The Occasions

by Eugenio Montale

Book Overview

Eugenio Montale's second book of poetry was first published in 1939. This book is his most experimental work, but a work no less tradition-saturated than Eliot's. As poet, private individual, and ""good European"," Montale's way of dealing with his difficulties was to seize the occasions offered him by writing poetry in which the lover's passions for his beloved country would convey the truth of both his public and his private situations.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393023168
• ISBN13: 9780393023169
• Release Date: December 1987
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 169 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Montale's second book of verse in a successful translation

Published in 1939, THE OCCASIONS (Le occasioni) was Eugenio Montale's second book of verse and the first to use the themes one would traditionally associate with this Italian poet. His first book of verse, CUTTLEFISH BONES, was inspired by the Ligurian landscape in which he grew up, and its poetry is mostly marked by experimentation in style and attention to the natural world. Afterwards, Montale moved to Florence, and in THE OCCASIONS his poetry has turned away from not just paeans to the Mediterranean shore to intensely personal and introspective poetry. For Montale had seen in a woman the absolute, and went immortalize her in this stunning work.In 1933 Eugenio Montale became acquainted with Irma Brandeis, a Jewish-American scholar of Italian literature (her work on Dante's Comedy, THE LADDER OF VISION, was acclaimed upon its appearance in the 1960's). He saw he only occasionally, but his few encounters with her captured his heart until his imagination of her ceased to be literal, and she became, like Beatrice to Dante, a redemptrix and mediatrix. The key part of THE OCCASIONS, the sequence of 21 poems called "The Motets" deals solely with "Clizia", as Montale called this ideal. The Motets have been called love poems, but there is no syrupy romanticism within them. Instead, they are metaphysical poems, in which Montale adores Clizia because he sees in her the divine. A common theme is departure or distance. In the first motet, "You know: I must leave you again...", the poet expresses his despair at another departure from his beloved. Montale's transcendental imagination of Clizia is shown its ending lines "I look for the lost/ sign, the only pledge I had of your/ grace. / And hell is certain."While the Motets traditionally have received the most attention, the other parts of THE OCCASIONS are also superb. In "Dora Markus", Montale muses on a Jewish woman he imagined at the seaside. She looks across the ocean at place that is her homeland but where she has never lived. Arrowsmith excellently translates Montale's sly irony in part as "Your restlessness reminds me/of those migratory birds that thump against the lighthouse/on stormy nights: /even your sweetness is a stoms/whose raging's unseen/whose lulls are even rarer." In "The Coastguard Station", one of his more popular poems and taught in many Italian schools, Montale reflects on a building that stands out in his memories of youth, but which his companion cannot remember.Among the several translations in English I prefer William Arrowsmith's. While Jonathan Galassi has published the more recent collection of translations of Montale and thus has received more attention lately, I believe that Arrowsmith's are stronger poetically. Galassi was dedicated towards translating above all else the meaning of Montale's poetry and trying to make his symbolism more penetrable for the reader in English, as a result the sound of his translation do not sound very poetic. Arrowsmith, on the other hand, was a g