Meriggiare pallido e assorto

Blue sky and blinding light... Though I'm in the north of China, this sharp and cutting white light and the gleaming on the sea has reminded me of my home town and its thin fresh air blown clean by a northerly pine scented wind.

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Meriggiare pallido e assorto (Eugenio Montale)

Meriggiare pallido e assorto
presso un rovente muro d'orto,
ascoltare tra i pruni e gli sterpi
schiocchi di merli, frusci di serpi.
Nelle crepe del suolo o su la veccia
spiar le file di rosse formiche
ch'ora si rompono ed ora s'intrecciano
a sommo di minuscole biche.

Osservare tra frondi il palpitare
lontano di scaglie di mare
mentre si levano tremuli scricchi
di cicale dai calvi picchi.

E andando nel sole che abbaglia
sentire con triste meraviglia
com'è tutta la vita e il suo travaglio
in questo seguitare una muraglia
che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia.


And here the English version

Meriggiare pallido e assorto by Eugenio Montale (Nobel price 1975)
translated from the Italian by Millicent Bell

To slump at noon thought-sick and pale
under the scorching garden wall,
to hear a snake scrape past, the blackbirds creak
in the dry thorn thicket, the brushwood brake.

Between tufts of vetch, in the cracks of the ground
to spy out the ants' long lines of march;
now they reach the top of a crumb-sized mound,
the lines break, they stumble into a ditch.

To observe between the leaves the pulse
beneath the sea's scaly skin,
while from the dry cliffs the cicada calls
like a knife on the grinder's stone.

And going into the sun's blaze
once more, to feel, with sad surprise
how all life and its battles
is in this walk alongside a wall
topped with sharp bits of glass from broken bottles.


Millicent Bell, Professor Emerita of English at Boston University, is a literary scholar and critic.