The Translator’s Invisibility

English translation of Montale’s poetry began early, with a 1928 appearance in Eliot’s Criterion, and it has continued to this day in myriad magazines and anthologies. It was only in the late 1950s, however, that book-length translations started to proliferate, so that Montale now rivals Dante in the number of versions by different hands to be found on publishers’ lists. Montale brought out seven slim volumes of poetry, all of which have been englished in their entirety or in part, some of them more than once.[1] Individual sequences of poems have frequently been lifted out of these volumes and published as chapbooks. There have been five representative selecteds, a book of autobiographical prose, a slim miscellany of critical prose, and a large selection of essays (some 350 pages). At present, thirteen English-language translations of Montale’s writing are in print. They are published by an impressively broad range of trade, academic, and small presses in the United States, England, and Canada: Agenda, Boyars, Ecco, Graywolf, Kentucky, Mosaic, New Directions, Norton, Oberlin, Oxford, Random House. And the numerous translators include talented poets, scholars, and editors, {277} some of whom are internationally known: William Arrowsmith, Jonathan Galassi, Dana Gioia, Alastair Hamilton, Kate Hughes, Antonino Mazza, G.Singh, and Charles Wright. Italian poets linked to Montale by influence, stylistic or otherwise, have also appeared in a number of book-length translations since the late fifties; Guido Gozzano (1883–1916), Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970), Salvatore Quasimodo (1901–1968), Lucio Piccolo (1903–1969), Sandro Penna (1906–1976), Leonardo Sinisgalli (1908–1981), and Vittorio Sereni (1913–1983). Here too the presses are varied and the translators accomplished: Anvil, Carcanet, Cornell, Hamish Hamilton, Minerva, New Directions, Ohio State, Princeton, Red Hill, Red Ozier; Jack Bevan, Patrick Creagh, W.S.Di Piero, Ruth Feldman and Brian Swann, Allen Mandelbaum, J.G.Nichols, Michael Palma, and Paul Vangelisti. Eleven books by poets who can be described, without too much violence, as Montale avatars in English are currently in print, a couple with essays by him.

Compared to the increasing interest that distinguishes Montale’s reception in Anglo-American culture, other postwar tendencies in Italian poetry have received limited attention. Among them, experimentalism is remarkably underrepresented, given its importance in Italy. In a conservative estimate, approximately fifty poets writing over four decades can be classed in this category, making it a central movement in contemporary Italian poetry. The first wave, sometimes called “I novissimi” (“The Newest”) after the title of an important 1961 anthology, includes its editor Alfredo Giuliani (1924–), Corrado Costa (1929–), Edoardo Sanguineti (1930–), Giulia Niccolai (1934–), Nanni Balestrini (1935–), Antonio Porta (1935–1989), Franco Beltrametti (1937–), and Adriano Spatola (1941–1989). The second wave, which began publishing during the 1970s, includes Nanni Cagnone (1939–), Gregorio Scalise (1939–), Luigi Ballerini (1940–), Angelo Lumelli (1944–), Giuseppe Conte (1945–), Cesare Viviani (1947–), Michelangelo Coviello (1950–), and Milo De Angelis. There are also various other poets whose careers do not coincide with these chronologies, but whose writing is marked by a strong experimental impulse—Andrea Zanzotto (1921–), for instance, and Amelia Rosselli (1930–). The fact that these names are more than likely to be meaningless to English-language readers of poetry is symptomatic of the poets’ current marginality (and perhaps that of any other Italian poet but Dante and Montale) in Anglo-American writing.