A new book by Italy's greatest twentieth-century poet? By Italy's second Nobel prizewinner for poetry (1975--the first was Giosuè Carducci in 1906--the first centenary of his death is coming up in 2007), a poet who died a quarter of a century ago?

In October 2006, the Mondadori publishing house released a 100-page volume entitled La casa di Olgiate e altre poesie by Eugenio Montale (1896-1981).

Well, to call it a book by Montale is a bit of an exaggeration. In the care with which he put his books of poetry together, Montale was almost as meticulous as the founding father of Italian lyric poetry Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374), who spent fifty years arranging the 366 poems of his one-book Canzoniere.

What we have in La casa di Olgiate is a group of poems that Montale never published and that ended up in the hands of his faithful Tuscan housekeeper Gina Tiossi.

It was Gina who donated the originals to the Fondo Manoscritti, which collects autograph manuscripts of twentieth-century writers, at the University of Pavia.

The philologists at Pavia did the rest. The 56 poems--mostly short, many just a few lines long--were composed between 1963 and the poet's death in 1981, the bulk of them in the poet's last two or three years.

Montale's poetry, from Ossi di seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones", 1925) to Quaderno di quattro anni (1977) and Altri versi (1981), changed a great deal. His debut volume has a distilled and concentrated feel that made it the voice of a generation. Or better, the voice of part of a generation, the part that did not, could not embrace Fascism, perhaps as much for aesthetic as for political reasons.

The poems commemorating the years leading up to or following WW II or the poet's experience of those years--Le occasioni (1939), La bufera e altro (1956) are more difficult, more syntacticaly complex, more "hermetic," more allusive.

The new poems that came out in the 1970s, after a twenty-five year silence, were completely different, simpler, more ironic, more overtly autobiographical, more intimate, more epigrammatic and ultimately more resignedly pessimistic . The poems in La casa di Olgiate belong to this later manner. Just one example, chosen for its brevity rather than its optimism:

Se anche si scoprisse / il come e il perché dell'universo ? venire al mondo sarebbe / tempo perso. [Even if we were to discover / the how and why of the universe / coming into the world would / still be a waste of time.]

Incidentally, an excellent anthology of translations from the works of Montale is the one edited with an introduction by Harry Thomas and published in 2002 by Penguin Books and in New York by Handsel Books in 2004.

Thomas often gives more than one translation of the same poem, though it is occasionally hard to believe (especially since there is no facing Italian text) that the translators were working from the same original. Among them Allen Mandelbaum is one of the more conscientious and literal, while "confessional poet" Robert Lowell is the one who--"imitating" rather than translating (his 1961 collection of translations is entitled Imitations)--does most violence to the translatee's text (and not only for Montale).

Several of the translators included have won prizes for translation. Which leads one to the realization that translations are often judged on their merits as convincing free-standing poems by people who don't know the original language.