Jonathan Galassi’s last two books were translations of Montale: Otherwise: Last and First Poems of Eugenio Montale (1984) and The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays of Eugenio Montale (1982). Yet Galassi’s poetry bears little resemblance to that of the great Italian modernist poet. There are similarities of phrasing and diction, even some conscious echoes: in Galassi’s “Against Earrings,” for example, the lines, “Don’t tonight, don’t wear/perfume or put up your hair . . . . Don’t you know I’d know your face,/its ivory veiled by your hair,” are obviously adapted from Montale’s “The Strands of Hair,” which begins, “Don’t push back the strands of hair which veil/ Your child-like forehead.” But on the whole, Morning Run, especially its first two sections (the book has three), seems to be quite at odds with Montale’s aesthetic disposition.

Montale’s taste for symbolism and allusion, and for objective correlatives that reflect internal emotional states, made his poetry appear anti-rational to many. (Its detractors labeled it obscure, which it isn’t.) Montale’s rejection of straight realism came in part from the “total disharmony” the Italian poet felt since childhood “with the reality that surrounded” him, as he put it in one of the essays Galassi has translated. This disharmony was no doubt intensified by the Italian political climate of the Twenties and Thirties, the period when Montale’s first poems were published. (Later in life, Montale spoke of a “necessity for realism”; thus, his late poetry is declarative and ironic—quite unlike his early