Late Montale

A Nobel laureate’s later poetry, perfect for existing fans of the Italian master and the uninitiated alike. Now in a sparkling new translation for English-language audiences.

Late Montale is a generous selection of the poems that the Nobel laureate Eugenio Montale wrote in the last decade of his life, including many drawn from notebooks he entrusted to his housekeeper, which appear here in English for the first time. In new translations by the American poet George Bradley that carry over all the wit and lucidity of the originals, each poem takes on a fresh immediacy. Together, they form an ideal introduction for readers unfamiliar with these late works, and for readers who have long admired them, a sparkling reminder of their subtle art of disillusion and surprise.

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) was a poet, prose writer, and translator. Born in Genoa, he originally trained as an opera singer and, though he wrote poems as a teenager, turned to poetry more seriously following his military service during World War I and the death of his vocal instructor. Though he only published five collections of poetry in his first fifty years as a writer, he became extremely prolific in his later years, publishing over twenty works, poetry and prose, in his lifetime. He died in Milan.

George Bradley is a poet, editor, and fiction writer. Born in Roslyn, New York, Bradley’s poetry collections include Terms to Be Met (1986), which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Of the Knowledge of Evil (1991), The Fire Fetched Down (1996), Some Assembly Required (2001), and A Few of Her Secrets (2011). He lives in Connecticut.