested in broader questions regarding poetry and what it might mean to write about poetry, loss and mourning, the nature of space and time, the relationship between the living and the dead, and, above all, the entanglements among all of these within and beyond poetry. Indeed, it is an understanding of poetry as ‘possibilità’, a word that in Italian holds together both its singular and plural denotation of possibility and possibilities. It is up to us to decide which of the two. For encouraging me in exploring this, I am indebted to several colleagues and friends.

First, I would like to thank Emanuela Tandello, to whom I am deeply grateful for her generosity and guidance on everything, poetic and otherwise. I would also like to mention two places that served as the settings for germinal moments in the development of this monograph: the glorious and warmly chaotic Polstead, where a first draft of the manuscript could be completed, and Nelson Street, where it was possible to return to it, in the company of countless books belonging to Emanuela and that reminded me of my limits in this enterprise and everything that remains to be read and explored. For this, I am thankful to Emanuela, as well as Richard Cooper, together with the enlarged family that centres around them and their homes. They offered me homes characterized by a unique and lively warmth that nourished and supported me beyond any kind of generosity that I could have envisaged.

During the years it has taken to write and revise this book, I have benefited from the comments of numerous friends and colleagues. Thanks are due to my doctoral examiners Giuseppe Stellardi and Beatrice Sica for their helpful feedback and corrections. I am indebted to Jennifer Rushworth ←vii | viii→for introducing me to Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, whose work has greatly enriched my understanding of Montale’s poetics of mourning, and for reading countless drafts of this book’s chapters. I am profoundly grateful to Roberto Binetti for offering critical comments and invaluable insights into key questions animating my research, which provoked continuous rewriting and rethinking. I am thankful for his companionship and the dialogue that has developed between the two of us, which keeps my thinking in motion and nourishes my academic and creative endeavours. Roberto also helped translate all of Montale’s poems in collaboration with Caroline Maldonado and I am grateful to both of them for offering an English translation for non-Italian speaking readers of this book.

Most recently, I have been unable to return to this book while attempting and failing to settle in Dublin, a city I first encountered from faraway through its poets and the prose of James Joyce which this year’s anniversary has brought to the front of a city that he resented and, yet, he tells us, ‘For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.’ I should thank the Irish Research Council and the Department of Italian at Trinity College Dublin for allowing me to continue carrying out my research activities and for reminding me that poetry and marginality are almost inseparable. Everything began with poetry, a story says, and everything will need poetry. The first-year students at Trinity College Dublin ←viii | ix→that I had the opportunity to read poetry together with know this. Their enthusiasm and insights have pointed directly to the possibilities that lie in attempting to talk about poetry as a way to talk about everything and that, naturally, end to talk about nothing at all. Our time together has been what has allowed me to remain in the space of poetry. I am indebted to all my students, who enriched my time in Oxford as well as in Dublin, making it more enjoyable and worthwhile. I would like to acknowledge two, in particular: Salomé Melchior and Jonathan Wiles, whom I taught in my very first course and whose intellectual curiosity has inspired me in many ways ever since. My students have been, perhaps unknowingly, among the best interlocutors of my research throughout these last years.

←ix | x→The person whose name is on the cover of this book is not satisfied with this book, and never would be, but they are happy about letting it go as must inevitably happen with every scholarly work. The same book would not be written now if the person bearing that name wrote it again. It will be worth considering what it will do with you and what you will do with it. It is possible, that it will do nothing, that it will not encourage a reading of Montale’s poetry – or any poetry, for that matter – or thinking about broader questions about poetry and the place and time when poetry is written and read. I am ready for this prospect with the understanding that every attempt to write about literature is an attempt to draw a story with a beginning and an end. For the same event, many stories could be crafted. Or, in other words, to end with the writer of the city that has allowed me to understand how carmina non dant panem: ‘He lived at a little distance from his body, regarding his own story with doubtful side-glances.’ As literary critics, it is distance and doubt about the stories we tell that should drive our work, and remembering, from time to time, about all the possibilities left – unseeen, unthought, unlived, unwritten – on the sidewalk. It is them that make this book, and its story, possible.

