Books October 1986
The storm & all: a new look at Montale
A review of The Storm & Other Things by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by William Arrowsmith.
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...
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