Carmen League

This research aims to recover a private code between Montale and Irma Brandeis that spontaneously takes shape in their correspondence, gradually becoming structured through the recurrence and rewriting of the same figures, until it crystallizes in the poet’s verses.

The word, encrypted, is the meeting place, a site of creation and revelation: Dante as a shared cultural reference, the English language, and Irma Brandeis’s translations, published or unpublished, are an ever-present underlying watermark, a “basso continuo” (the same sound that, for Montale, Eliot represented).

Brandeis’s Dante becomes fundamental and, in fact, through lux-in-tenebris, Montale retraces Jacob’s Ladder via Brandeis’s book, making Irma Brandeis the first step of the ladder that leads to God.