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Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) |
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Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1975. Eugenio Montale made his breakthrough as one of the chief architects of modern Italian poetry in the 1920s. The Italian writer Italo Calvino has called Montale's La bufera e altro (1956) "the finest book to have emerged from the Second World War". In his work, Montale focused on the dilemmas of modern history, philosophy, love, and human existence. Montale was also a student of music-especially bel canto. "The man who was preching on the Crescent Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa. He was the youngest of five
children of Domenico Montale, who ran an import business, and
Giuseppina (Ricci) Montale. His formal education was cut short by ill
heath. Montale spent his summers at the family villa in a small village
nearby the Ligurian Riviera, and later images from its harsh landscape
found their way into his poetry. Originally Montale aspired to be an
opera singer, a baritone, dreaming to "deput in the part of Valentine in Gounod's Faust".
However, Montale also was interested in literature, especially Italian
classics, French fiction, and such philosophers as Arthur Schopenhauer,
Benedetto Croce, whom he regarded as "master of clarity", and Henri
Bergson. During World War I Montale served as an infantry officer on the
Austrian front. Upon to his return to his family home, Montale took up
singing again. After the death of his voice teacher, Ernesto Sivori, in 1923, he
abandoned his operatic hopes, and began his literary career by writing
for several publications. He wrote often about musical matters and attended the La Scala opera performances. Montale moved in 1927 to Florence, where he worked briefly for a
publishing house. In 1928, he was appointed director of the Gabinetto
Viesseux research library. As a critic, he helped along with James
Joyce the writer Italo Svevo (1861-1928)
to
gain critical attention; Montale was the first Italian to champion this
curiously neglected novelist and essayist, whose real name was Ettore
Schmitz. He was a manufacturer of marine paints. They met in Milan in
1926. He had business dealing's with Montale's father; "there was
always an odor of turpentine about our relationship," Montale said. ('Introduction,' The Second Life of Art: Selected essays of Eugenio Montale, edited and translated by Jonathan Galassi, New York: The Ecco Press, 1982, p. xv) Ossi di seppia (1925, Bones of the Cuttlefish), his first collection of poetry, was published by the anti-fascist Piero Gobetti; Montale also signed in the same year Croce's Manifesto of anti-Fascist intellectuals. Ossi di seppia included several poems about his childhood's Liguria and its scenery. In the following collections, such as Le occasioni (1939, The Occasions), Montale's expression grew more subjective and introspective. "Clizia" has been identified with Irma Brandeis, a
Jewish-American scholar of Dante, whom Montale met in the 1930s. She
appeared as Montale's Beatrice or Laura in several poem – "Look up
again, / up high, it is your fate, Clizia, you / who, changed, still
harbour that unchained love". ('Hitler spring,' Selected Poems of Eugenio Montale, p. 109) With his difficult, pessimistic, and introspective early works Montale was superficially associated with his contemporaries Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, representatives of hermeticism in poetry. Loosely, the term denotes obscure, difficult poetry, in which the symbolism and images are subjective and the words have emotionally suggestive power. Montale once noted, "The poet does not know-often he will never know-whom he really writes for." Montale was always an opponent of fascism, but he showed
understanding to Ezra Pound, in spite of Pound's sympathies for the
Fascist regime. In 1938 Montale was dismissed from his cultural post
for refusing to join the Fascist Party. His poems were not included in
school syllabuses. Italo Calvino
mentions in his essay 'Eugenio Montale, 'Forse un mattino andando''
(1976), that he learned several of them by heart in the early 1940s.
Montale withdrew from public life and spent the following years
translating into Italian such writers as William Shakespeare, T.S.
