'It is impossible to say just what I mean!' Prufrock's frustration in Eliot's celebrated poem underlines the pessimistic view of language at the heart of much Modernist poetry. Locating the greatest Italian poet of the twentieth century, Eugenio Montale, firmly within European Modernism, thisbook examines the struggle with language that is central to his work. What can a poet do when words fail him? Does he put down his pen, retreat into silence? Does he seek instead to push language towards its limits, and, if so, what tools can he employ? What part does metaphor, the via negativa,allusive or understated writing have in this process? These are just some of the issues that Clodagh J. Brook seeks to address. In its unravelling of the inexpressibility paradox, her book offers a new reading of Montale's early verse, and reveals how in articles and metapoetic comments Montalegives us insights into both his poetics and the whole process of expression.

A beautiful hardcover Pocket Poets selection of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Italian poet Eugenio Montale, one of the giants of twentieth-century poetry. Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) is not only Italy’s greatest modern poet but a towering figure in twentieth-century literature. His incandescently beautiful body of work is deeply rooted in the venerable lyric tradition that began with Dante, but he brilliantly reinvents that tradition for our time, probing the depths of love, death, faith, and philosophy in the bracing light of modern history. Dynamic innovation and a coiled, fierce energy fuel the poet’s quest for liberation from the self. Marked by musicality and rhythmic variety, Montale’s poems manage to be buoyant with allusion and metaphor while also densely studded with things—with concrete, elemental images that keep his complex and restless musings firmly tethered to the world. Montale’s reputation is international and enduring; his widely translated work has profoundly influenced generations of poets around the world. This volume contains selections from all his greatest works, rendered into English by the accomplished poet and translator Jonathan Galassi. It serves as both an essential introduction to an important poet and a true pleasure for lovers of contemporary

Glauco Cambon draws on twenty-five years of commitment to Montale's poetry and prose for this extended critical analysis. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

LATE MONTALE presents a generous selection of the intimate, elusive, and trenchant poems that the Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale wrote in the last several years of his life. Translated by the prize-winning poet George Bradley (Yale Younger Poet, 1985), the work chosen for this volume includes fifty-six poems that were previously unavailable in English and now form an important addition to the Montale oeuvre. Bradley's idiomatic, accurate, and graceful versions bring Montale's Italian to the anglophone audience with a new immediacy, and the extensive notes he provides offer valuable information, much of it newly uncovered, regarding the many people and places referenced. Both readers coming to Montale for the first time and those familiar with his earlier work will find these translations compelling, and anyone interested in world-class literature will find LATE MONTALE a fascinating volume. "With LATE MONTALE the distinguished poet George Bradley has given us a Montale in English most of us hardly knew. In selecting and translating scores of poems from the four collections published in the last decade of Montale's life, along with dozens of previously untranslated poems drawn from notebooks the Nobel laureate entrusted to his housekeeper, Bradley urges us to focus on the work the poet's old age. These translations, printed with the meticulously edited Italian texts en face, are marvels of lucidity and subtle music in which precision is suffused with a rare tenderness of attention. The volume includes Bradley's succinct but copious notes clarifying many of the allusions in the poems. And there are many masterpieces here, riches of meditation, at times caustic and satirical, at others grave and quizzical. For all its unavoidable melancholy, Montale's late work pulses with life, and Bradley captures the underlying exuberance to perfection. Montale's late poems are 'direct and conversational, the work of an older man soaked in reflection and second thoughts,' as Bradley notes in his elegant Foreword; but they are no less moving and indeed no less thrilling for that."--Eric Ormsby "Montale once quipped that the early poems 'were written in a tailcoat' and the late poems 'in pajamas,' an image that goes a long way toward conveying the casual, relaxed mood of LATE MONTALE. George Bradley's versions feel as comfortable in their English as the originals do in their Italian, and his generous selection and discerning introduction and notes offer Anglophone readers their best chance yet to discover the many quiet pleasures of LATE MONTALE."--Geoffrey Brock "With his gentle wit and rigorous precision, Mr. Bradley is the ideal medium for these poignant poems of Montale's late maturity. He has done the anglophone reader a great service."--Daniel Mark Epstein "George Bradley has found the perfect, acerbic tone for these late poems and drafts of Montale, some never seen before in English. In old age, Montale crafted an art of radical disillusionment, a world of smoke and ashes in which 'the children of those children will have / nothing left to learn / nothing to lose' Bradley has importantly enlarged our understanding of this important and incorruptible poet.'--Rosanna Warren Poetry.

