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Ah, if we're starting soon I'd better go pick up the book at the library tomorrow.
Jozy--Sorry to hear you're having one of those no good sort of days. I hope you feel better soon. I have access to some journals via my university proxy and found an article in New Criterion from 2001, titled "The Violence of Allen Tate" by David Yezzi. Is that the article you wanted to get hold of? If so, PM me and maybe we can find some way to get it from me to you in pdf form.
That is one of them Petrarch yes! I owe you a future hypothetical lunch, and will PM you in a bit. I have to run for a few.Quote:
Originally Posted by Petrarch's Love
I'll start the posting tomorrow evening (Friday). I am overly tied up with some issues at school and I want to post a brief bio/overview of Montale before we get started. I have been going through both Cuttlefish Bones and the Galassi translation and have an idea where i want to start. I am looking forward to the participation of both JBI and Petrarch in this discussion considering their understanding of Italian and experience with the poets that formed a great part of the tradition in which and against which Montale works: Dante, Cavalcanti, Petrarch, Leopardi, Foscolo, D'Annunzio, etc...
I have saved most of my New Criterion magazines. If Petrarch doesn't have it, I can go look in my basement and see if I still have that issue. Do you know what month it was included in?Quote:
Originally Posted by Jozanny
Virgil, I will let you know. I sent Petrarch's Love one of my endearing short howls:lol:.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
I will try to *do* Vine Street soon. I am willing to keep my gun concealed over Montale until I see if I can read him in Italian and back. I may need a few scribbles and a bug to my father, and so on, but as previously indicated, I am not much for reverence and bowing down to clever form if poets can't do it for me. I'm rotten that way, and agree with my former-prof that Shakespeare's end couplets on his sonnets can get pretty droll.:)
Well I'm currently reading up on Montale's bio and on some of the critical response to his work. I have also been refreshing myself with Arrowsmith's translations of Cuttlefish Bones. For those who are interested in getting a head start I am looking at tackling Mediterranean, which is a poemetto or short-long poem. It is Montale's longest composition... something of a suite of nine parts possibly inspired in part by Debussy's La mer. I will be looking at the entire suite, but especially section 8:
If only I could force
some fragment of your ecstasy
into this clumsy music of mine...
:rolleyes: @ luke. I am not translating his longest poem, but I also think his longest might be somewhat slightly intimidating to start with? Other members might be encouraged to join in if *we* took it easy on the opening drum roll? I am all for elitism luke, I just published an essay defending it--but I'd like to let the surf tickle my ankles before I sink into my bust line.Quote:
Originally Posted by stlukesguild
Hey, I don't know if this is the right 'room/forum' to be in, but you all seem to enjoy the stuff your reading so maybe you could help me over the next couple of weeks. I am in the fourth week of an 'A' leve English lit' course and as I'm not as young as I used to be and it's been decades since I went to school it's a little harder than I anticipated. We're doing Hardy - poetry and Tess of the D'urbyviles - the poetry I can stand, but Tess goes on and on forever and it really gets me down! After Hardy we do Tenyson and then Stopard, and a couple of others I can't think of at the moment - 'my short term memory's suffered over the years, I'm sort of like a gold fish, - whops it's gone! Anyway, if there is someone out there who can help me out with a couple of hot tips I'd be really pleased to hear from you. thanks
Hi marly, no, this is the poetry book club, and we are just starting the Italian modernist, Montale, or we will if luke doesn't club me over the head:lol:
Anyway, you might want to look in the author's list under Hardy, and start a thread or join one. Welcome to litnet!
One quick question before I log off to the shambles of my former nicely ordered writing life, which may take me another 24 months to reorder again, should I live so long, end vent--in the Arrowsmith Xenia quasi linked, the narrator is reading *Deutero-Isaiah*, which, if memory serves, most scholars believe is not the actual prophet, but either a disciple or imitator, or scribe-Isaiah. I have that right, right?
Wasn't it S. Beckett who, when asked if he would go to a funeral, said "I never go to those celebrations."? Well, my funeral of the month is over so I can get on with...something. Montale might be a good place to go. Virgil will forgive me for posting this bit a academia, as I first thought it might not be helpfull but...here it is. Bly on Montale... http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html...l-Montale2.pdf It is interesting.
