Thursday, April 6, 7:45 pm

"How welcome Galassi's scrupulous and pondered versions of [these poems] prove to be…. With Galassi's carefully studied translations, another link, a powerful one, has been added to the chain."--Richard Howard, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"The infinite preciousness of a few memories, a few signs, a few objects, carried in secret but still radiant with unsullied feeling, is what Montale's poetry embodies, like a secular ark of the emotional life."--Nicholas Jenkins, New York Times Book Review

Poet, translator, executive editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Chairman of the Academy of American Poets, Jonathan Galassi will read from his acclaimed translations of the poems of Eugenio Montale, widely regarded as the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi. Galassi is author of two volumes of his own poetry, Morning Run (Paris Review) and North Street (HarperCollins), and two previous books of translations of Montale. Now, with the bilingual edition of Eugenio Montale: Collected Poems 1920-1954, fourteen years in the making, all of the Italian Nobel laureate's books of poetry are available in English. The volume has won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize (UK) and the Premio Montale (Italy).

Like that circle of cliffs
that seems to unwind
into spiderwebs of cloud,
so our scorched spirits

in which illusion burns
a fire full of ash
are lost in the clear sky
of a single certainty: the light.

~("Non refugiarti")