In a fecund month of new translations, our editors select two phenomenal titles: a collection of the later poems by the acclaimed Eugenio Montale, and an intimate epistolary fiction leading readers to a seldom-seen region of Colombia.
Late Montale by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by George Bradley, New York Review Books, 2024
Review by Danielle Pieratti, Poetry Editor
“The world exists,” declared Eugenio Montale in the poem “Wind and Flags” from his first book, Cuttlefish Bones, published in 1925 (translated by Jonathan Galassi). Given the frank, existential agnosticism that governs the poet’s later work, it feels a little like whiplash to return to this otherwise characteristically subtle poem after reading Late Montale. Translated from the Italian by George Bradley, this collection comprises Montale’s published and unpublished poems from the second half of his life, offering glimpses of the poet first in the period of his Nobel win and later, as an increasingly reflective and skeptical widower. Yet ultimately, Montale seems to arrive where he began. “Unarguably / something must exist,” he writes in an unpublished poem at the end of his life,
But with [regard to] this,
science, philosophy, theology (red or black)
have all misfired.If this isn’t faith,
O men of the altar or the microscope,
then go f. yourselves.
Given that these works range from the 1960s to his death in 1981, the fact that Montale circles back to this revelation bears noting. While his underlying ironies and symbolism persist, there’s a definitive “shift from formality to intimacy and self-revelation,” Bradley writes in his introduction, which “parallels the course of twentieth century poetry as a whole”. In poems taken from Satura, first published eight years after the 1963 death of his wife Drusilla Tanzi, Montale retains his characteristic imagery and density, but his focus has drifted from the tangible nature symbolism of his earlier works to more abstract questions of grief befitting an older poet experiencing loss. Many of the poems speak to memory and to individuals from Montale’s past, including several from two long sequences addressed to Tanzi. Others allude frequently to Montale’s former life as an opera singer. Indeed, the tension between then and now pervades Late Montale, and the poet’s apparent scorn for the passing of time lends a hint of tragedy to poems increasingly pensive and raw. “We were two lives too young to be old but too old to feel we were young,” he writes to Tanzi in “Lake Sorapis, 40 Years Ago”, which ends:
That’s when we learned what aging is.
Nothing to do with time, it’s something that tells us,
that makes us tell ourselves: “Here we are,
it’s a miracle and won’t come again.” By comparison
youth is the most contemptible of illusions.
The poems of Four Year Notebook, published after the poet was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975, elaborate more spontaneously on the passage of time, as well as the failure of history, science, philosophy, and even lyric to meaningfully document experience. In “The Black-Cap that Wasn’t Killed”, Montale muses on the inadequacy of narrative constructs. “Where will they take refuge then, these stray / bits of gossamer?” he asks of the bird’s life. “There exists no science, / philosophy, theology that concerns itself with them”.
Montale’s verses shed artifice as the collection proceeds. Part 1 of Other Poems (published in 1980 and the only book featured unabridged here) is made up primarily of brief, untitled pieces that are also increasingly extemporaneous and cynical, at times to humorous effect. “If the universe was born,” for example, features a recurring big-bang motif along with the poet’s characteristic self-deprecation:
If the universe was born
from a puff of gas
a puff not a soup, then how … but here the hand lets drop
the quill pen taken from a swan
which, albeit anachronistically,
is thought suitable to a poet.
Part 2 returns to a narrative style with poems like “Nixon in Rome”, one of several in which Montale recollects his experience as a literary celebrity. While these feel more stylistically analogous with his earlier work, they equal his other late pieces in their frankness, plunging even more deeply into existential doubt and cultural critique. In the poem “In Doubt,” Montale begins, “I was addressing a discourse / to the ‘Friends of Cacania’ / on the subject of ‘Is Life Probable?’ / when I remembered / I was agnostic regarding all things”.
