Maybe during National Poetry Month we should be reading American poets. But this season, or actually during any season when changes in the weather seem to color every perception, I seek out Montale and Ungaretti, who write of storms, seas, warm nights, and landscapes of anticipation.
Ungaretti is the lesser known. An excellent Selected Poems, translated by Kenyon Review contributor Andrew Frisardi, came out in 2002. Ungaretti grew up in Alexandria speaking Italian and French and was influenced by Mallarme and Valery. As a young man he spent time in Paris, where he met Apollinaire, Picasso, and Max Jacob. To me, the best of his poetry has a penetrating quality. “June,” written in 1917 when Ungaretti was fighting in the First World War, is one of my favorites, long by column inch, but not by word count. Exquisite, cleanly written images do the work here when they’re working well. In stanza 11, the death of one lover’s eyes disappearing in the other’s is both rigorous — you can see the literal event, as eyes reflect, then do not reflect, eyes — and figuratively lovely. Notice the repeated transposition of the interior an exterior. The weather comes indoors (inside the transparent speaker’s consciousness) and vice versa.
June
When
will this night
die
so that I
can look at it
like another man
and fall asleep
to the swash
of waves that finish
their coiling
at the wall of black locusts
outside my house
When will I wake again
in your body
that varies its tones
like the call of the nightingale
It fades
like the luminous
color
of ripened
wheat
In the water’s
transparence
the golden tissue
of your skin will be frosted brown
You’ll be
like a panther
balanced
on the shrill
panels of air
At the moving
edges
of shadow
you’ll shed your leaves
Roaring
mute within
that dust
you’ll smother me
Then
you’ll half close your eyes
We’ll see our love lie down
like evening
Then at peace again
I’ll see
my pupils die
on the bitumen horizon
of your irises
Now
the clear sky
is closed like the jasmine
at this hour
in my native Africa
Sleep eludes me
I waver
at the corner of the road
like a firefly
Will this night
die in me?
—
Ungaretti also wrote very short poems, like this 1927 stunner:
Statue
Petrified youth,
O statue, O statue of the human abyss…
After so much journeying the great tumult
Wears down a reef
In whispers.
—
Montale is the more famous, being a Nobelist. My favorite translations are by Charles Wright in The Storm and Other Poems. There’s a lot to love, and again, sharp and unexpected visions. See, for example:
Seaside
The air rattles, the darkness is torn to shreds,
and the shadow you threw along the fragile
palisade curls up. Too late in the day
if you want to be yourself? The rat plops
from the palm, the lightning is on the fuse,
is on the long, long lashes of your look.
Again the poem is a kind of dialog between the internal and external, culminating finally in “a look,” that is simultaneously inside and outside the looker. Having an electric intent, the look comes from within the looker and, having long, long lashes, it’s a bella figura, worn by a beautiful face.