Diary of '71.
Eugenio Montale (12 October 1896 – 12 September 1981) was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor, and translator.
Montale was born in Genoa, into a family of businessmen
In 1915 Montale worked as an accountant but was left the job to follow his literary passion. On a private basis, he studied opera singing with the baritone Ernesto Sivori.
Montale was largely self-taught.
In 1925, appeared Montale's first poetry collection Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones).
Also, in 1939, Le occasioni was published followed by Finisterre (1943).
La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Things) was published in 1956 and after that, his later works Xenia (1966), Satura (1971) and Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973).
1925 - Bring Me the Sunflower (Portami il girasole, collection of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones, Ossi di seppia)
Bring Me the Sunflower
Bring me the sunflower so I can transplant it
here in my own field burned by salt-spray,
so it can show all day to the blue reflection of the sky
the anxiety of its golden face.
Darker things yearn for a clarity,
bodies fade and exhaust themselves in a flood
of colors, as colors do in music. To vanish,
therefore, is the best of all good luck.
Bring me the plant that leads us
where blond transparencies rise up
and life evaporates like an essence;
bring me the sunflower sent mad with light.
The Lemon Trees (I limoni)
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.
See you on Tuesday!
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