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Simpatico 279poetics in Anglo-American culture, specifically its romanticassumptions: that the poet is a unified subjectivity freely expressinghis personal experience, and that the poem should therefore becentered on the poetic I, evoking a unique voice, communicating thepoet’s self in transparent language, sustaining a feeling of simpaticoin the translator. Montale’s canonical status in Anglo-Americanwriting rests on his translators’ assimilation of his poetry tomainstream poetics, whereas the postwar experimentalism has beenmarginalized largely because it resists any such assimilation. TheMontale canonized in English is actually a domesticated versionshaped by a poet-oriented aesthetic and realized in the transparentdiscourse of fluent translation.A case in point is Dana Gioia’s version of Montale’s Mottetti, aconsecutively numbered sequence of twenty poems that forms thecenterpiece of the 1939 volume Le occasioni. Montale’scontemporaries found these poems obscure, using the term“hermeticism” (ermetismo) to disparage their typically modernistpoetics of indirection, their recourse to ellipsis, fragmentation,heterogeneity. In an essay from 1950, “Due sciacalli al guinzaglio”(“Two Jackals on a Leash”), Montale answered his critics by claimingthat the “motets” were not obscure, that although individual poemswere written at various times, they constituted “an entirelyunmysterious little autobiographical novel,” in which he deployedsome traditional cultural materials—Dante’s La Vita Nuova, the dolcestil novisti—to represent his intermittent relationship with IrmaBrandeis, an American Dante scholar he encountered in Florence(Montale 1982:305). Anglo-American mainstream poetics privilegesthe poet, so Gioia accepts Montale’s defensive, slyly ironic essay atface value and asserts that the poems “form a unified sequencewhose full meaning and power becomes apparent only when theyare read together” (Montale 1990:11). Any obscurity is onlyapparent, an effect of the equally apparent discontinuity of thenarrative:The sequence recreates isolated moments of insight, stripped oftheir nonessential elements. Everything else in the story is toldby implication, and the reader must participate in thereconstruction of the human drama by projecting his or her ownprivate associations to fill in the missing elements of thenarrative.(ibid.:16, my italics)