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What’s the Difference? Part 2

So in my last post, I contemplated why I found Zbigniew Herbert boring but Eugenio Montale (both in translation) interesting. Here’s a poem by Eugenio Montale titled “Wind and Flags”:

The gust that lifted the bitter scent
of the sea to the valley’s twists and turns
and struck you, ruffling your hair,
brief tangle on the pale sky;

the squall that glued your dress to you
and shaped you swiftly in its image,
how it’s come back, now you’re gone, to these rocks
the mountain shoulders over the abyss;

and how, now the drunken rage is spent,
the soft breath finds the garden again,
that lulled you, stretched in your hammock
among the trees, on your flights without wings.

Alas, time never orders its grains
the same way twice. And there’s hope in this:
for, if it happens, along with nature
our fable will go up in a flash.

Flow that doesn’t quicken – and now brings alive
a group of dwellings laid out to the eye
on the flank of a hill,
bedecked with banners and festoons.

The world exists…Amazement halts
the heart that surrenders to straying ghosts,
heralds of evening: and won’t believe
starved men are celebrating.

I find much to admire in this poem: it’s supple shifts of tone, its striking imagery (”ruffling your hair;/brief tangle on the pale sky”). The abstractions in Montale create interest despite the fact that I’m reading this in translation. I find similar effects in 20th-century Greek poetry.

W.S. Graham frequently commented in his letters that he strove to push language (specifically English in his case) into new territories, to attempt to create new limits of meaning (putting nouns into verbs, a common technique of Shakespeare, for example). I think a similar concept can be gained by using imagery to push boundaries of meaning. The extension of meaning still happens within the context of language (think of Hart Crane’s “adagio of islands” – its mix of musical terminology with a physical landscape to create an impression of languid islands or of a leisurely sail through islands…both ideas work together to create the overall impression). I agree with Graham’s desire to see poetry push language to achieve effects outside of normal speech (even those poets who which to use every day speech still create effects with imagery, rhymes, etc. – think Robert Frost here). Translations of Herbert fail to give me that sense in English (though I fully imagine that those effects are apparent in the original Polish). Translations of Montale tend to become, in English, poems that succeed in adding to the language.