What the Swedes Read: Eugenio Montale

• Laureate: Eugenio Montale (1975, Italy)
• Book read: Satura, translated by William Arrowsmith

It’s so great when something great turns out to be really great. I have a memory, shoehorned into my first novel, of standing at Michelangelo’s David, at what was probably the height of my teenage cynicism, and realizing that even though everyone said it was amazing, it was. From Roth­ko to Shakespeare, Citizen Kane to Gilgamesh, so many of the greats are great, by which I mean that they have not only the lasting heft of a masterpiece but that moment by moment they manage to engage in the business of delight. There are masterpieces that are worth the long haul—I emerged from Don Quixote as if from a marathon, just as breathless and proud—and they are not to be ignored. But hot damn, go listen to Sgt. Pepper. Everybody knows it’s a great album, a milestone of pop craftsmanship, and a bright, guiding star in the world of music. But also, it’s great like a great ice cream cone.

The poetry of Eugenio Montale, Nobel prizewinner and Italian literary powerhouse, is great like this, too. Everybody loves this guy. Montale is often described as a “poet’s poet,” and indeed the complexities of his work have been explored hither and yon by his comrades in arms. I’ve seen books with different translations of Montale put side by side, something you don’t see done with, say, Wisława Szymborska, who will pop up again in a future column. But even that scheme doesn’t feel like an academic exercise—you get the feeling that they’ve been laid out just for the joy of it, the way a Coltrane fan will cue up three live versions of “Greensleeves.” Mention Elizabeth Bishop to a group of poets, and you’ll hear a lot of reverence and respect. Bring up Montale and people act like he paid last night’s bar bill.

Sometimes, though, respectability outshines enthusiasm. A writer gets enough serious praise and you begin to get the feeling that they’re someone you ought to read instead of someone who will actually delight you. I read a ton of Montale in my early twenties, when I was writing poetry myself, and loved it, and yet it was something like twenty years since I’d taken down one of his books from my shelf. I guess I was busy respecting him. Although it was part of the gambit of this Nobel project that I read something new, I owned so much of Montale’s work already that finding something I hadn’t encountered felt more like scraping the barrel, so I took down Satura...