La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things), which appeared in 1956, was the third book that Eugenio Montale published and it affirmed his position as the leading poet of postwar Italy and perhaps the finest since Leopardi. Montale considered the work, the product of seventeen years, the peak of his career, the first expression of his authentic voice. The purpose of the poetry in this volume, in William Arrowsmith’s words, is “sympathetic magic, the accomplishment of an impossible miracle—poetry that can keep pace with, even contain, life itself. . . . these are love-poems, both personal and cosmological, without doubt the most remarkable sustained sequence of love-poems in Italian since Petrarch.” Now on the thirtieth anniversary of its appearance, it is fitting that we have a major new translation of a book which in the eyes of many won for Eugenio Montale the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.[1]

La bufera is indeed a treasure, but its secrets are not easily unlocked. In their study Eugenio Montale, subtitled The Private Language of Poetry(1977), Guido Almansi and Bruce Merry have summed up the problem: “[It] . . . is one of the hardest and most unmanageable books in modern literature. Time and time again even the most devoted reader, well familiar with the intractable texts, is defeated by the arbitrariness of the image, the constant shift from dream to reality, the jump from one place or time to another, the privacy of the