THE COLLECTED POEMS OF EUGENIO MONTALE: 1925–1977

First edition, first printing. Original quarter blue over yellow cloth, lettered in gilt to the spine, in the dustwraper designed by Jennifer Carrow, the front panel reproducing Pantonio Ciccone's 1966 painting 'Olive Trees in Tuscany'. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents bright and clean throughout. In the clean, bright dustwrapper, fine except for the merest wear to spine tips. Not price clipped ($49.95 to the upper edge of the front flap). A lovely copy.

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature for 1975, was both an heir to a tradition of Italian poets including Dante, Petrarch, and Leopardi and, like such predecessors, an innovator responding to his own turbulent century and its historical, political and personal upheavals. This edition brings together for the first time William Arrowsmith's acclaimed Montale translations for the first time, with original Italian versions presented alongside. The jacket quotes the poet and translator Richard Howard, who describes Montale as "great but [...] great obscurely, uniquely. In most of these poems (as in most of [Elizabeth] Bishop's) Montale's achievement is a tone of voice. [...] Arrowsmith, who spent years translating most of these unquestionable yet often iracund engenderings, seems born to that manner", while for Rachel Hadas, Arrowsmith's translations are "as tough, delicate, and unsentimental as the originals." The volume is edited by the American poet, Rosanna Warren, who provides an introduction and the substantial critical apparatus following the poems.