[Kessler is an American educator, poet, short story writer, translator, and screenwriter. In the following excerpt from the transcript of a radio broadcast, he states that Montale is more "outspoken and direct" in It Depends: A Poet's Notebook than in his previous works.]

We have still among us today the great Italian poet, Engenio Montale, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975. And, perhaps it's not surprising that he continues to produce poetry that is full of interest and power, although he keeps changing its qualities and its direction. Not surprising, because of the nature of this great poet. Ever since his first book came out in 1925, Montale's most recurrent theme has been the mediation of our present lives, that is, our personal identities, by our links to the past. Of course, one has to have had a past, and Italy is the European country par excellence with a past. I suppose that there is another, and somewhat ironical, aspect to this situation of Italy in our Western Civilization's heritage: for Italy is also one of the last Western nations to have entered the Modern Age, for it was only unified as a nation during the past century, lagging long behind even Germany. As anyone who has travelled and lived in Italy knows, it is a very varied and very complex society, and Italians are Milanese, Venetians, Tuscans, Abruzzese and Sicilians, for example, before they are Italians. And in fact, Italy has a long way to go, perhaps luckily so, before the people of its many regions become, if they ever do, more or less one people.

At any rate, there are extremes of contrast always present to the minds of Italian artists, ranging from the most primitive and poverty-stricken backwardness to the most contemporary and sophisticated mentalities. And even in the hills of Sicily, or the mountains of the Marche, the poorest peasants live among the ruins and relics of what was Classical Roman Civilization, bad before Roman, Etruscan and Greek. Not only is the past so rich and complex, but the swiftly-changing 20th Century can be seen as its mirror opposite, or even contrary: unstable and beset by extraordinary pressures. For a meditative poet like Montale, whose lifelong effort has been to express the vision of the constancies of Italian life, and to stabilize himself in order to offer a spiritual structure to the mind of our time, or, rather, to the diverse minds of our time, the challenge has been enormous, and it is what has made his poetry what it is. And Montale, being a great poet, has been seeking constancies to live by. Therefore, during the long aberration of Italian Facism, from 1922 to 1945, the period of his principal works, he stood firmly opposed to the regime, its theatrical impostures and vanities, its parody of Socialist ideals, and its essentially vulgar shoddiness and had to live outside of its force unlike our American Ezra Pound, who, living in Italy, believed that Mussolini's regime was really the modern way to go, and that its delirious propaganda of energy, athleticism and Futurist worship of power, speed, and technological brutality was the promise of the new day for Europe. As Montale remarks in his new book, we find that "precariousness (is) the muse of our time."

Montale's new book is called It Depends: A Poet's Notebook. It was published in 1977 in Italy, with the title Quaderno di quattro anni, or, The Four Years' Notebook, to translate it roughly, when Montale was in his 82nd year.

I can summarize the thrust of these 75 pages of poems by saying that whereas Montale was always a subtle, dense, rich and rare poet of deep meditative vision, he has, in his old age, become most casual, most outspoken and direct in his manners. Although a collection of what is called poems out of his writing notebooks over four years would seem to be private jottings, what we do in fact have here is a very various collection of humorous, critical, sardonic and often wittily editorial comments on contemporary life by a mind that has grown ever more clear, ever more direct and forceful. It is the poetry of old age; but every bit of it is the consequence of a poetic life lived in the moral and intellectual realm. When Yeats, for example, entered old age, he was quite different. Yeats spoke up at one point, and declared that it was time to be "making the soul," and his poetry became increasingly passionate, sensuous, and was built up on and out of the extreme tension of trying to resolve the realms of the flesh and the spirit into a unity. Montale, coming from a land of crystalline light, and not from the dark and moist foggy ambiguities of Northern Europe, is quite another sort of poet in old age, as though his Classical temperament and inheritance had accepted the identity of flesh and spirit from the outset. So that, in old age, all that passionate confusion and struggle had long ago been outgrown; he had long ago found his satisfactions and fulfillment in love and marriage, in life and the political struggle: that is, he had grown up and through his life. When one regards Yeats, however, one sees a poet who remained in many ways adolescent and terribly incomplete, unfulfilled, until he entered old age, whereupon there was the desperation of having to begin to live as a man, a whole man, when there was hardly any time left at all. Montale's character, in contrast, has always been marked by a certain Italian kind of integrity and sobriety; and his efforts have been to find a way to live and be a man in a world that denies both being and humanity.

Now, in these notebook poems of his late 70's and early 80's, Montale discourses quite informally and freely: we see here the results of his quest for modernity, and for being here now, which is fundamentally a Classical kind of way of looking at our moments of life, Classical and perhaps even pagan. He can speak through wit, pun and parody and sardonicism, he can speak, not oracularly and desperately as Yeats did, and as Roethke did, or even tragically and despondently as Thomas Hardy did, but directly out of the fullness of his life. He can look at the present, and, being old, call up odd vagrant memories from the remote past. His voice is even, his eye cold and clear. He remembers, for instance, Aspasia:

Late in the night
men used to enter her room
by the window. She lived on the ground floor.
I had named her Aspasia and she was pleased.
Then she left us. She worked as a barmaid,
a hairdresser and other things. It rarely happened
that I met her. But when I did,
I called out Aspasia! and she
would smile without stopping. We were
the same age, she must be long since dead.
When I enter Hell,
almost from force of habit I shall shout
Aspasia at the first shade that smiles.
Naturally she will keep on walking.
We shall never know who was and who wasn't
that butterfly who had just a name
chosen by me.

And in another poem, the poet prays, with devastating irony:

Protect me
my silent custodians
because the sun is turning cold
and the last leaf of the laurel
was dusty
and couldn't be used
even for the roast en casserole—
protect me from this
halfpenny film
which is being projected
before me

and presumes to involve me
as an actor or extra
not provided for by the script—
protect me even
from your own presence
almost always useless
and inopportune
protect me
from your terrifying absences—
from the void which you create
around me
protect me from the Muses
whom I saw roosting
or reduced to their half busts
in order to hide better
from my ghost's step—
protect me or better still
ignore me
when I enter the urn
I have been praying for for years—
protect from the face/farce
which gained me entry into the illustrated Larousse
only to be omitted from
the new edition—
protect me
from those who beseech your presence
around my catafalque—
protect me with your forgetfulness
if it can help me keep on my feet
poor household gods always locked
in your dubious identity—
protect me without
anyone knowing about it
because the sun is turning cold
and he who knows it is
maliciously pleased
o my little gods
third-rate divinities
driven out of the ether.

And finally, though there are dozens of short poems that are deceptively simple, with the deadly simplicity of old age's devastating and ruthless probity, here is an example of what I mean … :

The dead poets sleep peacefully
under their epitaphs
and they only start with indignation
when a worthless writer
recalls their names.
And so do the flowers thrown into the rubbish heap
if someone should pick them up by chance.
They were on their way
to their mother but now
they are on their way to no one
or to a bunch held together by a string
or by silver paper and to the nearby garbage can
to the joy not even of a child or a madman.

To recur once again to the old Yeats, in one of his most famous poems, "Lapis Lazuli," the poet speaks of ancient sages who are full of laughter. Yeats was not really, at the end, full of laughter, I think. But the gaiety of which Yeats dreamed, that gaiety is actually here in Montale, and even these private, these notebook poems, so called, are full of that strange, and really almost ineffable gaiety of the very old poet.