The final section of Late Montale, “The House in Olgiate and Other Poems”, is devoted to a series of handwritten poems never published in Montale’s lifetime. Many provide glimpses of Montale’s creative process—in some cases returning to ideas or lines the poet was likely sampling for future work. Of these, the majority are untitled, brief musings that range from mournful and sardonic to humorously playful. Several stand out as more refined, such as the opening poem “The House in Olgiate”, a lament on memory, childhood, and loss which ends with the devastating lines: “now your longed-for Friuli home looms large, / that threshing floor where your childhood exploded / into the future and was already flying away”. “Time and space, two unlivable / houses,” he writes later, recapitulating the futility in any attempts to recreate the past, including his own.
In “The New Art”, one of the final, titled poems in Late Montale, Montale considers his legacy; “Art proclaims its genius by destroying itself”, he writes,
a handful of zabaglione tossed
at random on a canvas and the job is finished.
These aren’t laughable creations, they’re the only
ones telling the truth.
But which one?
They have a right to exist
like humans or other animals.
P.S.–And very little deserves laughter.
I did a pretty good job myself.
Such poems underscore his ambiguity regarding the literary world and his role in it, offering the poet’s range of complex self-revelation in sharp relief. Indeed, one of the great merits of this collection is the narrative developed by its thoughtful curation, which presents selected poems from Satura, Diary of ‘71 & ‘72, and Four Year Notebook as a kind of stylistic and thematic introduction to the book’s main acts: the unabridged Other Poems and “The House in Olgiate and Other Poems”. Bradley’s translation deftly manages the stylistic and tonal range of poems spanning more than two decades, composing a voice that is both distinct and consistent with Montale’s earlier work. In all, Late Montale contributes unanticipated layers to Montale’s life and legacy, adding necessary dimension that sheds new light on this master poet’s extensive and influential body of work.
Tidal Waters by Velia Vidal, translated from the Spanish by Annie McDermott, Charco Press, 2024
Review by Sarah Gear, Assistant Interview Editor
Tidal Waters is rooted in Velia Vidal’s love for her home region of Chocó, a “great jungle between two seas” in north-western Colombia. The intimate novel is composed entirely of letters written to a man who remains unknown to us, in which Vidal describes elements of her daily life—and most pivotally her efforts to launch Motete, a program to promote reading and literature. Through these messages, she explores questions of identity, poverty, and racism, all while asserting her passion for—and her inexorable link with—her home.
To understand the need for Motete, as well as the difference it makes to the children and teachers it reaches, it is important to know a little more about Chocó itself. Details of the region emerge relatively slowly from Vidal’s letters—more gleaned than overtly expressed. However, she includes her inaugural speech for the literary festival FLECHO (Fiesta de la Lectura y la Escritura del Chocó), which provides an illuminating description of the region:
[Chocó is] one of the most biodiverse corners of the world, which finished off its beauty with a huge historic mistake: slavery, a mistake we find painful and condemn, but which, in the long run, has allowed us to complete the circle of biodiversity and given this place, already so rich in nature, the good fortune to be inhabited not solely by indigenous people, but also by mixed-race mestizos and direct descendants of Africa. All three, on coming together here, in this land of water and rain, seas and humidity, were fertilised and gave rise to a particular culture: the culture of Chocó.
Vidal’s identity as an Afro-Colombian woman, as well as her connection to the wider Afro-Latin American community, is one of the key motivations of her project—though again, it is rarely stated directly. But this speech, which comes towards the end of the book, confirms that questions of race, poverty, and identity are the catalyst behind her decision to dedicate her life to launching Motete, stating: “Our exclusion from the racist, centralised Colombia that turns its back on Chocó made our stories into something unimportant.”
While this 2018 speech is clear, driven, and directed, Vidal’s letters reveal the organic growth of Motete, which began as a seed of an idea in 2015. One witnesses this project—which will ultimately be clearly effective and impactful on the local community—emerge during this correspondence, fed by the ebb and flow of her emotions. Between 2015 and 2018, Vidal and her team slowly advance; they open Casa Motete, introduce programmes, establish workshops for teachers and reading groups for children, and all the while, Vidal hones her own prose, studies the craft of reading promotion, and strives continually towards her dream.