I gratefully acknowledge having received permission to reproduce the following copyrighted material: Eugenio Montale, Tutte le poesie, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1984, © Mondadori Libri SpA, Milano); portions of Chapter 1 appeared in Adele Bardazzi, ‘Lame, lamelle, lime, lamiere, lastre, sciabole, scaglie. The io and its dissolution, and the topos of knife-edged objects in Eugenio Montale’s Ossi di seppia’, Italian Poetry Review 13–14 (2018–2019): 199–213 (© Società Editrice Fiorentina). Part of Chapter 2 appeared in ‘Eugenio Montale’s Xenia: Between Myth and Poetic Tradition’, in Transmissions of Memory: Echoes, Traumas and Nostalgia in Post-World War II Italian Culture, ed. Patrizia Sambuco (Madison Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2018), pp. 21–38 (©Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). Every effort has been ←x | xi→made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful for notification of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

A Note on the Text

References to poems by Eugenio Montale are to the Meridiano edition of Montale’s poetry, Tutte le poesie, ed. Giorgio Zampa (Milan: Mondadori, 1984), unless otherwise indicated. References to Montale’s poems are given in the following form: title of the poem, title of the collection, line number(s), page reference to the Meridiano edition, for example, ‘Corno inglese’, Ossi di seppia, 1–2, p. 13. All translations from Italian to English are by Roberto Binetti and Caroline Maldonado, unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction

Eugenio Montale’s poetics of mourning results from his conceptualization of ‘ombra’ [shade] and the relationship between the poetic subject and his ‘care ombre’ [beloved shades] (‘Proda di Versilia’ [Coast at Versilia], La bufera e altro [The Storm and Other Things], 33, pp. 253–254). The figure of the shade creates a bridge between life and death. The nature of this fundamental mode of being beyond the tangible is defined by a drive towards essence – as he writes in Xenia: ‘non […] più forma, ma essenza’ [not form anymore, but essence] (Xenia I.14, 4, p. 302). The paradoxical presence-in-absence, characteristic of Montale’s poetics, is the mechanism that allows for a continuity between life and death, loss and recovery, immanence and transcendence, absence and presence.¹ This contradictory presence-in-absence is what makes Montale’s shades essentially liminal: they are caught in between the tangible, visible world and what lies beyond, the afterlife. Their liminal nature is the result of their state of radical dissolution and their being true essence. Montale’s incorporeal shades represent more authentic forms of being, eventually perceived by the poetic subject as more alive and truthful than the living. Their principal function, in travelling between the visible world and the ‘oltrevita’ [afterlife],² is to allow the poetic subject ←1 | 2→a glimpse of the afterlife, a dimension with which he strongly seeks to enter into a dialogue. This dialogue, however, is the product of a progression. To begin with, the element of the ‘ombra’ [shade] represents a state of being with which the poetic subject of Ossi di seppia strives to identify, through a drive towards the absolute and the essential that is often articulated as self-effacement. The figure of the shade, at this early stage, represents the poetic subject himself. This book begins its exploration of Montale’s poetics of mourning and his eschatological vision by focusing on the individual dimension of the shade. This allows me to consider the transition from the individual shade to the plurality of Montale’s ‘care ombre’ [beloved shades].

Scholars have hitherto tended to focus on either the poetic subject’s earlier desire for self-effacement in Ossi di seppia [Cuttlefish Bones] or on some of Montale’s ‘care ombre’ [beloved shades], with the latter often being regarded individually and not necessarily collectively as shades.³ Moreover, critics have tended to approach these two key elements of Montale’s poetry separately and without seeing the ‘ombra’ [shade] as a crucial element on the basis of which Montale’s extensive and diverse poetic corpus acquires a renewed sense of unity and cohesion. This book aims to redress the ←2 | 3→fragmentary approach that characterizes existing scholarship. My analysis begins by taking its cue from Rebecca West’s seminal Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge, in which she focuses on liminality and marginality – from geographic edge spaces to psychological margins – as key elements in Montale’s poetry.⁴ West’s article, ‘Montale’s “Care Ombre”: Identity and its Dissolution’, is another work that informs this book.⁵ West looks at both the poetic subject’s struggle with his own identity and his subsequent identification as a shade, among the other shadowy presences. West’s main contribution lies in her highlighting of the extent to which the motif of the ‘care ombre’ [beloved shades] is reminiscent of Virgil’s and Dante’s own treatment of shadowy presences in their respective poems. This, of course, has been widely and exhaustively discussed by scholars, particularly Glauco Cambon, and will therefore not be examined in this book.⁶ West’s article distinguishes itself through its exploration of the different natures and functions of the various ‘ombre’ [shades] in Montale’s poetry, which serves to shed further light on his eschatology: from the ‘io-ombra’ [shade-ego], to the shadows of absent female beloveds, to the ‘care ombre’ [beloved shades] of the figures of the mother and the father. Although there are some significant differences between them, as this book will highlight, all of these shades lead the poetic subject towards his exploration of the ‘oltre’ [beyond] and the development of a peculiar eschatology whereby all that is related to earthly existence must dissolve into nothingness.