Un’“apparizione meravigliosa, quasi Inverosimile”: Tracce di musa nei versi di In un giardino ‘italiano’

Montale’s life and poetry are crowded with what critics refer to as figure femminili – so much so that Maria Antonietta Grignani, one of Montale’s finest readers, talks about quaestio de mulieribus. What all these women have in common is their election from persone storiche to persone poetiche in order to fulfil a demanding mission: to save the poet from his male di vivere. This article presents for the first time evidence of yet another female presence. A doctor by profession, a trained violinist and a self-taught literary translator, Edith Farnsworth – from the US, like Irma Brandeis – appears towards the end of Montale’s life, in time however to initiate a personal and poetic relationship that is documented in one of Montale’s finest late poems, In un giardino ‘italiano’