The name Motete is both a perfect metaphor for both the project’s aims, as well as for the text of Tidal Waters. In explaining the word, Vidal writes:
It’s basically a basket used by indigenous people for carrying food, with a strap that goes over the head. “Motete” is what we call those baskets on the North Pacific coast (Bahía Solano, Juradó, Nuquí) and in Panama. The thing is, motetes have always been used to carry food for the body: plantains, bushmeat, fish. Our idea is to fill them with food for the soul: art, culture, books. And just as motetes are woven by hand, I thought these new contents would also form a fabric: the fabric of society, of community, of the fabric of souls.
This beautiful metaphor is not only evident in the work that Vidal carries out within her community, but is echoed in these direct, immediate, and often poetic letters. Together, this one-sided missive weaves a picture not only of the Motete project and the people surrounding it, but of Vidal herself—whose quest to establish a Chocóan identity is intrinsically linked to an effort to define her own. Although Vidal celebrates her successes, her letters often focus on the smaller details: her dreams and ambitions, or a growing sense of self. This changing image is reflected in her varying sign-offs: sometimes she is simply Velia, sometimes Veliamar (“amar and mar, love and the sea”). She also has a more official role, that of Seño Velia, as the children in the local community call her. By the time the letters end, she still has yet to decide what her final title should be. Perhaps, we imagine, she can be all three.
Vidal’s sense of self is tied to the sea that she loves, so integral to her home. Her writings are washed through with images of the water. In 2015, fresh with a new project and preparing to move to Chocó, she opens her first letter with a direct comparison: “You know me, I’m just like the Pacific. I can be calm one minute and then suddenly break into great powerful waves, which crash down and end up changing the landscape.” In fact, Vidal is so linked to the sea that when she is away from it for too long, her body has a physical response. In one letter, she describes developing such a bad case of dermatitis that even her fingerprints disappear, and she is unable to confirm her identity. Without her link to the ocean, Vidal is effectively erased. When she is detached from the land, the people, and the sea that she loves, she is no longer able to be herself.
The oceanic metaphor that permeates the text is further perfected in Vidal’s exploration of resistance. As part of a predominantly black community, this resistance, she writes, takes the form of an “intense love”. In a powerful allegory, she describes the force of Colombia’s Guapi River as it meets the enormity of the Pacific Ocean; as the sea forces its way up the river, the river pushes back and appears to be still, but it is not. As she points out, it is resisting all the time. The necessity of this endurance is not the main preoccupation of Vidal’s letters, but it forms a necessary condition of their backdrop. The levels of poverty in her communities, the violence from the local guerilla group that forces people to leave the region, and Vidal’s fear that the world might abandon them altogether—these threatening elements are woven with her worries that the simple act of helping people to read, to find their voices, can hardly be enough in the face of all these challenges. Yet, like the river pushing back against the ocean, she persists.
Without Brazilian philosopher Djamila Ribeiro’s foreword to Tidal Waters, we might initially miss the significance of Vidal’s activism, for which Ribeiro delineates as defining and exploring the Afro-Colombian and Afro-Latin American experience. When this book was published in Colombia in 2020, it came to the attention of the Brazilian press Sello Sueli Carneiro and the Colección Femenismos Plurales (both of which are headed by Ribeiro), and was then published in Brazil to celebrate Vidal and to encourage collaboration across the Afro-Latin American community. Ribeiro is clear that Vidal’s work—in “democratizing books, reading, and writing for Afro-Latin Americans”—is a source of inspiration for black women across the continent. Tidal Waters then, can be read as a wellspring of motivation, a unifying force, and evidence of what commitment and vision can achieve, as well as a promise of future partnership.
The braided nature of the motete is also present in the interweaving of projects and languages that Vidal’s translations—into both Portuguese and English—represents. By commissioning this project, Charco Press is furthering Vidal’s work, bringing attention to an area of Colombia that seldom appears in anglophone writing, and transporting a sense of Chocóan identity beyond the region’s borders. As a result, this place has another pathway by which to interact with the wider literary world. Annie McDermott’s beautiful, warm translation has brought Vidal’s work to life, and will hopefully further consecrate Vidal’s project at home. It will certainly bring even more credibility and success to Vidal’s first love: spreading the joy and knowledge of literature to those who need it.
*****
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