Jonathan Galassi

In addition to publishing two volumes of poetry, Morning Run (1998) and North Street (2000), Jonathan Galassi is an eminent translator of Italian poetry. He has spent over 25 years studying Eugenio Montale’s poetry and has published several collections of Montale’s work, including Eugenio Montale: The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays (1982) and Collected Poems 1920–1954 (1998). Reviewing Collected Poems for the New York Times, Nicholas Jenkins found Galassi’s translation “faithful to the weird lexical discords in Montale’s writing, to its compactness, to its odd combination of verbal vigor and imaginative obscurity, to its often exquisitely discreet avoidance of rhyme”; the London Review of Books pronounced Galassi’s rendering “unlikely to be superseded for a long time.”