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Eugenio Montale's “Motets”: The Occasions of Epiphany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Glauco Cambon
Glauco Cambon*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N. J
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Extract

The centrality of the twenty “Mottetti” to Montale's decisive second book, Le Occasioni (1939), has been noted by such critics as Ettore Bonora and Silvio Ramat. Despite their probings, however, much remains to be done towards an organic understanding of this remarkable series of poems. Since this part of Montale's work relates to much else he has written before and after, I shall not attempt to isolate it from the rest of the Occasioni book, but merely to keep my focus on what is after all a kind of book within the book. A tighter unity prevails among the “Motets” than among the other poems in the volume, both because the former all turn on the constant of love for Clizia in the variations of worldly vicissitudes, and because they match this thematic constancy by a relative constancy of form.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 7 , December 1967 , pp. 471 - 484
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 Ettore Bonora, La poesia di Montale, Vol. ii: Le Occasioni, La Bufera e altro (Torino: Editrice Tirrenia, 1965); Silvio Ramat, Montale (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1965), pp. 99–117.

2 Montale said this in “Intenzioni, intervista immaginaria” (“Intentions, an Imaginary Interview”), first published in La Rassegna d'Italia, i, i (1946), and then reprinted by G. Spagnoletti in his anthology, Poesia italiana contemporanea (Parma: Guanda, 1959).

3 Walter J. Ong, S. J., “Evolution, Myth, and Poetic Vision,” CLS, iii, i (1966), 1–20.

4 Supplementary, if rather indirect, evidence for this view might come from a statistical inquiry recently conducted on Montale's vocabulary, which shows him to have a significantly larger spectrum of usage, and thus a richer lexicon, than the “neoclassical” type of modernist poet like Valéry (or the Ungaretti of the neopetrarchan phase). Dante's rich lexical range was one important differentiating factor vis-à-vis Petrarch's stylizing selectivity. The lexicological essay in question is “Consistenza e distribuzione statistica del lessico poetico di Montale,” in the Bologna magazine, Rendiconti, No. 11–12 (Sept. 1965), pp. 397–421, by Luigi Rosiello.

5 Le poetiche del Novecento in Italia (Milan: Marzorati, 1962), pp. 204–214. See also the same author's extensive preface to Anceschi-Antonielli, Lirica del Novecento (Firenze: Vallecchi, 1953–63).

6 The relevance of this particular reference to the present context becomes even more obvious when we consider that Montale published, in Il Baretti of 15 Jan. 1925, an article called “Stile e Tradizione” whose closeness to Eliot's “Tradition and Individual Talent” is not just a matter of titles; that Montale translated “La Figlia che Piange” plus two of the Ariel poems (“A Song for Simeon” in the Dec. 1929 issue of the magazine Solaria, “La Figlia che Piange” for the American issue of the magazine Circoli in 1933, and “Animula” in the Eliot issue of L'Immagine, i, Nov.-Dec. 1947, all to be later included in his 1948 Quaderno di Traduzioni, Milan: La Meridiana), while Eliot himself, after seeing Mario Praz's translation of Montale's “Arsenio,” published it in The Criterion in 1928 (vii, iv, 54–55). This translation is now reprinted in Eugenio Montale, Selected Poems (Norfolk, Va.: New Directions, 1966). The first meeting of the two poets, prompted by their simultaneous recognition of an artistic affinity, took place in Florence in 1929. Montale also wrote two significant articles on Eliot: “Eliot e noi” in the quoted issue of L'Immagine, pp. 261–264, and “Invito a T. S. Eliot” in Lo Smeraldo, iii (30 May 1950), 19–23. In T. S. Eliot, a Symposium (London, 1948), there is an outstanding essay by Mario Praz on the affinities of the two poets. Although this affinity seems to rest on their common “wasteland” motif, Montale came to Eliot's Wasteland only after reading the Ariel poems. Both poets, finally, are in an avowedly Dantesque line of tradition-minded modernism.

7 La poesia di Montale, pp. 106–107.

8 Bonora, ibid., thinks of the flag customarily hoisted on Ligurian boats for their races, so popular in Montale's native region; but by semantic attraction to the heraldic image of St. George and the dragon this reader is led to merge that plausible denotation of the boat flag with the connotation of a medieval tournament.

9 Die Struktur der modernen Lyrik (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1956).

10 “Due poesie contemporanee,” Comunità (Aug. 1954), pp. 49–52.

11 Come 'l ramarro sotto la gran fersa dei dì canicular, cangiando siepe, folgore par se la via attraversa, (Inf. xxv. 79–81)

12 Cf. Par. xviii.35–36:

quello ch'io nomerò, lì farà l'atto
che fa in nube il suo fuoco veloce,

and Par. iii. 127–129:

e a Beatrice tutta si converse;
ma quella folgorò ne lo mio sguardo
sì che da prima il viso non sofferse;

13 Ramat, p. 114, points out that in the original Einaudi edition of Le Occasioni (1939) the apocalyptic reference was explicit: “un cielo di lavagna / si prepara all'irrompere dei tre / cavalieri! Salutali con me.” Ramat regrets the subsequent change as “calligraphic” and also because, by eliminating Clizia as the addressee of the utterance, it isolates the poem from the rest of the sequence. My interpretation might account for the change and its option for an implicit image.

14 See Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe (Zürich: Artemis-Verlag, 1948), pp. 48–49: “Alle meine Gedichte sind Gelegenheitsgedichte, sie sind durch die Wirklichkeit angeregt und haben darin Grund und Boden [Goethe speaking].”