Poetry Bookclub 2

Quote:

---

I think if you look at the Italian it's definitely meant as water. But there is a parallel between the squall of water and the birds.

---

Yep, it works better in Italian, just checked and it means whirlpool (should have known - vortex - a connection with vorticism? :p ) - so jays and sea come together from the start. By the way, I don't know if "s'abatte" is like the French "s'abattre", but it's more violent than just "swoops" - once again they're viewed as a bit of a threat, I have the impression.

I wonder like you why they're a couple...

Thanks for the list of birds, and have thought of two more: Baudelaire's albatros (a metaphor for the poet) and Saint John Perse.

I like Montale more and more!!!!

Quote:

---

Birds usually in literature from what I understand represent a poet, or poetic force. Perhaps that is what Montale is playing on?

---

Ah yes!

There is always the possibility that what Montale is relating is something he actually experienced... in which the question of why blue jays may simply be no unlike that which the poet felt upon the sudden shock... the sudden break in his focus upon the raging sounds of the sea as these two jays streak by. I also wonder whether the choice was coloristic... the white and the blue repeating the azure of the sea and the white of the sky. Again... just throwing out possibilities.

Looking at the notes Arrowsmith suggests that the poet's reverie... his concentration upon the sounds of the sea is broken from the start:

A squall
of antic fleering swoops
above my bent head...

I notice that I mis-copied the word fleering (or taunting) as fleeting. As I reread it it becomes a scene in which the poet's reveries... his meditations upon the sounds of the sea are broken by taunting sounds above his bent head. As the "scolding" ceases he looks up to see the jays streaking through the sky.

Time to explore another from Mediterranean:

“Noi non sappiamo quale sortiremo
domani, oscuro o lieto;
forse il nostro cammino
a non tócche radure ci addurrà
dove mormori eterna l’acqua di giovinezza;
o sarà forse un discendere
fino al vallo estremo,
nel buio, perso il ricordo del mattino.
Ancora terre straniere
forse ci accoglieranno: smarriremo
la memoria del sole, dalla mente ci cadrà il tintinnare delle rime.
Oh la favola onde s’esprime
la nostra vita, repente
si cangerà nella cupa storia che non si racconta!
Pur di una cosa ci affidi,
padre, e questa è: che un poco del tuo dono
sia passato per sempre nelle sillabe
che rechiamo con noi, api ronzanti.
Lontani andremo e serberemo un’eco
della tua voce, come si ricorda
del sole l’erba grigia
nelle corti scurite tra le case.
E un giorno queste parole senza rumore
che teco educammo nutrite
di stanchezze e di silenzi,
parranno ad un fraterno cuore
sapide di sale greco”

What tomorrow will bring, joyful
or somber, no one knows.
Our roads may take us
to clearings untrodden by human foot,
to whispering steams of eternal youth;
or perhaps a last descent
into that final valley,
all darkness, memory of light quite lost.
Foreign lands, perhaps
will welcome us once more; we will lose
the memory of our sun, our lilting rhymes
will be forgotten.
And the fable
that expresses our lives will suddenly become
that grim tale no man will ever tell.
Still, O father, one legacy
you leave us: some small part of your genius
lives on in these syllables we bear with us,
humming bees.
However far our journey, we will always keep
an echo of your voice, like the brown grass
in dark courtyards between the houses,
which never forgets the light.
And a day will come when those unvoiced words,
seeded in us by you, nourished
on silence and fatigue,
will, to some brotherly soul, seem seasoned
with salt-sea brine.

from Mediterranean
Cuttle Fish Bones
Eugenio Montale
tr. William Arrowsmith

I know I have not been around lately but I have been caught up in other things, and caught behind in the dicussion, but seeing a new poem posted, I thought I would try to get back into things again.

The poem is truly beautiful and makes use of such wonderful langauge. It has a very dream like quality to it.

Quote:

---

What tomorrow will bring, joyful
or somber, no one knows.
Our roads may take us
to clearings untrodden by human foot,
to whispering steams of eternal youth;
or perhaps a last descent
into that final valley,

---

I just love this passage. I find it to be very striking.

This while poem seems to be about the journey of man through his life, and the desire that everyone has to be remmemberd "immortalized" in some after they have gone. For something of them to still remain.

Quote:

---

you leave us: some small part of your genius
lives on in these syllables we bear with us,
humming bees.

---

These lines in particular struck me. Espcially the part about the humming bees.

Quote:

---

However far our journey, we will always keep
an echo of your voice, like the brown grass
in dark courtyards between the houses,
which never forgets the light.

---

This is another set of lovely images. The annlogy of the brown grass is truly quite wonderful.

