this morning while reading eugenio montale's poetry to my infant daughter, i came across a poem that i have read many times before without noticing it. oddly enough, i don’t think that the majority of montale’s work is great—good, yes, and it’s interesting in terms of his landscape descriptions; however, couched between the landscape pieces are poems of amazing insight, of such insight that they make me consider him one of the greats. the poem i noticed today, “Là fluoresce il Tritone” (“There Triton rages”), is an in-between poem. it has lines that are brilliant, but it fails to rise to the height of two poems just a few pages before it in Ossi di sepia (Cuttlefish Bones).
the poem deals with the confusion or insignificance of the self when confronted with the primal forces of the ocean, of triton, and of triton specifically at Portovenere where the god touches at the threshold of the ancient church now under st. peter’s. the “origini” (origins) he mentions are those of the sea and of culture. at the origins, “Là non è chi si guardi” (“There no one regards himself”—Arrowsmith’s translation**). interesting. is he saying that when faced with cultural or primal origins, the speaker loses or confuses his self/identity? the speaker notes that he must put on a “volto” (“face”) when he returns home, and the origins seem to control even the future: “ogni ora prossima / è antica” (“every future hour is ancient”). most people discuss returning to the origins as a way to find identity, but not this speaker—the origins are overwhelming, are beyond self, so much so that seeing them makes individual identity seem somehow hollow (hollow in the grand spiritually void sense, not hollow as lacking identity).
**I like the Arrowsmith translation partially just for the commentary on the poems at the end of the book.
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