'The Second Life of Art'

As an obstinately monolingual American, I rely on the precious work of translators. The three poets I read most often in translation, in order of frequency, are Dante, Eugenio Montale and Zbigniew Herbert. I have much English and American poetry safely stored in memory – one of many reasons I am almost never bored -- but only scraps of the Italians and the Pole. Rough outlines, fragments, incomplete lines, yes. This is shameful, I know. One of the tests of great writing, especially poetry, is memorability. The personal stamp of some poets is so indelible, so poetically DNA-specific, as to lay claim not only to stanzas, lines and phrases but individual words. Perhaps this is the ultimate memorability, to wield a single word so forcefully that readers, centuries later, recognize its ownership. “Slant” immediately conjures Dickinson; “madding,” Gray. “Fruitfulness” and “clammy” are forever Keats’. I'm denied this with the three foreign-language poets cited above. 

Montale was also a memorable writer of prose. In his 1949 essay “The Second Life of Art” he writes: "An art which destroys form while claiming to refine it denies itself its second and larger life: the life of memory and everyday circulation. I will try to explain what this second life of art is so as not to be misunderstood.” Montale dismisses much of modern poetry for it absence of this “second life”; that is, in the reader’s consciousness and, sometimes, his memory:

 

“Paradoxically, one could say that music, painting, and poetry begin to be understood when they are presented but they do not truly live if they lack the capacity to continue to exercise their powers beyond that moment, freeing themselves, mirroring themselves in that particular situation of life which made them possible. To enjoy a work of art or its moment, in short, is to discover it outside its context; only in that instant does the circle of understanding close and art become one with life as all the romantics dreamed.”

 

Montale was a rare critic who changed for the better my understanding of art. Clive James writes of him:

 

“If it ever came to the point where a lifetime’s memories of artistic exaltation shrank to nothing except a single image, an image of dignity would be a good one to see. One would want to retain at least that much. But Montale must have had that idea in mind, or he would not have talked about the inevitability of forgetting in a way that emphasized the quality of what is remembered.”

Montale was born on this date, October 12, in 1896 and died in 1981 at age eighty-four.

 

[The Montale prose translations are taken from The Second Life of Art (trans. Jonathan Galassi, 1982). Clive James’ essay on Montale can be found in Cultural Amnesia (2007).]