The poem is just so very visual, you can really feel it, as if you could reach out and grab hold of it.

This is not on topic, Stlukes...but Italian vocabulary is way more impressive than I imagined. My provincial attitude wouldn't you know. Also, according to my translating tool...some of Montale's words just don't have a direct equivelant.

~ It's Rigged ~

It's rigged---everything in your favor.
So there is nothing to worry about.

Is there some position you want,
some office, some acclaim, some award, some con, some lover,
maybe two, maybe three, maybe four---all at once,

.maybe a relationship
with
God?

I know there is a gold mine in you, when you find it
the wonderment of the earth's gifts you will lay
aside as naturally as does
a child a
doll.

But, dear, how sweet you look to me kissing the unreal;
comfort, fulfill yourself in any way possible---do that until
you ache, until you ache,

then come to me
again. ...

by Jelaluddin Rumi
From Love Poems From God ,
translated by Daniel Ladinsky

sorry, i was not knowing the rules of this thread...however, how about including Rumi as well??

Arrowsmith in inimitable fashion, somehow inserts into his translation a sense of the romantic atmosphere and liquid sound of Montale's Italian. Montale supplies the honesty and sincerity without a bit of the maudlin and without any trace of being jaded...even in the sense of death as ultimate empty abyss following life except for a noble, poetic sentiment which will endure...."Still, O father, one legacy you leave us: some small part of your genious/ lives on in these syllables we bear with us/ humming bees."

sorry, i was not knowing the rules of this thread...however, how about including Rumi as well??

Yes... Rumi is certainly worth discussing. The Poetry Bookclub Thread, however, is focused upon the in-depth discussion of a single poet and/or book of poetry voted upon by the group as a whole. I would be more than interested in discussing Rumi if you were to post him in an original thread... or even if you placed him within the thread entitled Exempli Gratia: Classic Poetry where we post and discuss "classic" poems and poets.

Still, O father, one legacy
you leave us: some small part of your genius
lives on in these syllables we bear with us,
humming bees.

Again I am struck with the sense that the poet is speaking at once to the Mediterranean as a body of water... a landscape that has made a deep impression upon him ( "However far our journey, we will always keep
an echo of your voice..." ) but also symbolic. I imagine the Mediterranean... and all that entails to the poet (Homer, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi...) as also a father to the poet whose legacy is perhaps but just "some small part" of the whole of Mediterranean genius... like the humming of that sole single bee among the humming of the whole nest. Perhaps a Romantic... even fanciful interpretation on my part... but I greatly sense that Montale never limits his poems to a single simple "meaning".

This is not on topic, Stlukes...but Italian vocabulary is way more impressive than I imagined. My provincial attitude wouldn't you know.

So Dante WAS on to something...?:D

Unfortunately, Collected Poems 1920-1954, revised, bilingual edition, is translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi.....I sincerely hope this translator will not detract from my appreciation re: Arrowsmith's superior work....At least it is all inclusive.

Galassi's translations are also quite well respected. He may actually capture certain aspects of Montale's work that Arrowsmith doesn't. I simply prefer Arrowsmith... not least of all because he was the translator in whom I first encountered Montale.

The following statement on "Reading Montale" by Jonathan Galassi:

Excerpt from READING MONTALE

...What do Italian readers hear in Montale? I'm going to offer a response,

informed by my reading in his critics, though of course no one not born
into a language can truly know how poetry sounds to those for whom it was written.
First, I believe they hear a nervous, astringent music, one that asserts its individuality
in sharp contradistinction to the prevailing norms of its era. Instead of orotund
mellifluousness they encounter harshness and abruptness, enclosed in predominantly
short forms tending to the paratactic, which are often in themselves self-conscious
ironic reprises of traditional stanzas. They encounter a large, often arcane vocabulary which, in its restless search for expressive authenticity, employs rare words from sources ranging from the highly artificial and archaic to local dialect, frequently deployed in surprising conjunctions calculated to
"strike sparks." They find, as a rule, compressed expression and thematic reiteration
to the point of obsession, along with prodigious inventiveness in handling the inevitable,
even oppressive riches of Italian rhyme, and great variation in the use of the Italian
version if iambic pentameter-- the hendecasyllable-- which Montale alternates freely
with SETTENARI, OTTONARI, and NOVENARI, or seven-, eight-, and nine-syllable lines,
in his search for constant rhythmic variety, occasionally resorting to longer forms as he
experiments with his own kind of Hopkinesque "sprung rhythm." In sum, Italian readers of
Montale experience a restless will to reinvent, to renew the time-honored materials
of their poetry by submitting them to arduous contemporary challenges.