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Those days are gone.  Now swift flights
slant across the wall, the plummeting
of everything goes on and on, the steep coast
swallows even the reef that first lifted you
above the waves.

With the breath of spring comes
a mournful undertow of lives
engulfed; and in the evening,
black bindweed, only your memory
writhes and resists.

Rises over the embankments, the distant tunnel
where the train, slowly crawling, enters.
Then, unseen, a lunar flock comes drifting in
to browse on the hills.

--translated by William Arrowsmith

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EUGENIO MONTALE won the Nobel Prize in 1975.   Montale was born in Genoa in 1896.   He was an infantry officer in WWI, and in 1948 moved from Florence to Milan where he became chief literary critic for Italy's primary newspaper, the Corriere della Sera.  After a long break from writing poetry, he published four final collections of poems during the last ten years of his life.  He died in Milan, at the age of 85, in 1981.

WILLIAM ARROWSMITH, a renowned classics scholar and a literary and film critic, is University Professor of Classics at Boston University.  He has received a Prix de Rome, a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and ten honorary degrees.  He is general editor of The Greek Tragedy in New Translation.

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