Ossi di Seppia (#HYH25)

Eugenio Montale in his office at the Corriere della Sera

The Agave on the Reef: Sirocco

O rabid sirocco

gale that burns

the parched land's yellowgreen;

and in the sky alive

with pale lights

a few cloud columns pass

and are lost.

Worried hours, vibrations

of a life that flees

like water through the fingers;

unsnared events,

light-shadows, shakings

of the wobbling things of earth;

oh arid wings of air

today I am

the agave that takes root

in the crevice of the rock

and in the algae's arms escapes the sea

that opens its huge jaws and mouths the boulders;

and in the ferment

of every essence, with my furled-up buds

that no longer explode, today I feel

my rootedness as torment.

 

-Eugenio Montale (tr. Jonathan Galassi)

 

Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa, Liguria, Italy in 1896 to a well-to-do family, and died in Milan in 1981. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1975.

 

His first book of poems was titled Ossi di Seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones") and came out in 1925. Since cuttlefish are a marine invertebrate, a relative to squid and octopus, you might not think they have bones, but what they have is an internal shell, called a cuttlebone in English, osso di seppia in Italian, which they use to control buoyancy. After the cuttlefish dies, these cuttlebones wash up on shore. Montale called his poems ossi, 'bones' suggesting that they were things he found on the Ligurian coast.

 

'The Agave on the Reef' is the first in a series of three poems (I've only typed the one) about winds of the region. The sirocco is the hot wind from Africa; the second poem names the tramontane, the cold wind that blows down over the Alps; the third is the mistral (maestrale in Italian) from the northwest that blows in all that wonderful sunny weather on to the French and Italian riviera. 

 

Montale wrote many more books of poetry, some published abroad during the Fascist era, translations from English, French, and Spanish, and after the war was a regular columnist for the venerable Milan paper Corriere della Sera.

 

I read it in the bilingual edition from Farrar, Strauss that came out in 1998 with translations and notes by Jonathan Galassi:

The Italian:

 

L'agave su lo scoglio

 

Scirocco

 

O rabido ventare di scirocco

che l'arsiccio terreno gialloverde

bruci;

e su nel cielo pieno

di smorte luci

trapassa qualche biocco

di nuvola, e si perde.

Ore prepesse, brividi

d'una vita che fugge

come acqua tra le dita;

inafferrati eventi,

luci-ombre, commovimenti

delle cose malferme della terra;

oh alide ali dell'aria

ora son io

l'agave che s'abbarbica al crepaccio

dello scoglio

e sfugge al mare da le braccia d'alghe

che spalanca ampie gola e abbranca rocce;

e nel fermento

d'ogni essenza, coi miei racchiusi bocci

che non sanno più esplodere oggi sento

la mia immobilità come un tormento.

 

-Eugenio Montale

 

Galassi reproduces the alliteration of the Italian in 'alide ali dell'aria' but doesn't do much with Montale's rhymes. It's easier to rhyme Italian than English, but I do feel it's a loss: the Italian ends on a rhymed couplet which adds a weight that's not quite there in English. 

 

Embarrassingly enough, I started reading Ossi di Seppia in October for the 1925 Club, but only finished it now. Well, I did try to read the Italian first. Fortunately there's still Neeru's Hundred Years Hence challenge, running until the end of the year, which I will squeak in on: