Reading with my father

            These, coasts,

       were the prayers of the age-old boy

       who stood at a rusted balustrade

       and, smiling, slowly died.

       Shores, how much these cold lights say

       to the tormented one who fled from you.

       Blades of water glimpsed between the arcs

       of shifting branches; rocks brown in the foam;

       arrows of roving

       swifts . . .

            O lands,

       if I could trust in you one day,

       funeral trappings, gilded frames

       for the agony of every being.

            Now I return to you

       stronger (or deluded) though the heart

       seems to dissolve in glad-and savage-memories.

       Sad spirit of the past

       and you, new will that calls me,

       perhaps it's time to unite you

       in a calm harbour of wisdom.

       And one day we shall hear the call again

       of golden voices, bold enticements,

       my more divided soul. Think:

       to make the elegy a hymn, to be remade;

       to want no more.

            To be able

       like these branches,

       yesterday rude and bare, alive today

       with quivering and sap,

       for us too to feel

       among tomorrow's fragrances and winds

       a rising tide of dreams, a frenzied rush

       of voices toward an outcome, and in the sun

       that swathes you, coasts,

       to flower again!

       Montale

It would have been unusual, I think,
if the years after his wife’s, my

mother’s death, which found my father

returning to La Jolla to live among

friends of their youth, did not allow, 

in this adjusted family geometry, a 

deferred rapport between us to unfold. 

As incompletely as I could imagine

how our unexpected family residue 

struck him, I think I can say that

for both of us it did invite an or-

iginal conciliation, more than a 

reconciliation, in its two most dis-

tant members. I know that I am for-

tunate, that our lives allowed my 

natural hunger for a true rapport 

with my father to furnish entire 

vacant quarters of my mind, not 

with inheritance or belief but with 

confidence and ease, in talks we'd 

pursue on many themes after breakfast, 

before I would set out for those day-

time and evening distractions of the 

young bachelor, flying down from 

San Francisco once or twice a month. 

His never-doubted interest in one's 

intellectual growth had never expired, 

and not just as an element of paternal 

duty. What was telling, was how that 

motive brought back so clearly to him 

the education he had been given and 

never laid aside, but also never ex-

ercised in such plain sight in years.

It was almost startling to seem to 

sit with him at Cate (then the Santa 

Barbara School for Boys), and re-open 

Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad; or 

bring him back to Twain to take that 

voyage down the river with me, into 

the "Negro question" as it marked our 

past. I found how a single book we might 

read - Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian as 

much as Lord Devlin on Woodrow Wilson’s 

foreign policy, Too Proud to Fight - 

could let us appreciate our strikingly 

sympathetic but distinct sensibilities. 

This pleased him, both in the exertion 

and its evidence, and certainly with

less surprise than the same impressions 

came to me. But it did something else, 

that one could see. It comforted him 

in a project of his own. And we had not 

yet done that. Tone of voice, setting, 

time of life played their part, but 

for me they distinguished less an ex-

ception than a stunning, shining rule, 

that texts are meeting places we can

carry. 

Such a book, I think, has lately been

published and will likely find its way 

into further presentation here, Jonathan

Galassi's new poetry, Left-Handed. I've

already exhibited his translations of 

Leopardi and of Montale, and I've known

him to be one of the great editor-pub-

lishers of his generation. I'd not been 

aware of his poetry.

To anyone who has been interested occa-

sionally in reading this page, I espec-

ially commend these poems, which com-

prise a continuous narrative drawn from
elements of his life. They achieve with 
the reader what Montale foretold for an-
cient intimates, not for self-disclosure
but to unite in a calm harbour of wisdom.
You probably learned it from your father,
that this can be done, and probably you
wish to pass it on.

Eugenio Montale
Riviere
  [extract]
1925
Jonathan Galassi, translation
Collected Poems, 1920-1954
op. cit. 


Jonathan Galassi

Left-Handed

Knopf, 2012©