James Merrill's translations of Eugenio Montale appear in the Collected Poems, ed. J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser (New York: Knopf, 2002): 790-99.
"The House of the Customs Men" (with Ben Jonson)
"The Eel" (with Ben Jonson)
"New Stanzas" (with Ben Jonson)
"Cafe at Rapallo" (with Irma Brandeis)
"In the Greenhouse"
"In the Park"
"The Shadow of the Magnolia""The Blackcock"
The following poems were translated by Irma Brandeis for the special Montale issue of Quarterly Review of Literature (1962) that she guest edited.
News from Amiata
The fireworks of threatening weather
might be murmur of hives at duskfall.
The room has pockmarked beams
and an odor of melons
seeps from the store−room. Soft mists
that climb from a valley
of elves and mushrooms to the diaphanous cone
of the crest cloud over my windows
and I write you from here, from this table,
remote, from the honey cell
of a sphere launched into space−
and the covered cages, the hearth
where chestnuts are bursting, the veins
of saltpetre and mould, are the frame
where soon you will break through.
Life that enfables you is still too brief
if it contains you. The luminous ground
unfolds your icon. Outside it rains.
* * *
Could you but see the fragile buildings
blackened by time and smoke,
the square courtyards with their deep wells
at center; and could you see
the laden flight of the night birds
and, beyond the ravine, the twinkling
of the Galaxy that that soothes all wounds!
But the step that echoes long in the dark
is of one who goes alone and who see only
this fall of shadows, of arches and of folds.
The stars sew with too fine a thread,
the eye of the tower stopped at two,
even the climbing vines are an ascent of shadows,
and their perfume bitter hurt.
Return tomorrow, colder, wind from the north,
shatter the old hands of the sandstone,
overturn the books of hours in the sunrooms,
and let all be pendulum calm, dominion, prison of sense
which does not know despair! Return still stronger
wind from the north, wind that endears
our chains and seals the spores of the possible!
The paths are too narrow, the hooves of the back donkeys
clicking in file raise sparks,
from the hidden peak magnesium flares reply.
O the slow drip of rain from the dark shacks,
time turn to water,
the long colloquy with the poor dead, the ashes, the wind,
late−coming wind, and death, and death that lives!
* * *
The christian fracas which has no speech
other than shadows or laments,
what does it give you of me? Less
than was snatched from you by the tunnel
plunging gently into its casing of stone.
A mill−wheel, and old tree−trunk,
last boundaries of the world. A heap
of chaff blows off; and, venturing late,
to join my vigil to your deep sleep
that welcomes them, the porcupines
will sip at a thin stream of pity.
Quarterly Review of Literature. Montale Issue. 11.4: 263-64
The Lemon Trees
Listen; the poets laureate
walk only among plants
of unfamiliar name: boxwood, acanthus;
I, for my part, prefer the streets that fade
to grassy ditches where a boy
hunting the half−dried puddles
sometimes scoops up a meagre eel'
the little paths that wind along the slopes,
plunge down among the cane−tufts,
and break into the orchards, among trunks of the lemon−trees.
Better if the jubilee of birds
is quenched, swallowed entirely in the blue:
more clear to the listener murmur of friendly boughs
in air that scarcely moves,
that fills the senses with this odor
inseparable from earth,
and rains an unquiet sweetness in the breast.
Here by a miracle is hushed
the war of the diverted passions,
here even to us poor falls our share of riches,
and it is the scent of the lemon−trees.
See, in these silences
in which things yield and seem
about to betray their ultimate secret,
sometimes one half expects to discover a mistake of Nature,
the dead point of the world, the link which will not hold,
the thread to disentangle which might set us at last
in the midst of a truth.
The eyes cast round,
the mind seeks harmonizes disunites
in the perfume that expands
when the day most anguishes.
Silences in which one see
in each departing human shadow
some dislodged Divinity.
But the illusion wanes and time returns us
to our clamorous cities where the blue appears
only in patches, high up, among the gables.
The rain falls wearying the earth,
the winder tedium weights on the roofs,
the light grows miserly, bitter the soul.
When one day through a half−shut gate,
among the leafage of a court
the yellows of the lemon blaze
and the heart's ice melts
and songs
pour into the breast
from golden trumpets of solarity.
Quarterly Review of Literature. Montale Issue. 11.4: 219-20.
Portovenere
There leaps the Triton
out of waves that graze
the threshold of a christian shrine,
and every nearest hour
is old. Every uncertainty
lends you its hand,
as docile as a friendly child.
There are no-one's eyes and ears
are bent on self.
You stand at origins and can see
decision ill becomes the place.
You will leave presently
in order to assume a face.
Quarterly Review of Literature. Montale Issue. 11.4: 240.
House by the Sea
The journey's end is here;
in the wretched cares that cleave
a soul no longer able to cry out.
Now the minutes go fixed and equal
like the rounds of the pump-wheel.
One turn: a jet of water that resounds.
One more, more water; sometimes a creaking.
The journey's end is at this beach
which the persistent slow waves ply.
No veil but the slow haze lifts from the shore
which mild breaths weave with shells:
and seldom there appear
in the mute calm
among the migrabond islands of the air
humped Corsica or the Capraia.
You ask if all thus vanishes
in the brief mist of memories;
if in the drowsing hour in the sigh
of the breaker, all destinies are fulfilled.
I would choose to say no, say that the hour is near
which you shall spend beyond the rime of time.
Perhaps he, only, becomes infinite who wills it;
and this you may, who knows; not I.
I think that for the most there's no salvation;
but someone overturns each scheme,
cross the ford, contrives to be what he had wished.
How shall I show you before yielding this path of flight,
unstable as in the tumbled fields
of the sea, hollow or foam?
