Posthumous Diary (diario Postumo)

Eugenio Montale's "Posthumous Diary," published here for the very first time in an English edition, is a collection of brief poems to a woman named Annalisa Cima that, when published after his death, created a cause celebre in Italy, a "firestorm of proportions unprecedented in the annals of modern Italian literature," as translator Jonathan Galassi notes in his introduction. The "unexpected major poet of Anglo-American Modernism," as he was called by Eliot Weinberger, gives us poems in this volume that deal with death and solitude, but also with things that unify us and shield us from despair: deep friendship and the consolations of art.

There have been eloquent versions of Montale in English, but they did not catch his agnostic, complex relation to his predecessors Foscolo, Leopardi, D'Annunzio. Montale culminates what Dante and Petrarch began, and Galassi conveys this fulfillment of Italian poetic tradition. --Harold Bloom

There are moments in the history of literature when someone rises to the surface and takes poetry in a radically unexpected direction, which also comes to seem an inevitable one, simultaneously blowing open a tradition and fulfillung it. Eugenio Montale provoked-he incarnated-one of those moments, as Valery or T.S. Eliot or Zbigniew Herbert did. --Edward Hirsch
Introduction by Jonathan Galassi.

5 x 8.25 in.