Poetry Bookclub 2

[quasimodo1]

Your interpretation is more likely but mine gives Montale more credit for a wider view. I'll go with yours.

[JBI]

Your interpretation is more likely but mine gives Montale more credit for a wider view. I'll go with yours.

Don't; the poem is ambiguous, it can mean anything. I'm just making educated guesses; the poem could mean many other things..

[quasimodo1]

I'll look out on a land of untouched snows
But insubstantial, as if seen on a screen.
A slow ray will slide down from the cottony sky.
Woods and hills alive with invisible light
Will praise me for their joyful reoccurrence.
{Galassi's third stanza}



.................................................. .................................................. .................

Avro' di contro un paese d'intatte nevi
Ma lievi come viste in un arazzo.
Scivolera' dal cielo bioccoso un tardo raggio.
Gremite d'invisibile luce selve e colline
Mi diranno l'elogio degl'ilari ritorni.
{Montale's original Italian} This third stanza seems to me, unconnected to the others and in my almost non-existant knowledge of Italian...just evaluating some expressions word by translated word (and of course I'm using the Galassi translation) ... the most seems lost in translation. "A slow ray will slide down from the cottony sky." stands out from the text in several ways....the "slow ray" being light that defies the laws of physics and "from the cottony sky" is a more romantic (dramatic as well) expression then perhaps you find in the rest of the poem. The image produced is surreal and getting back to your historical placement...the line has a post-war feel, or post great -event feel to it. Again I see the whole poem going in a direction that is anything but fantasy.

[stlukesguild]

I think it would be unfair also to view this poem as just a collection of happy images, or of a Wordsworthian moment as seen in Wordsworth's Prelude and Tintern Abbey... probably influenced strongly by the symbolists, who were just finishing up.

I agree that it would be off to limit this poem to such a view. The fact that he presents the scene in anticipation of the event rather than in response to an actual "Wordsworthian" moment is quite different. Montale admits to having been deeply inspired by the Symbolists as well as Rilke. I certainly see much of that in this work. The images add up, to my reading, as something not unlike the work of many Symbolist poems... I'm thinking especially of Rimbaud's Illuminations... but also the more crystalline Modernist sound of Rilke.

[quasimodo1]

Stlukes has made a most cogent remark and in response let me admit after the denial...that I'm grasping on this one.

[quasimodo1]

Listen to me, the poets laureate
walk only among plants
with rare names: boxwood, privet and acanthus.
But I like roads that lead to grassy
ditches where boys
scoop up a few starved
eels out of half-dry puddles:
paths that run along the banks,
come down among the tufted canes
and end in orchards, among the lemon trees.
{first stanza of "The Lemons" translated by Galassi}

[Virgil]

Arrowsmith translates the first two stanzas this way:

ALMOST A FANTASIA

Daylight again, I sense it
in the dawning of old
silver on the walls:
a glimmer edges the shut windows.
The sun comes back
again, but brings
no diffused voices, no customary din.

Why? I think of a day of enchantment,
my reward for the pageant of hours
too much alike. In me the power
welling, unconscious wizard,
will overflow. Yes, I'll be standing at the window,
I'll overwhelm tall houses, treeless streets.
[SNIP]

There are two keys I think to this poem. First this: "In me the power/welling, unconscious wizard,/will overflow." It echoes Wordworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" the philosophic heart of Ramanticism. Second, is the shift in tense right after that sentence I just quoted. Before the sentence, Montale is in present tense and describing the scene deligently, especially highlighting the sun and daylight and the enchantment of day time as "pageant". After the sentence of the "power welling" Montale shifts into future tense, which is a conditional or imaginative situation. The imagination has taken over and induces all sorts of imaginative situations, of which i can't quite connect except to say they magnify the narrator's ego and inflate his feelings of power. I don't exactly know what Montale suggests by the various images or symbols, but I do see this poem coming from the Romantic tradition.

[Jozanny]

Although I am disrupting the remaining discussion, I am posting just to let the club members know I am stopping with the club for the time being. I am not very good at absorbing poets or experiencing them through posts. I did manage to get some sense of Roethke, but this process is too inchoate for me, as a poet myself.

I need time with poets and their work, not only to read it, but to hear it, age with it, as I have done with Dr. Creeley, and thus appreciate his experiments with compression.

Should I be a member on the forum long enough, I will return if or when a poet is nominated whom I feel confident about in offering analysis--and whose selection is, perhaps, less rushed in the making.

[Virgil]

Although I am disrupting the remaining discussion, I am posting just to let the club members know I am stopping with the club for the time being. I am not very good at absorbing poets or experiencing them through posts. I did manage to get some sense of Roethke, but this process is too inchoate for me, as a poet myself.

I need time with poets and their work, not only to read it, but to hear it, age with it, as I have done with Dr. Creeley, and thus appreciate his experiments with compression.

Should I be a member on the forum long enough, I will return if or when a poet is nominated whom I feel confident about in offering analysis--and whose selection is, perhaps, less rushed in the making.

I completely understand. If I didn't have the book, I couldn't do it either.

[Jozanny]

I completely understand. If I didn't have the book, I couldn't do it either.

It is more than having or not having a text Virgil, but I hope the book club continues and manages itself a little better, perhaps. I suppose it is a matter of coordination.

[quasimodo1]

To Joz: If it seems like I'm winging-it, i.e. the poetry bookclub, it's becasue I am. Always open to organizational suggestions. But you know that. In these days of poetry not just being in the cultural closet...but being in the back of that cluttered closet...well. any discussion is a plus. If the quality of that discussion can be improved in any way...please inform me. As for Montale, I think we'll finish up on "The Lemons" and start a new poet. I was hoping in my inimitably prejudiced way for Bishop.

[Jozanny]

quasi dear, no biggie if you are winging it; I in fact appreciate the exposure you've given me.

I cannot *wing it* tho, if I do not wish to come off like a posting imbecile. I don't have my doctorate like Petrarch, true, but I consider myself an accomplished author, if not an entirely successful one--and reading poetry worth reading is an investment I need the time to make--more for some poets than others, and Montale is the "more" here. Bishop would be the same, as her critical reputation is on the rise--and in this I do not merely parrot TNR, as she has been in the eddy of upward attention for a few years now.

I withdraw until I can find the time to focus, research, and *say* something choice. I can get away with bandying fiction round and about, but I cannot reduce good poetry to sound bite summaries.

I will message you later. Busy this week.

[quasimodo1]

OK THEN, your qualifications are noted. I still look forward to the occaisonal interruption.

[JBI]

We moving on to "Lemons"?

[stlukesguild]

Quasi... sorry I've been tied up lately. I should be able to throw together some thoughts tomorrow (too tired after a day at school followed by 5 hours in the studio) on Montale before we come to a close.