I offer you my miserly hope.
Weary, I cannot foster it towards new days;
I pledge it to your fate, that you may be released.
The road ends on these shores
gnawed by the interchanging tides.
Your near heart that does not hear me
perhaps even now casts off for the eternal.
Quarterly Review of Literature. Montale Issue. 11.4: 244-45.
From Motets
1
You know this: I must lose you once again, and cannot.
I move at gunpoint; every deed
assails me, every cry, even the salty breath
that spill up from the wharves
and makes for us the sombre Spring
of Sottoripa.
Country of ironwork and clustering masts
that forest upward in the dust of evening.
A long−drawn buzzing sound comes from the open,
scrapes like a nail against the pane. I hunt
the mislaid token, the one pledge you have
in grace.
And hell is certain.
3
Brine on the panes; united
forever and forever set apart
the invalids; and at the tales
the long soliloquies over the cards.
It was your exile. I recall mine, too,
recall the morning when I heard
crackling among the rocks
the ballerina bomb.
And the night rockets
lasted till dawn; as in a festival.
A rough wing has passed by, has grazed your hands;
in vain: your card is not yet played.
6
The hope even of seeing you again
forsook me;
and I asked myself whether upon this that cuts me off
from every sense of you, this screen of images
swarm the insignia of death or whether from the past
there yet may be on it, distorted and unstable,
some glimmering of yours.
(At Modena among the porticoes
a blazoned servant led along
two jackals on a leash.)
7
The black−white swooping
of the martins from telegraph pole to the sea
does not comfort your anguish on the pier,
nor bring you back where you no longer are.
Already the thick wild elderberry
perfumes the air; the drizzle thins.
If this clearing is a truce,
your dear threat destroys it.
8
Here is the sign; it is traced out
on the goldening wall;
a ragged fringe of palm−leaves
burned by the glittering of dawn.
The footstep that emerges
so light from the greenhouse
is not muffled by the snow, it is
still your life, blood of yours in my veins.
11
The soul that scatters
polka and rigadoon at each
new season of the street, feeds
upon secret passion, finds it
fresh at every turning, more intense.
Your voice is this pervasive soul.
On wires, on wings, in the wind, by chance,
begotten by the muse or some machine,
it comes back gay or sad. I talk of other things
with others, strangers to you; its scheme
is there, insisting do re la sol sol . . .
14
Does it storm hail or brine? There is a slaughter
of campanulas and the verbena is laid low.
Note of an underwater cymbal drifts in close
just as you struck it and recedes again.
The pianola of the people underneath
raise the register on its own; it mounts
into the spheres of frost.... it glitters
as you did when with a rill of air
you mimicked Lakmé in her air, the Bell Song.
16
The flower that repeats
from the edge of the crevasse
forget me not
has no tints fairer or more blithe
than the space tossed here between you and me.
A clank of metal gears puts us apart.
The stubborn azure fades. In a pall of air
grown almost visible, the funicular
carries me to the opposite stage. The dark is there.
Quarterly Review of Literature. Montale Issue. 11.4: 258-61.
The Toll−House
You have forgotten the tollkeeper' house
on the height where the rock sheers, on the ledges;
desolate, it awaits you since that evening
with the swarm of your thoughts came home there −
entered and stayed, irresolute.
Years now south wind has harried the old walls
and the sound of your laughter is no longer light:
the compass runs mad, as chance takes it,
and the throw of the dice falls always wrong.
You have forgotten; another time diverts
your memory; a thread is frayed.
I grasp the thread's end, still; but now the house
retreats and the smoke−grayed vane on the roof−top
whirls without pity in the wind.
I grasp it still, but you remain alone;
you do not breathe here in the silent dark.
O the horizon in flight that flares
now and again with the tanker's lamp!
Is the ford here? (The breaker still
seethes up against the reef and drops away . . .)
You have forgotten the house of this
my evening. And I do not know who stays or who departs.
Quarterly Review of Literature. Montale Issue. 11.4: 262
The Orchard
I do not know, messenger
in descent, whom my god cherishes
(yours too, perhaps), if in the crab-tree grove
where the fledgling wrens mourn
languishing at nightfall,
I do not know if in the orchard
where the acorns rain and where beyond the wall
the hornbeams shed their airy garlands and point out
the foamy border of the waves, a sail
between crowns of rock
submerged or darkblack or more gleaming
than the final star that breaks ---
I do not now whether your muffled step,
blind nightmare whereby from the day I saw you
I have grown toward death,
I do not know whether your step
that makes my veins throb
to its approach here in this labyrinth
is the same step that overtook me in another summer
before a gale grazing the upthrust peak of Mesco
shattered my mirror . . . .
I do not know whether the hand grazing my shoulder
is the same hand that once
at the celesta keyboard answered calls
from other nests and from a thicket long since burned.
The hour of torture and lament
that struck down on the world,
the hour you fore-read clear as though by book
fixing your hard crystal glance
full to the depths where acrid veils
of soot rising on flashes from the forge-room
barred from view
the handiwork of Vulcan,
the day of Wrath which more than once the cock
proclaimed unto the perjured,
did not divide you, undivided soul,
from the inhuman anguish, did not fuse you
within the cauldron, heart of amethyst.
O mute lips dry
from the long journey down the pathway made of air
that bore you, O limbs
I cannot tell apart from mine, O fingers slaking
the thirst of the dying and kindling those that live,
O purpose exceeding your own compass, having formed
the hands of the dial and expanding,
into human time, into human space, in rages
of incarnate demons, in brows of angels
sped down in flight . . . If the force
that turns the disc already cut
were another, your destiny bound up with mine
would show a single groove.
Quarterly Review of Literature. Montale Issue. 11.4:276-77.