Language: Italian
Poet: Eugenio Montale
Translator: George Bradley
Region: Italy
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it gives the broken piece its meaning
La Storia
I.
La storia non si snoda
come una catena
di anelli ininterrotta.
In ogni caso
molti anelli non tengono.
La storia non contiene
il prima e il dopo,
nulla che in lei borbotti
a lento fuoco.
La storia non è prodotta
da chi la pensa e neppure
da chi l’ignora. La storia
non si fa strada, si ostina,
detesta il poco a poco, non procede
né recede, si sposta di binario
e la sua direzione
non è nell’orario.
La storia non giustifica
e non deplora,
la storia non è intrinseca
perché è fuori.
La storia non somministra
carezze o colpi di frusta.
La storia non è magistra
di niente che ci riguardi.
Accorgersene non serve
a farla più vera e più giusta.
II.
La storia non è poi
la devastante ruspa che si dice.
Lascia sottopassaggi, cripte, buche
e nascondigli. C’è chi sopravvive.
La storia è anche benevola: distrugge
quanto più può: se esagerasse, certo
sarebbe meglio, ma la storia è a corto
di notizie, non compie tutte le sue vendette.
La storia gratta il fondo
come una rete a strascico
con qualche strappo e più di un pesce sfugge.
Qualche volta s’ incontra l’ectoplasma
d’uno scampato e non sembra particolarmente felice.
Ignora di essere fuori, nessuno glie n’ha parlato.
Gli altri, nel sacco, si credono
più liberi di lui
History
I.
History does not unfold
like a winding chain
of uninterrupted links.
In any case,
many of the links are weak.
History does not contain
a “before” and an “after.”
There is nothing in it whispering
or brewing.
History is not made
by those who meditate upon it, nor
by those who ignore it. History
takes no great leaps forward; it is recalcitrant;
it loathes gradualism; it neither progresses
nor regresses. It jumps the track,
and its destinations
are not on any schedule.
History justifies nothing
and laments nothing.
History is in no way intrinsic,
for it is a surrounding.
History does not administer
caresses or whiplashes.
History is not the magistra
of any subject having to do with us.
Our knowledge of it will not serve
to make it any truer or more just.
II.
Then again, history isn’t
the bulldozer of total devastation people claim.
It leaves underground passages, crypts, holes
and hiding-places. There exist survivors.
History can even be kind: it destroys
as much as it can (and if it went further
so much the better), but history is short
of information and can’t always exact revenge.
History drags the bottom
like a net torn here and there
on snags, and more than one fish swims free.
Sometimes you’ll meet the living ghost
of an escapee, and he doesn’t seem especially happy.
He doesn’t know he’s outside; nobody told him
The others, still in the net, believe
themselves more free than he.
Le Pulci
Non hai mai avuto una pulce
che mescolando il suo sangue
col tuo
abbia composto un frappé
che ci assicuri l’immortalità?
Così avvenne nell’aureo Seicento.
Ma oggi nell’età del tempo pieno
si è immortali per meno
anche se il tempo si raccorcia e i secoli
non sono che piume al vento.
The Fleas
Did you ever have a flea
that combined its blood
with yours
and mixed up a milkshake
to guarantee us immortality?
That’s what happened in the Golden Age
of the sixteen hundreds, but today
in the age of full-time professionals
it takes less to get immortalized,
even if time contracts and the centuries
are nothing but feathers on the wind.
“Ho tanta fede in te”
A C.
Ho tanta fede in te
che durerà
(è la sciocchezza che ti dissi un giorno)
finché un lampo d’oltremondo distrugga
quell’immenso cascame in cui viviamo.
Ci troveremo allora in non so che punto
se ha un senso dire punto dove non è spazio
a discutere qualche verso controverso
del divino poema.
So che oltre il visibile e il tangibile
non è vita possibile ma l’oltrevita
è forse l’altra faccia della morte
che portammo rinchiusa in noi per anni e anni.
Ho tanta fede in me
e l’hai riaccesa tu senza volerlo
senza saperlo perché in ogni rottame
della vita di qui è un trabocchetto
di cui nulla sappiamo ed era forse
in attesa di noi spersi e incapaci
di dargli un senso.
Ho tanta fede che mi brucia; certo
chi mi vedrà dirà è un uomo di cenere
senz’accorgersi ch’era una rinascita.
“I have great faith in you”
to C.
I have great faith in you
and it will endure
(this the foolishness I told you one day)
until a lightning bolt from another world destroys
the gigantic garbage heap on which we live.
We’ll find each other someplace then,
if it makes sense to say that when there is no place,
and talk over some debatable stanza
of the divine poem.
I know that beyond the visible and the tangible
no life is possible, but perhaps the afterlife
is only the other side of the death
we carried inside us for years and years.
I have great faith in myself
and you have rekindled it without wishing to
without knowing it because in every fragment
of our life here there is a pitfall
of which we are unaware and which lies
in wait until we are helpless and alone
before it gives the broken piece its meaning.
I have great faith and it burns me. Surely
anyone seeing me would say: “He’s a man in ashes,”
unaware it has been a rebirth.
Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) was born in Genoa. In his teens, he studied accounting at vocational school and pursued his passion for poetry largely alone at the library. After serving in the infantry in the Great War and training to be an opera singer, he published his debut collection, Cuttlefish Bones, in 1925—the first of many books of poetry that would establish him as the leading Italian writer of his generation. A sworn anti-Fascist, he spent most of the Mussolini era barely making ends meet in Florence, where he got to know, among others, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Tommaso Landolfi, and Irma Brandeis (the subject of some of his most ardent love poems). In 1948, Montale moved to Milan,
becoming a regular contributor to the newspaper Corriere della Sera, for which he wrote most of the prose pieces that became Butterfly of Dinard (published by NYRB Classics). After taking a hiatus from poetry for much of the 1960s, he returned with Satura in 1971, followed by several other late works remarkable for their unstudied epigrammatic elegance. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975.
George Bradley is the author of six books of verse (most recently, A Stroll in the Rain: New & Selected Poems, 2021) and the editor of The Yale Younger Poets Anthology (1997). The recipient of the Yale Younger Poets Prize and the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, among other awards, he has worked variously as a sommelier, an editor, and a copywriter, as well as in construction. Currently he imports and distributes a brand of olive oil from Italy (La Bontà di Fiesole). When not overseas, he lives mostly in Chester, near the river of rivers in Connecticut.
These poems are excerpted from Late Montale, coming out May 2024 from NYRB.
