An Italian poet of my generation once remarked that Montale had long seemed old-hat to his contemporaries in Italy, who simply wanted to move on. Less important in their relegation of the master was Montale's conservatism, disgust with mass culture, bleak outlook on the prospects for the making of poetry, and great intensities of direct address in the major poems. The younger poets stepped around all of this, including Montale's charged address to a you.

Which is understandable: defeated by the Alps in front of him, a youngster may wish to shift his ground. But this pronomial stratum keeps glinting from the mountain. While the pronouns You and I may be topical now among our literati, they disturb no one's sleep, whereas for Paul Valery, Gottfried Benn, or Montale they were of great moment. Against the pressures of a collapsing civilized order and his own melancholy pessimism, Montale found ways to address a tu, a screen lady with several faces, whose figure let him constellate his own inner workings alongside the themes of his survival. This discovery, along with sharply lived details within an allegorical frame, lent his work enormous power. Since that power is densely specific, and also tightly unifies the first three books (Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, and The Storm, Etc.), Jonathan Galassi adds an essay, "Reading Montale," to his version of them. He nicely shows that Montale not only avoided being eaten alive by the tu-tradition of Petrarca and Dante but finally ended by "devouring it himself," and claiming that "'tradition is continued not by those who want to, but by those who can."' Galassi specifies Montale's mode of strength, however-and rightly-as "suspicious, off-center, often parodic," and finally depleting; an acid scepticism towards Italian lyric marks Montale's late work (which Galassi translated in Otherwise, Vintage, 1984, alongside Montale's essays in The Second Life of Art, Ecco, 1982).

I would qualify Galassi's remarks in only one respect. His belief that Montale's poetry "not only set the course of twentieth-century Italian verse but also [has] had an increasingly resonant influence on our own" overestimates us. With all due respect to Charles Wright (Montale's translator), Alan Williamson, and a few other American poets, the resonance which carries to Galassi's ear I fail to register. We have not had Montale's history lesson, we lack his powers, and we do not eat allegory for breakfast. Those of us who have tried to address a you in a some non-collective way (that is, in a manner not simply casually intimate or familial) find his actual influence to be, like his field of meanings, in American terms untypical. This view may seem too astringent to many, yet while many may go for a stroll in Montale's garden, they will find their host, when they encounter him, somewhat remote. Montale acknowledged initiation only into individuality, the fated kind which tries to ride passion's agonistic hope of redemption beyond solipsism's gravitational pull (in "Times at Bellosguardo": "sweat that throbs, sweat of death,/ mirrored acts and minutes/ that never change"). That I-You tension generates force, not simply our current fascinations with the poststructuralist Other. At the latter Montale would have smiled, as I infer from "Time and Times II," translated by Galassi in Otherwise.

There was a he with a weight, a sound, maybe a soul, and, who knows how, a destiny ahead. Now we need to be told: You're you in some rare cases, for to distinguish ourselves we need someone else, who with subtle artifice we suppose to be different, other than us, a scandal!

My narrow preference for Galassi's versions I can show by examining "On the Greve," from The Storm Etc. This nine-line poem about the full experience of love condenses into one throw Montale's typical moves: swift suggestions and expansions, ellipses, and glimpses of heraldic particulars. Arrowsmith's rendering interpolates a personal pronoun before acqua, where none is implied by Montale. Arrowsmith also improvises a neologism, glissando, to match the invented glissato, whereas Galassi settles for an extant term which sparkles in his most resonant line, a line in which the participle smoothly achieves what Arrowsmith's more angular syntax does not. All in all, Galassi's translation yields a more attractive poem in English. Though Galassi cannot match Arrowsmith's tonal best, his hand is often steadier.

Sulla GreveOra	non ceno solo con lo sguardo
	come quando al mio fischio ti sporgevi
	e ti vedevo appena. Un masso, un solco
	a imbuto, il volo nero d'una rondine,
	un coperchio sul mondo...
	E m'è pane quel boccio di velluto
	che s'apre su un glissato de mandolino,
	acqua il frùscio scorrente, il tuo profondo
	respiro vino.

The arrival of this second full-dress Montale in English suggests to me that it is time to stop translating him, at least for now. The effort that one translator puts forth to avoid the gestures made by his strongest antecedents begins to obtrude itself. Let me illustrate by way of "Hitler Spring" from The Storm, Etc. The golfo mistico acceso / e pavesato di croci, into which Hitler and Mussolini vanish in their auto cavalcade through Florence, George Kay many years ago left intact ("a mystic gulf lit / and hung with crosses"), while Arrowsmith upped the ante ("a Hellmouth yawned, lurid, /draped with hooked crosses") and Galassi has been induced to attempt a trump with "an orchestra pit, / firelit and arrayed with swastikas." It won't do, this round-robin, if only because in this case Montale's golfo mistoco remains suggestive, neither medieval-Christian nor Wagnerian, but also because a latecomer in the game tends to underplay his hand so as not to duplicate his predecessor's tricks. The anomalous white moths dying on the banks of the Arno in this powerful poem are phrased pungently by Arrowsmith, who jumps things up only once (larve become ghosts). What then must Galassi do?

Arrowsmith:	a loathesome shindy of shattered wings,
	ghosts on the wet mud, water gnawing
	at the banks, and no one's guiltless anymore
Galassi:	a foul Virginia reel of shattered wings,
	larvae on the sandbars, and the water rushes in
	to eat the shore and no one's blameless anymore.

The internal rhyme in that last line, not Montale's and in any case problematic, may be the tell-tale of concerns which, consciously or not, have diluted a primary response to the Italian. All praise to the traduttori-but let them also rest for awhile.