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Montale once described the writing of his poems as a ‘waiting on the miracle’. The manuscripts of some of his most celebrated work reveal few marks of revision, and his first three books were composed with scant residue of excluded work: published but ‘uncollected’ poems; unfinished fragments; miracles that didn’t quite happen. The poems which we have translated here are among early exceptions, and as such provide a rare view of near-misses in the development of his first mature style. ‘Letter from Levante’ (1923) and ‘In The Void’ (1924) might have been included in the first edition of Ossi di sepia (1925), whereas ‘The sweet years…’  (1926) would have been in contentio for its second edition in 1927.

   The earliest poem in Ossi di sepia was composed, according to its
author, ‘completely entire, with its prey attached’. That ‘prey’, as he went on to explain, ‘was, quite obviously, my personal landscape’. This personal landscape consists partly of Eastern Liguria and the Cinque Terre, with its ‘barren, rough, hallucinatory beauty’ (not ‘the coast of Tuscany’, as a recent translation of his work has it) and partly of a landscape which is altogether more slanted, interiorised and peculiar. Though hardly a regional writer in any narrow sense of the term, Montale wrote of the Ligurian setting of Ossi that he was ‘trying to write a line that would adhere to every fibre of that soil’. This faithfulness with regard to an actual, given ground was bound up with an urgency towards linguistic modernism: to ‘wring the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language’ , and it’s a critical commonplace that the principal ‘neck’ in question was that of D’Annunzio – perhaps in particular the D’Annunzio of Alcyone, a widely read sequence chronicling a summer spent on the Tuscan coast. Where D’Annunzio had been classicising and altitudinous, Montale would take the language down off its stilts, roughen
its music, and clear too obviously received literary props and properties from view. And where he had been awash with declared emotion and panegyric, Montale would treat the poem as an object which should emit emotion rather than explicitly declare or comment upon it.

   ‘Letter from Levante’ is Montale’s single longest attempt to ‘adhere to the soil’ of Liguria in the light of this project. Stylistically it is located in a borderland between the reticence and compression of his so-called ‘poetry of the object’, and some of the relatively spacious poems of Ossi. Even compared to the latter it contains more connective tissue, direct statement and epistolary latitude – and contrasts with those poems in the first volume which have already begun to function by eliminating links in a chain of intricately and rapidly associated parts, and to suppress the occasion of the poem whilst plunging the reader in medias res. It also intrigues as an early, extended example of the poem levelled at an unnamed female addressee - a ‘genre’ which would prove crucial to its author’s work. Though it’s easy see how it did not otherwise conform to
the direction in which Montale’s work was moving, it has intrinsic value as a revealing and moving love poem. With its combination of clear-cut images, abrupt movement and obscure sense of unease and stasis; with its finding in a faithfulness to appearances a sudden drop behind or beyond the visible, ‘In the Void’ will probably strike anyone familiar with Montale as more characteristically successful. The single, tightly wound and involved sentence which comprises ‘The sweet years…’ and contains one of those strangely memorable Montalean ‘signs’ drawn from the natural world (‘the liquid darting of a tarantula/on a flaking wall’) was eventually preserved by its author, along with the ‘Letter’ and ‘In the Void’, in a late volume which appeared as a series of appendices in the definitive, posthumous Tutte le poesie.