Academic work in a range of disciplines has been making an important contribution to the fraught and confusing debate around ageing, and through writers’ consciousness and experience, literature, just like economics, psychology, history and sociology, can provide valuable insights into the attitudes and prejudices prevalent in society. The present volume adds to this burgeoning field by providing a wide spectrum of literary analyses drawing on a range of approaches (Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and feminist theory, amongst others) and covering a broad geographical area (France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland, in addition to Francophone Canada and Morocco). Major writers such as Balzac, Cervantes, Goethe, Mann and Zola are discussed here, as well as a number of important twentieth-century writers (Ben Jelloun, Cixous, Doubrovsky, Ernaux, Roy and Ungaretti) and less well-known figures (Carvalho, Châtelet and Fleutiaux). Within the broad themes which structure the volume, many others also emerge, overlapping and often recurring in several sections. These constant echoes between essays remind us that, whatever the geographical location or the period in history, similar issues remain pertinent across time and space, whether it be family relations, generational solidarity, sadness and loneliness, memory and dementia, class differences, gender differences or sexuality. Together, these essays contribute to the existing body of critical work by providing a series of portraits of what age is, has been and might be in the future. Collectively they demonstrate once more the power of literature to reflect or even prefigure social trends, encouraging us to consider carefully what we think, how we live and how we might shape our future societies.

This interdisciplinary, transhistorical collection brings together international scholars from English literature, Italian studies, performance history, and comparative literature to offer new perspectives on the vibrant engagements between Shakespeare and Italian theatre, literary culture, and politics, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century. Chapters address the intricate, two-way exchange between Shakespeare and Italy: how the artistic and intellectual culture of Renaissance Italy shaped Shakespeare’s drama in his own time, and how the afterlife of Shakespeare’s work and reputation in Italy since the eighteenth century has permeated Italian drama, poetry, opera, novels, and film. Responding to exciting recent scholarship on Shakespeare and Italy, as well as transnational theatre, this volume moves beyond conventional source study and familiar questions about influence, location, and adaptation to propose instead a new, evolving paradigm of cultural interchange. Essays in this volume, ranging in methodology from archival research to repertory study, are unified by an interest in how Shakespeare’s works represent and enact exchanges across the linguistic, cultural, and political boundaries separating England and Italy. Arranged chronologically, chapters address historically-contingent cultural negotiations: from networks, intertextual dialogues, and exchanges of ideas and people in the early modern period to questions of authenticity and formations of Italian cultural and national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. They also explore problems of originality and ownership in twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations of Shakespeare’s works, and new settings and new media in highly personalized revisions that often make a paradoxical return to earlier origins. This book captures, defines, and explains these lively, shifting currents of cultural interchange.

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"I can't remember when I've learned as much from something I've read—or laughed as much while doing it." —Jacob Weisberg, Slate This international bestseller is an encyclopedic A-Z masterpiece—the perfect introduction to the very core of Western humanism. Clive James rescues, or occasionally destroys, the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. Soaring to Montaigne-like heights, Cultural Amnesia is precisely the book to burnish these memories of a Western civilization that James fears is nearly lost.

Because Charles Wright occupies a large space in contemporary American poetry, it is only natural that his readers over the years have wanted to engage him in conversation and discover more about his career and inspirations. In this collection of richly detailed interviews conducted between 1979 and 2006, Wright eloquently discusses a range of topics, including the beginning of his poetic career in Italy, his experiences at the University of Iowa, the American and European influences on his work, contemporary poets he admires, his place in Southern literature, the art of translating poetry, and such formal matters as his lineation and rhythmic phrasing, his use of syllabics, and the development of his characteristic style. An extensive bibliography of writings by and about Wright supplements the interviews.

The cafe is not only a place to enjoy a cup of coffee, it is also a space - distinct from its urban environment - in which to reflect and take part in intellectual debate. Since the eighteenth century in Europe, intellectuals and artists have gathered in cafes to exchange ideas, inspirations and information that has driven the cultural agenda for Europe and the world. Without the café, would there have been a Karl Marx or a Jean-Paul Sartre? The café as an institutional site has been the subject of renewed interest amongst scholars in the past decade, and its role in the development of art, ideas and culture has been explored in some detail. However, few have investigated the ways in which cafés create a cultural and intellectual space which brings together multiple influences and intellectual practices and shapes the urban settings of which they are a part. This volume presents an international group of scholars who consider cafés as sites of intellectual discourse from across Europe during the long modern period. Drawing on literary theory, history, cultural studies and urban studies, the contributors explore the ways in which cafes have functioned and evolved at crucial moments in the histories of important cities and countries - notably Paris, Vienna and Italy. Choosing these sites allows readers to understand both the local particularities of each café while also seeing the larger cultural connections between these places. By revealing how the café operated as a unique cultural context within the urban setting, this volume demonstrates how space and ideas are connected. As our global society becomes more focused on creativity and mobility the intellectual cafés of past generations can also serve as inspiration for contemporary and future knowledge workers who will expand and develop this tradition of using and thinking in space.