Montale/Wright: the Italian Charles.

Galassi, Jonathan White

My friendship with Charles goes back to the early 1980s, and it developed under the sign of one of our shared enthusiasms, the great Italian poet Eugenio Montale. Charles had already published his version of Montale's greatest book, La bufera e altro, which inaugurated the Field Translation Series for David Young in 1978. But what especially moved and excited me was the echo of Montale I heard in the lambent, passionate lines of Charles's own poems in Bloodlines, as in the closing poem of the brilliant sequence, "Tattoos."

It's not just the direct, if torqued, quotation from Montale's "Indian Serenade" in La bufera in the last stanza; Montale, who was and remains my own personal poetic idol, was everywhere in the Charles of those days, I felt, and to amazingly potent, resonantly lyrical effect. Like the octopus in "Indian Serenade," something in Montale--his obsessional attachment to the image, the fragment, the catalogue pileup of substantives--seemed to have taken up residence in Wright. Today, in fact, early Wright reads less Montalean and more Wrightian to me; what I hear most clearly now in Bloodlines are predictive echoes of other great Wright creations to come. In any case, whether justifiably or not, Charles joined my pantheon under the sign of Eusebio, as Montale called himself, and there he has remained ever since. No poet of Charles's great generation has spoken more intently, movingly, and enduringly to me. Partly via Montale, I'm convinced, but more broadly thanks to the beneficial influence of his most suggestive mentor, Ezra Pound (which constitutes no great claim to originality, given Pound's effect on several generations of poets, including Montale himself), Wright found his own mercurial, immortal way to be lyrically modern in his own moment. Their lessons have served him, and us, beautifully during a long and consistently productive career.

That was how I fell in love, as it were, with Charles's work. Our personal relationship also had a Montalean genesis, this time somewhat more difficult. In 1981, Montale was awarded the Nobel Prize. The following year, I published a translation of his selected essays, The Second Life of Art, with Dan Halpern at Ecco, and Mark Rudman invited me to edit an issue of Pequod devoted to Montale. I asked Charles to send me his version of the "Motets," the great sequence from Montale's second book, Le occasioni, which I knew he had done, to be the centerpiece of the issue. He did, and that's where the trouble began, for I had the chutzpah, the temerity to suggest numerous changes in his versions, which to me, for all their beauty, seemed less literally accurate than they might be. Charles was understandably enraged, but he ended up taking many of my suggestions, and in the process, thanks to his gracious and forgiving character, a friendship was forged, I became Charles's editor, first at Random House, starting with The Southern Cross and then The Other Side of the River. When I moved to FSG, he came along, and we've since worked together on Zone Journals, The World of the Ten Thousand Things, Chickamauga, Black Zodiac, Appalachia, Negative Blue, d Short History of the Shadow, Buffalo Yoga, Scar Tissue, Littlefoot, Sestets, and, just now, his selected late poems, Bye-and- Bye, with a beautiful Piero della Francesca Madonna on the cover, testament to the lasting power of the Tuscan--which is to say the Dantean/Montalean--aesthetic on Wright's sensibility. (1) There are other strains to the Wright aesthetic--Chinese (also modulated via Pound), Appalachian, Western. But his Americanness is basic, coming straight out of the author's lived--and inherited--history. What interests me here is how this material has been mediated by a style that is grounded in the dolce stil nuovo, which Pound and Eliot stole from Dante and his cohorts (as Montale did himself)--a style definitively shaped by Wright's searing engagement with Italian beauty as a soldier in Italy after the Korean War.

Charles and I often joke about how each of us prefers his own Montale versions to the other's. It is simply asking too much of a translator (or pianist) to expect him to set aside his own interpretation in favor of someone else's, no matter how much he loves his colleague/rival. But it doesn't matter. Wright's Storm is a direct and genial homage to Montale's determining effect on him, and I learn new things from it constantly. In preparing to write this piece, I reread Charles's "Motets" and found myself wondering if I hadn't erred thirty years ago in asking him to hew closer to Montale's literal sense. I seem to be much looser, more tolerant as an editor now, less interested in "accuracy" for its own sake and more attracted to the author's idiosyncrasies, to how he projects his own voice onto a poetic translation. Maybe Charles should reprint his original versions the way they were before I got my grubby hands on them. They'd be possibly less Montalean but they'd be more Charles. And we need more Charles. We always do. We always will.

(1) I also had the privilege of writing the introduction to his great translation of Campana's Orphic Songs for the Field series along the way.