Bugged Again

Our home computer is out of commission and one of my wife's colleagues, after listening to a description of the symptoms, diagnosed the problem as "catastrophic." We'll resort to American ingenuity.

James Marcus at House of Mirth, commenting on my most recent post regarding Eugenio Montale, mentioned in an e-mail that I had neglected "one of the most celebrated and sinister uses of insects in his poetry -- the moths circling the lanterns at the beginning of "Primavera hitleriana," and the bodies of the dead ones crunching underfoot like sugar. Very memorable and icky. The first translation I read of this poem, in the old New Directions anthology, translated falene as mayflies, which is wrong. [Jonathan] Galassi and [William] Arrowsmith get it right. But the Italian word for mayfly is itself a tiny bit of poetry: efemera."

If you know anything about mayflies, the Italian word is precise and beautiful. See Richard Wilbur's poem on the same insect.

Here's the opening lines of "Hitler Spring" as translated by Robert Lowell:

"A dense white cold of maddened moths
swaggers past parapet and lamp,
shaking a sheet upon the earth,
crackling like sugar underfoot."

And here is Bernard Wall's translation, also taken from Montale in English, edited by Harry Thomas:

"Thickly the whitened cloud from the maddened moths
whirls round the pallid standards and on the embankments,
spreads on the ground a pall that crackles
like sugar underfoot..."

Grazie, James, for the reminder and for deepening my insight into Montale's mastery.