Poetic Diaries 1971 and 1972 - Softcover

Montale, Eugenio

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393344193 ISBN 13: 9780393344196

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012

Synopsis

Poetic Diaries 1971 and 1972 is one of the Nobel Prize–winning poet Eugenio Montale’s final works, and it reveals the last act of the twentieth-century master to be one of splendid negation.

Poetic Diaries 1971 and 1972 is ruled by a brusque economy, and Montale’s is, here, a poetics of magnificent reduction. The poet meditates on the very conditions of his art: language reveals itself to be madness, and poetry a broken promise. The Muse has become a scarecrow: “She still has / one sleeve, with which she conducts her scrannel / straw quartet. It’s the only music I can stand.” And yet music it is, and time and time again Montale attains a contrarian grandeur that renews faith in the art he punishes. These poems are dense and dramatic, evasive and erotic and vividly alive.

About this title

About the Author:

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.

William Arrowsmith was a renowned translator and classics scholar.

Rosanna Warren, the author of four collections of poetry, has received awards from the Academy of Arts and Letters and has won the Lamont Poetry Prize. She teaches at the University of Chicago and lives in Chicago.

Review:

“Dry and luminous, sharp-edged and visionary. . . . William Arrowsmith’s translations [are] as tough, delicate, and unsentimental as the originals.”
- Rachel Hadas

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0393344193
• ISBN 13: 9780393344196
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240
• Editor: Warren Rosanna