Montale's Eel

[Begging eel (Motueka)]

I'm reliably informed (by Marco Sonzogni of Victoria University) that there are now more than fifty English-language versions of Eugenio Montale's famous lyric "L'anguilla" [The Eel], from his late collection La bufera ed altro [The Storm and Other Things] (1956).

So what's wrong with one more? (Mine's a little on the free side, as you'll observe from the version I've included underneath):

Eel


frigid ice-queen
of the Baltic
who quits her haunts

to plumb our river
mouths
branch to branch

capillary to capillary
deeper deeper
into the rock

writhing through ditches
till one day
a flash of light

glancing off chestnuts
ignites her
in the stagnant pond

eel
lightstick birchwand
Love’s arrow on earth

led downhill through
Apennine gullies
to green fields

still waters
through dust & drought
the spark that says

Just do it
when everything’s
burnt toast

your spitting
image
iris recognition

would suggest
mired in this life
can you not call her

sister?

Here's a more literal translation for anyone else who'd care to try their hand:

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981):
L’anguilla / The Eel



L’anguilla, la sirena
The eel, siren
dei mari freddi che lascia il Baltico
of the cold seas that quits the Baltic
per giungere ai nostri mari,
to come to our seas,
ai nostri estuari, ai fiumi
to our estuaries, to the rivers
che risale in profondo, sotto la piena avversa,
rising from the deep, under the downstream surge,
di ramo in ramo e poi
from branch to branch and then
di capello in capello, assottigliati,
from capillary to capillary, slimming itself down,
sempre più addentro, sempre più nel cuore
increasingly more inside, increasingly into the heart
del macigno, filtrando
of rock, infiltrating
tra gorielli di melma finché un giorno
between rills of mud until one day
una luce scoccata dai castagni
a light glancing off the chestnuts
ne accende il guizzo in pozze d’acquamorta,
lights her fuse in stagnant puddles,
nei fossi che declinano
in ravines cascading down
dai balzi d’Appennino alla Romagna;
from the flanks of the Apennines to Romagna;
l’anguilla, torcia, frusta,
eel, flashlight, birch,
freccia d’Amore in terra
arrow of Love on earth
che solo i nostri botri o i disseccati
that only our gullies or dried
ruscelli pirenaici riconducono
Pyrenean streams lead back
a paradisi di fecondazione;
to a paradise of insemination;
l’anima verde che cerca
the soul that seeks green
vita là dove solo
life there where only
morde l’arsura e la desolazione,
drought and desolation bite,
la scintilla che dice
the spark that says
tutto comincia quando tutto pare
everything begins when everything seems
incarbonirsi, bronco seppellito;
burnt to charcoal, a buried stump;
l’iride breve, gemella
brief iris, twin
di quella che incastonano i tuoi cigli
to the one your lashes frame
e fai brillare intatta in mezzo ai figli
which makes you shine intact in the midst of the sons
dell’uomo, immersi nel tuo fango, puoi tu
of man, immersed in your mud, can you
non crederla sorella?
not believe her sister?

So what's all that about? To find out, let's turn to the notes in Jonathan Galassi's magisterial translation of Montale's Collected Poems 1920-1954 (2000), p.594 et seq:

Arrowsmith [in his dual-text version of La Bufera ed altra, 1985] emphasizes that the eel should not be read as essentially phallic, but that it incorporates both sexes, incarnating an "undifferentiated 'life force' akin to Bergson's elan vital" ... 'The Eel,' then, should be viewed as a cosmic love-poem, an account of the phylogeny of the human spirit as well as a dithyramb to the woman who inspired it, or as [Gilberto] Lonardi ... puts it, "the anabasis of the Anima, in the Jungian sense, of its author".

Just so. Couldn't have put it better myself.

I'd also recommend the fascinating discussion of Robert Lowell's strange translation / adaptation of the poem (included in Imitations, 1961) in Paul Muldoon's recent collection of his Oxford lectures on poetry, The End of the Poem (2006). Lowell ended up running this poem into the one which happened to be printed next to it in the Penguin Book of Italian Verse, as he didn't realise that the page divide was also the end of the poem ...