Irma Brandeis' Translations of Montale

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

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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 . . .

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.

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.