My amazon order came in!!:banana: I have the book!!!!:banana::banana: What's the first poem? I'm ready!!!!!! :cool:
Darn, I knew I forgot something at the library today. I'll pick it up tomorrow and join in.
I get mine tomorrow also, I'll have to wait. If someone wants to suggest one though...
:lol: @ Virgil's post. I will have to depend on quasi's or Petrarch's charity (ouch) until I can see what the main branch could do for me.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
I could email them, but the glitch there is my card expired in February, and I have, oddly, not trekked over because I have too much reading in my own collection.
I could buy Montale just as I've bought Tate, but I am going to overwhelm myself if I get stupid on a spree just now. Hoping on early next week for a more real than virtual journey.:D
I think we're all a delightful riot, at that.
Eugenio Montale- A Brief Background
Eugenio Montale was born in 1896 in Genoa to reasonably affluent parents. Most of his education was attained through his own reading or through his sister, Marianna. She introduced him to St. Augustine, Pascal, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc... A large portion of the experiential portion of his education came through the summers spent in the villa of Monterrosso on the Ligurian coast. The stark, harsh, rocky, sun-baked edge of the Mediterranean became etched into the soul of the poet... providing both a physical and a mythical/psychological geographical setting.
Music was Montale's earliest passion and his teacher, Ernesto Sivori, considered him "extremely promising" in his training as an operatic vocalist. Sivori's death in 1923, and his father's opposition to the notion of a career in music led him to abandon his plans. Montale also realized that he lacked the single-minded focus to succeed as a musician: "I had other interests, and maybe I wasn't so dumb: to be a good singer requires a mixture of originality and stupidity."
The largest of these other "interests" was obviously poetry. Montale possessed a furious drive as an autodidact and a reader of world literature. Among his favorites were the French symbolist poets (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, Valery, etc...), the great poets of the Italian tradition: Dante, Guido Cavalcanti, Petrarch, Leopardi, Foscolo, Campana, and D'Annunzio, and among the English-language writers: Shakespeare, Browning, Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Henry James, and T.S. Eliot.
From the beginning Montale imagined a certain affinity with the efforts of T.S. Eliot. He too wished to bring a certain muscularity transcending the mannered, perfumed eloquence of Italian poetry of the time... the work of mandarins who deferred far to much to the authority of the Italian tradition... not unlike the worst examples of late Victorian poets against whom Eliot and the other Modernists struggled. At the same time, Montale wanted nothing to do with the notion of rejecting the tradition as put forth by the Futurists. he wished to embrace yet transcend this tradition: "I wanted to wring the neck of our old aulic language, even at the risk of counter-eloquence."
In a way, Montale imagined his own struggle not unlike those of Dante. Where Dante struggled to take what was largely considered a vulgar language (vulgari eloquentia) and infuse it with an eloquence, a poetry, a grandeur... Montale struggled with a language that in many ways had become too effete and florid. His means to this end included the use of colloquialisms and local dialects... but also a certain classical/Modernist starkness and a sort of "sprung rhythm" not unlike that of Hopkins.
The central core of Montale's oeuvre consists of the three brilliant volumes of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones (Ossi di seppia), the Occasions (Le occasioni), and The Storm (La bufera). Later volumes, including Satura ae certainly essential to gaining a total picture of the poet... but they are also often seen as satirical comments upon the great achievements of these three volumes.
Major elements among Montale's poetry include certain repeated images: the sun scorched Mediterranean coast, the sunflower, the cicada, the mirror, the ditch. Another major theme is the continual use of the poet's muse... an element that has guided Italian poetry across its entire history from Dante and Cavalcanti onward. Montale's muse continually evolves and metamorphoses... certainly building upon the experience of the poet's own lovers... but also alluding to the entire range of poet's muses from the Italian tradition: Cavalcanti's Mandetta, Dante's Beatrice, Petrarch's Laura, Leopardi's Silvia... even Shakespeare's Dark Lady. Still another element... as already suggested... is the poet's writing at the point of a veritable "cultural saturation"... His work can be so heavily layered with allusion and quotation (again, not unlike Eliot) that his work seems an echo chamber or "collage of borrowings". Again... like Eliot... Montale does not use such quotation to out of mere shallow deference to tradition or a desire to raise his own work through a connection with this tradition... but often as a means of illuminating his own contrast with this tradition.