On the eve of WW II—Germany was about invade Poland on September 1, 1939, Italy, which had promulgated the first of a series of ever more strict anti-Jewish laws in September 1938, would enter the war as Germany’s ally in June 1940—, conservative Pope Pius XI (Achille Ratti) composed an important speech, to be given before the assembled Italian bishops. The occasion was the tenth anniversary of the Lateran Pacts between Mussolini’s government and the Vatican, which constituted their so-called Conciliazione or Reconciliation. The speech was written only ten days before the intransigent pope died.

In his speech the pope intended to denounce the latest policies of the Nazi-Fascist Axis and reaffirm the independence of the Catholic Church against the pressures being brought to bear on it by the Fascist government. Pius XI passed away before he could make the speech, but he had seen to it before he died that printed copies of the text be made for distribution to his prospective audience.

Documents recently brought to light by Vatican archive researcher Emma Fattorini and illustrated in a book published this week entitled Pio XI, Hitler e Mussolini, La solitudine di un papa (Einaudi) prove beyond doubt that it was the pope’s Secretary of State and confidant Eugenio Pacelli who prevented their distribution and insisted that all copies of the defiant speech be destroyed.

Pacelli was destined to be elected as Pius XI’s successor with the name of Pope Pius XII.

We were already aware that Pacelli had censored the encyclical letter Humanae Generis Unitas (The Unity of the Human Race) prepared by the American Jesuit John LaFarge and a couple of Jesuit colleagues at the express request of Pius XI. The encyclical, the draft of which was published by French researchers Georges Passeclecq and Bernard Suchecky in the 1990s (English version: The Hidden Encyclical of Pius XI, Harcourt Brace, 1997), condemned Fascist anti-semitism but not without indulging in a little old-fashioned Catholic antisemitism of its own.

The publication of this new document calls into question once again the role of Pius XII in combating Nazi atrocities. In last week’s Sunday’s supplement to the economic newspaper Il Sole-24 Ore (May 27, 2007), Emilio Gentile, author of a book on the 1937 Oxford University international conference of Christian churces against totalitarianism, to which the Roman Church declined to send a representative, characterized Pius XI’s fulminating approach as “prophetic” and Pius XII’s circumspect approach as “diplomatic”. Pius XII wanted to avoid at all costs a counter-productive confrontation, thinking there was more to be gained by attempting to persuade the Duce and the Führer to change their policies. I guess there’s no reasoning with some people.

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.