What does the discovery of an unpublished work by Montale at the University of Pavia teach us

There are plenty of reasons for fascination in the discovery, by a professor from Kyoto University, of an unpublished Montalian manuscript at the Manuscript Center of the University of Pavia (Luca Mastrantonio talked about it on Sette). It is fascinating to discover how every author is bottomless, and that writing is a well from which to continue extracting material, since its root is found in an indefinite point of the soul, which ultimately remains unattainable and which no publication will ever be able to exhaust.

However, it is also fascinating to realize that, honestly, even Montale sleeps and writes occasional ugly poems: that is, that it is not enough for some verses to be written by Montale (he did not publish them, in fact) in order to become worthy of a publication that goes beyond the interest in philological completeness. Above all, however, given that apparently the folder of Montalian papers had been donated to the Manuscript Center in 2004, it is fascinating to ask ourselves what exactly they do at the University of Pavia, if in order to discover the unpublished material, twenty years later, a scholar from Japan.