Mont10

• December 10, 2025








Eugenio Montale






MOTTETTI / MOTETS


translated by Alan Tucker

10

Perché tardi? Nel pino lo scoiattolo

batte la coda a torcia sulla scorza.

La mezzaluna scende col suo picco

nel sole che la smorza. È giorno fatto.

A un soffio il pigro fumo trasalisce,

si difende nel punto che ti chiude.

Nulla finisce, o tutto, se tu fólgore

lasci la nube.

     

X

Why so long? In the cedar a red squirrel

beats out its tail against the bark.

The half moon sinks with its horn

washed by sunrise from the dark. It’s plain day.

A puff of smoke idled by the breeze

persists enfolded around you.

Nothing is over, or all, if you, firestorm

leave the cloud.


 

 

 



NOTE:
‘It often happens (and often wilfully) that I am equivocal… for example in the Motet of the woman who is about to emerge from a cloud:

At a puff the lazy smoke… (?)

persists in the point that enfolds you

it is clear that in the point can have two meanings: in the moment that and in the place that, both of them legitimate.’

Montale, letter to Bobi Bazlan

10 May 1939, quoted by Rebecca

J West, Eugenio Montale: Poet

on the Edge Harvard, 1981. p49.

folgare is thunderbolt. I presume in Italian this does not instantly bring to mind Titfield or to me Georgie’s parlour-maid Foljambe.
thunderclap would be a good word but still not quite.
Another ambiguity is the time of day of the first stanza. Is it dawn or dusk? Surely dawn, but some translators have ‘The day is over’ If so then the sun is quenched by the dark.

 




Introduction

I     
II     
III     
IV     
V     
VI     
VII     
VIII     
IX     
X     
XI

XII     
XIII     
XIV     
XV     
XVI     
XVII     
XVIII     
XIX     
XX