Eugenio Montale

The Lemon Trees

Hear me a moment. Laureate poets
seem to wander among plants
no one knows: boxwood, acanthus,
where nothing is alive to touch.
I prefer small streets that falter
into grassy ditches where a boy,
searching in the sinking puddles,
might capture a struggling eel.
The little path that winds down
along the slope plunges through cane-tufts
and opens suddenly into the orchard
among the moss-green trunks
of the lemon trees.

Perhaps it is better
if the jubilee of small birds
dies down, swallowed in the sky,
yet more real to one who listens,
the murmur of tender leaves
in a breathless, unmoving air.
The senses are graced with an odor
filled with the earth.
It is like rain in a troubled breast,
sweet as an air that arrives
too suddenly and vanishes.
A miracle is hushed; all passions
are swept aside. Even the poor
know that richness,
the fragrance of the lemon trees.

You realize that in silences
things yield and almost betray
their ultimate secrets.
At times, one half expects
to discover an error in Nature,
the still point of reality,
the missing link that will not hold,
the thread we cannot untangle
in order to get at the truth.

You look around. Your mind seeks,
makes harmonies, falls apart
in the perfume, expands
when the day wearies away.
There are silences in which one watches
in every fading human shadow
something divine let go.

The illusion wanes, and in time we return
to our noisy cities where the blue
appears only in fragments
high up among the towering shapes.
Then rain leaching the earth.
Tedious, winter burdens the roofs,
and light is a miser, the soul bitter.
Yet, one day through an open gate,
among the green luxuriance of a yard,
the yellow lemons fire
and the heart melts,
and golden songs pour
into the breast
from the raised cornets of the sun.



by Eugenio Montale
Translated by Lee Gerlach

The Dish on Anedda, Buffoni and Cavalli

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Italian Poetry, As It Lurks on the Internet and in Small Presses

*Several of the poets from this week are being translated into English by Italica Press (based in New York).

*The University of Delaware Press published this collection of Contemporary Italian Poetry in 2007 (not much detailed info out there on it).

*Linh Dinh presents Seven Contemporary Italian Poets (very recent feature from January 2009). In addition to poems in translation, the profile also includes an interview with poet Gherardo Bortolotti that I thought was worth reading. It touches on how American culture influences Italian writing (he also mentions American writers who are held in high regard there) and on current literary movements in Italy (appropriately, the American movement of Flarf/sought poetry has made its way over there via the internet... thanks, K. Silem Mohammad).

*Italian Poetry Today: New Ways to Break the Line, by Gianluigi Simonetti

*Some Recent Italian Poems, by Geoffrey Brock

*Here's a good selection of bios of contemporary Italian poets.

*Finally, I think this is a pretty awesome resource for all of us - it's a database of poetry in translation. In addition to reading the poetry in English, it's interesting to see who's being translated where, and how widely.