'To Feel With Melancholy Wonder'

I was introduced to the poet, critic and editor Stanley Burnshaw (1906-2005) in the mid-Seventies by Edward Dahlberg, a difficult man who furthered my education. Collected in Epitaphs for Our Time: The Letters of Edward Dahlberg (George Braziller, 1967) are five letters to Burnshaw. In one dated February 10, 1963, Dahlberg writes: 

“I read with great care, as I told you, The Poem Itself. And although I felt that Henri Peyre did wonderful translations of Mallarmé I thought his lovely work was somewhat tarnished by drossy pedantry, an overelaborate attention to punctuation. However, your spirit pervades the book, and I want to tell you how greatly impressed I am with it.”

 

As usual, Dahlberg has to temper praise with reservations. A friend has sent me a first edition of The Poem Itself: Forty-five Modern Poets in a New Presentation (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960). Edited and introduced by Burnshaw, the anthology’s associate editors are Dudley Fitts, John Frederick Nims and Peyre. It includes more than 150 poems by European and South American writers in their original languages, plus literal translations and explanatory notes. Here is a poem from Eugenio Montale’s first collection, Ossi di sepia [Cuttlefish Bones], published in 1925 though written a decade earlier. The translator is Nims:

 

“To rest at noon, pale and absorbed

next to a scorching garden wall,

to hear among the thorns and sticks

crackle of blackbirds, stir of snakes.

 

“In the cracks of the ground or on the vetch

to spy on files of red ants

that now disperse, now interweave

on summit[s] of the tiny heaps [anthills].

 

“To observe through foliage the throbbing

far away scales of sea--

while the quavering screaks of cicadas

rise from the bald peaks—

 

“And passing into the dazzling sun

to feel with melancholy wonder

how all life and its laboring (travail) is

in this following a wall

that has on top sharp pieces of bottle[s].”

 

In his commentary Nims writes: “The poem ventures an interpretation of the nature of life that in other contexts might be cynical and depressing. Here it is not—in this verve and brilliance of a landscape vibrant with raw color. . . the emotional effect of the experience, though deepened with sorrow, has been chiefly that of wonder. . . . Montale meets it with a spirit as tough as its own with quite other resources of endurance and human courage—so admirably engrained in the fiber of his stubborn poem.” 

 

This is a good time for Montale’s readers in English. New York Review Books has published Late Montale (trans. George Bradley, 2022) and Butterfly of Dinard (trans. Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky, 2024). The latter, especially, is a gift to all readers of Montale. In 1971, G. Singh translated these stories in prose as The Butterfly of Dinard and managed to make Montale dull and, occasionally, nonsensical. Lately, among twentieth-century poets who wrote in languages other than English, I have most often been reading Montale, even more than Paul Valéry, Zbigniew Herbert and Osip Mandelstam.