In such an absence, art grows humble. For all our cerebral progress, we are stiU greatly subject to relapse into the Romantic (and, hence, Realistic as weU) notion that "art imitates life." If art does anything of this kind, it undertakes to reflect those few elements of existence which transcend "life," extend it beyond its terminal point—an undertaking which is frequently mistaken for art's or the artist's own groping for immortality. In other words, art "imitates" death rather than life; i.e., it imitates that realm of which life supplies no notion: realizing its own brevity, art tries to domesticate the longest possible version of time. After all, what distinguishes art from life is the ability of the former to produce a higher degree of lyricism than is possible within any human interplay. Hence poetry's affinity with—if not the very invention of—the notion of afterlife.
New Poems provides an idiom which is qualitatively new. It is largely Montale's own idiom, but some of it derives from the act of translation, whose limited means only increase the original austerity. The cumulative effect of this book is startling, not so much because the psyche portrayed in New Poems has no previous record in world literature, as because it makes clear that such a mentality could not be expressed in English as its original language. The question "why" may only obscure the reason, since even in Montale's native Italian such a mentality is strange enough to earn him the reputation of an excepticnal poet.
Poetry after all in itself is a translation; or, to put it another way, poetry is one of the aspects of the psyche rendered in language. It is not so much that poetry is a form of art as that art is a form to which poetry often resorts. Essentially, poetry is the articulation of perception, the translation of that perception into the heritage of language—language is, after all, the best available tool. But for all the value of this tool in ramifying and deepening perceptions—revealing sometimes more than was originally intended, which, in the happiest cases, merges with the perceptions—every more or less experienced poet knows how much is left out or has suffered because of it.
This suggests that poetry is somehow also alien or resistant to language, be it Italian, English, or Swahili, and that the human psyche because of its synthesizing nature is infinitely superior to any language we are bound to use (having somewhat better chances with inflected ones). To say the least, if the psyche had its own tongue, the distance between it and the language of poetry would be approximately the same as the distance between the latter and conversational Italian. Montale's idiom shortens both trips.
New Poems ought to be read and reread a number of times, if not for the sake of analysis, the function of which is to return a poem to its stereoscopic origins—the way it existed in the poet's mind—then for the fugitive beauty of this subtle, muttering, and yet firm stoic voice, which tells us that the world ends with neither a bang nor a whimper but with a man talking, pausing, and then talking again. When you have had such a long life, anticlimax ceases to be just another device.
The book is certainly a monologue; it couldn't be otherwise when the interlocutor is absent, as is nearly always the case in poetry. Partly, however, the idea of monologue as a principal device springs from the "poetry of absence," another name for the greatest literary movement since Symbolism—a movement which came into existence in Europe, and especially in Italy, in the twenties and thirties— "Hermeticism." The following poem, which opens the present collection, is testimony to the main postulates of the movement and is itself its triumph. ( Tu in Italian is the familiar form of "you.")
106 I J os ep h Brodsky
The Use of "Tu"
Misled by me
the critics assert that my "tu" is an institution, that were it not for this fault of mine, they'd have known that the many in me are one, even though multiplied by the mirrors. The trouble is that once caught in the net the bird doesn't know if he is himself or one of his too many duplicates.
Montale joined the Hermetic movement in the late thirties while living in Florence, where he moved in 1927 from his native Genoa. The principal figure in Hermeticism at that time was Giuseppe Ungaretti, who took the aesthetics of Mallarme's "Un Coup de Des" perhaps too much to heart. However, in order to comprehend the nature of Hermeticism fully it is worthwhile to take into account not only those who ran this movement, but also who ran the whole Italian show—and that was 11 Duce. To a large degree, Hermeticism was a reaction of the Italian intelligentsia to the political situation in Italy in the third and fourth decades of this century and could be viewed as an act of cultural self-defense—linguistic self-defense, in the case of poetry—against Fascism. At least, to overlook this aspect of Hermeticism would be as much a simplification as frequently overstressing this aspect is.
Although the Italian regime was far less carnivorous toward art than were its Russian and German counterparts, the sense of its incompatibility with the traditions of Italian culture was much more apparent and intolerable than in those countries. It is almost a rule that in order to survive under totalitarian pressure art should develop density in direct proportion to the magnitude of that pressure. The whole history of Italian culture supplied part of the required substance; the rest of the job fell to the Hermeticists, little though their name implied it. What could be more odious for those who stressed literary asceticism, compactness of language, emphasis on the word and its alliterative powers, sound versus—or, rather, over—meaning, and the like, than the propaganda verbosities and state-sponsored versions of Futurism?
Montale has the reputation of being the most difficult poet of this school and he is certainly more difficult—in the sense of being more complex—than Ungaretti or Salvatore Quasimodo. But for all the overtones, reticence, merging of associations, or hints of associations in his work, its hidden references, substitutions of general statements for microscopic detail, elliptical speech, etc., it was he who wrote "La primavera Hitleriana" ("The Hitler Spring"), which begins:
The dense white cloud of the mayflies crazily whirls around the pallid street lamps and over the parapets
spread on the ground a blanket on which the foot grates as on sprinkled sugar . . .
This image of the foot grating on the dead mayflies as on sprinkled sugar conveys such a toneless, deadpan unease and horror that when some fourteen lines below he says:
. . . and the water continues to eat at the shoreline, and no one is any more blameless