Two Jackals on a Leash

Jamie McKendrick

  • Eugenio Montale: Collected Poems 1920-54 translated by Jonathan Galassi
    Carcanet, 626 pp, £29.00, November 1998, ISBN 1 85754 425 0

The entomologist Henri Fabre tells how the cicada’s song is produced by its ‘musical thighs’ and how in Provençal folklore the source of the sound is thought to be the insect’s ‘mirrors’, although he points out that this ‘dry membrane coloured like a soap bubble’ actually dampens the sound. In Provence a singer out of breath or a poet without inspiration is said to have broken mirrors. In ‘Reading Montale’, an essay appended to his translation of the poet’s first three books, Jonathan Galassi considers the old and especially Mediterranean association of poet and cicada and its recurrence in Montale’s poems.

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