“Galassi’s extending grasp of the figure he has translated anew with such effective tenacity includes a wide range of the intricate Italian scholarship and criticism of Montale (already an academic cottage industry: neither a communist nor a Catholic nor a fascist, the poet affords his ambitious exegetes a riot of good clean fun).”—Richard Howard, Los Angeles Times“[A] superb translation . . . If one of the functions of a poem is to offer an alternative to dominant ways of thinking and feeling within a society, and even on occasion to offer an alternative to its own alternatives, then Montale’s Collected Poems 1920-1954 is poetry of an unignorable kind.”—Nicholas Jenkins, The New York Times Book Review“A brilliant afterword . . . offers the best short account I have yet come across of the nature, import, and elusive content of Montale’s work. Above all [Galassi] has a firm grasp of its extraordinary inter-connectedness both inside itself and within Italian and European culture as a whole . . . Excellent.”—Tim Parks, The New York Review of Books “[A] superb translation . . . If one of the functions of a poem is to offer an alternative to dominant ways of thinking and feeling within a society, and even on occasion to offer an alternative to its own alternatives, then Montale’s Collected Poems: 1920-1954 is poetry of an unignorable kind.”—Nicholas Jenkins, The New York Times Book Review
“Galassi has lived with these poems, studied Montale’s prose, his letters and notebooks, studied the Italian critics who have commented on the poems lovingly (and learnedly), and he’s given his readers the benefit of his own long absorption.”—Robert Hass, The Washington Post Book World
“Galassi is that rarity, a translator of verse who almost totally effaces himself as an intermediary between poet and reader . . . His versions succeed so consistently because Galassi treats the originals as coherent wholes; he is alert to their shifts of cadence and he strives to recreate what might be called their prosodic argument, that syllabic counterpoint or accompaniment to the sense of the words . . . With this plump but amiable tome in hand . . . it is finally possible for English readers to immerse themselves wholly in Montale’s private universe.”—Eric Ormsby, Parnassus: Poetry in Review
“Splendid . . . [A] generous, illuminating selection of the poet’s total product has been wisely chosen, sensitively translated, and brilliantly annotated. How many young (and old) American readers will this handsome new publication introduce to the great poet? A large number, I should guess . . . Galassi does not just translate the poems; he gives them a shape, a context, a history. His copious, informed notes are as irresistably readable as his afterword and leave no textual stone unturned.”—William Weaver, The Yale Review
Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896. His work was read by many as symbolic of resistance to Fascism; eventually, he was widely acknowledged as the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi. Montale was also a voluminous writer of prose—stories and cultural, literary, and music criticism—and a talented amateur painter. he was awarded the Nobel Prizr in Literature in 1975 and died in Milan in 1981.Jonathan Galassi has also translated and edited Montale's selected essays, The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays, and Otherwise: Last and First Poems, and his edition of Giacomo Leopardi's Canti appeared in 2010. He is also the author of three volumes of poems, Morning Run, North Street, and Left-Handed. He lives in New York and is president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets.
Eliza Griswold reads Eugenio Montale's poem "Syria," translated by Jonathan Galassi.
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