{"id":2069,"date":"2018-09-11T16:26:05","date_gmt":"2018-09-11T16:26:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2069"},"modified":"2018-09-11T16:26:05","modified_gmt":"2018-09-11T16:26:05","slug":"review-eugenio-montale-xenia-transl-mario-petrucci","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2069","title":{"rendered":"Review – Eugenio Montale, Xenia, transl. Mario Petrucci"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eugenio Montale<\/strong>, transl. Mario Petrucci<\/strong>, Xenia<\/em>, Bilingual Italian \/ English, 84 pp, \u00a39.99, Arc Publications<\/p>\n

Twenty-eight poems, some only two or three lines long, addressed to his dead wife by a poet in his late sixties and early seventies; Montale\u2019s Xenia<\/em> makes an approachable and moving introduction to this great but difficult poet. The Italian originals are beautifully presented in this book from Arc, though notes would have been helpful.<\/p>\n

My feelings about Petrucci\u2019s versions are ambivalent.\u00a0 He presents the first poem like this:<\/p>\n

Dear little insect
\nthey called \u2013 I don\u2019t know why \u2013 fly<\/em>,
\nthis evening on the brink of dark
\nwhile I was reading Deutero-Isaiah
\nyou recomposed, right here, beside:
\nbut had no glasses
\ncouldn\u2019t see me
\nnor could I, without their spark,
\ntell you from murk.<\/p>\n

“Mosca” – Montale’s wife’s nickname – means “Fly” in Italian.<\/p>\n

Reading that aloud, you\u2019ll see how well he\u2019s used phrase lengths and breathing pauses to write something that flows swiftly, easily and expressively off the tongue. I admire the way his \u201cwhy\u201d \/ \u201cfly\u201d rhyme creates a dramatic, incredulous emphasis on \u201cfly\u201d and I\u2019m sure many readers will like the effect. To me, though, this jazzy, energetic, extravert style seems at odds with the tone and feeling of the original, which hovers between tenderly intimate address to \u201cMosca\u201d and meditative self-communing. Said in such a way, by a man addressing an absent presence, feeling her in his imagination but sadly aware that she now exists only there, the words \u201cStasera quasi al buio\u201d (\u201cthis evening, almost in the dark\u201d) become poignant because of the simplicity with which they present an image of the poet\u2019s twilit loneliness, suggesting both the desolation of bereavement and his own approaching death.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a different problem in line 5: the sheer unnaturalness of the intransitive \u201crecomposed\u201d and the lack of a noun or pronoun to follow \u201cbeside\u201d. The Italian \u201csei ricomparsa accanto a me\u201d literally just means \u201cyou reappeared beside me\u201d. Perhaps that didn\u2019t seem emphatic enough to Petrucci, but to me the beauty of these poems lies in the quietness with which Montale allows his subtleties and complexities of meaning to emerge.<\/p>\n

Such problems recur. There are also a number of clear misrepresentations of the sense of individual statements, presumably for deliberate effect. Overall, Petrucci\u2019s Xenia<\/em> versions are livelier in style than the translations by William Arrowsmith and Kate Hughes but they\u2019re much freer. They\u2019re enjoyable in themselves and interesting as a take on the original, and they won a PEN Translates award in 2016, but I\u2019d recommend Arrowsmith or Hughes to someone wanting the English text as an aid to closer engagement with the Italian.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom for permission to post this review originally published in The North 60<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eugenio Montale, transl. Mario Petrucci, Xenia, Bilingual Italian \/ English, 84 pp, \u00a39.99, Arc Publications Twenty-eight poems, some only two or three lines long, addressed to his dead wife by a poet in his late sixties and early seventies; Montale\u2019s Xenia makes an approachable and moving introduction to this great but difficult poet. The Italian […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[131,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eugenio-montale","category-mario-petrucci"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2069"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2071,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2069\/revisions\/2071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}