Volume 18, Number 10 · June 1, 1972
The Poetry of Montale
By Stephen Spender
Provisional Conclusions
by Eugenio Montale, translated by Edith Farnsworth
Regnery, 352 pp., $10.00
Xenia
by Eugenio Montale, translated by G. Singh
Black Sparrow and New Directions, (limited edition), 50 pp., $20.00
The Butterfly of Dinard
by Eugenio Montale, translated by G. Singh
University Press of Kentucky, 186 pp., $5.95
Mosca (meaning 'fly')—as everyone called her—was the wife of Eugenio Montale, the most famous living Italian poet and the incomparable ironic literary commentator of Corriere della Sera. She was a small, auburn-haired, rather heavily made-up lady who wore spectacles with thick lenses that magnified the gaze with which she looked out at the world. She took people in amusedly—not unkindly—but with no illusions about them. Her laugh was of the sort that used to be described as 'tinkling.' There was certainly something old-fashioned about her, like a watchful guest at a corner table of a boardinghouse on the sea coast. Perhaps she was called Mosca (Montale seems in his poetry to wonder why) because she seemed glinting and flickering: a firefly rather than just a fly, I would have thought.
Review, 2803 words
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