Eliot, whom he once characterized as "a poet-musician", Herman
Melville, Eugene O`Neill, and others. He was especially impressed by
Eliot's The Waste Land. Noteworhy, Ossia di seppia,
which had a profound effect on Italian modernism, has been linked in
many to this work. Eliot had caught the pessimism and
mood of confusion felt by many between the world wars, but whereas he
remained for many readers inaccessible, Montale was more open,
and also expressed feelings of love. Politicians he despised, and he
was sarcastic about every "cleric, red or black". Eliot ranked Montale as "a man of letters of very high
distinction." He had met Montale two or three times, and published a
translation of Montale's 'Arsenio' in an early
number of The Criterion. When Montale applied for the Chair of
Italian at Bedford Collage, in 1948, Eliot stated in his letter to the
Academic Registrar, University of London, "I can only say that he is a
very agreeable and cultivated person and that he has, I should think,
quite sufficient knowledge of English." (The Letters of T. S. Eliot Volume 6: 1932–1933, edited by Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016, pp. 352-353) After the war Montale moved to Milan, where he contributed to the literary page for Corriere della sera, the most influential Italian daily newspaper. He wrote among others about Ettore Schmitz, who became known under the name Italo Svevo, W.H. Auden, a "cosmopolitan poet in every sense of the word," Emily Dickinson, "a virile soul", and Henry Furst, an unknown poet, who published his poetry in private editions. Montale reviewed almost all important new Italian books and his opinions influenced other reviewers. In spite of Pound's sympathies for the Fascist regime, he considered Pound a profoundly good man. "Montale is an ardent defender of simplicity and clarity and an enemy of irrationalist methodologies. He thinks of criticism largely as "reading," lettura—I would say "close reading"—though this close reading must be supplemented by what he calls "framing," meaning an interest in history and in the social milieu, which Montale conceives in the widest terms as the whole of Western civilization. This criticism demands from the critic a personal engagement and even justifies a serious participation in contemporary life." (A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950: Volume 8: French Italian and Spanish Criticism, 1900–1950 by René Wellek, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1955, p. 302) Montale's third major collection, La bufera e altro (The Storm and Other Poems), drew from the experiences of World War II and post-war anxieties. Hitler, Hell's messenger meets in 'The Hitler Spring' Mussolini in Florence, and the poet and his muse, Clizia, exchange long farewells. The poem is concluded with an apocalyptic vision: "Perhaps the sirens and the tolling / that hail the monsters on the eve / of their pandemonium already blend / with the sound let loose from the sky that descends and conquers— / with the breath of a dawn that may rise tomorrow for all / white, but without wings of terror, / over the sunbleached rockbeds of the south." (translated by Jonathan Galassi, Poetry. Italian Poetry Since World War II, Vol. 56, No. 4, 1989, p. 11) When Montale's earliest poems were mostly set in Liguria, from Le occasioni and La bufera e altro Montale widened his angle of view and range of expression. Satura
(1962), Montale's fourth collection experimented with dialogue,
journalistic notation, aphorism, commentary, and half-strangled song.
'Satura' is Latin for a stew or mixed dish. In such poems as
'Gotterdammerung' and 'Non-Magical Realism', he satirized the
proliferation of ideologies, which promised more than they could
accomplish: "Twilight began when man thought / himself of greater
dignity than moles or crickets." ('Götterdämmerung,' The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale, 1925-1977, translated by William Arrowsmith, edited by Rosanna Warren, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012, p. 331) In 1967 Montale became a member-for-life of the Italian Senate. He
died in Milan on September 12, 1981. Montale was married to Drusilla
Tanzi; she had separated from her husband in the late 1930s, but
Montale and Tanzi were not married until in 1958, after her husband
died. The couple had no children. In Xenia (1966) Montale dealt
with love and marriage. His wife, called Mosca (fly), had died in 1963,
and in the title poem of the collection he wrote: "They say mine /
is a poetry of unpertainingness. / But if it was yours it was someone's: /
yours, who are no longer form, but essence." ('Xenia (1964-1966),' translated from the Italian by Frank Kermode and Camillo Pennati, The New York Review, December 19, 1968 issue) In his work Montale attempted to move his expression to new directions and create new myths. He rejected early on D'Annunzian rhetoric, but struggled with the heritage of Dante and Petrarch. Like Picasso, who said, "I do not seek. I find", Montale remarked, "I do not go in search of poetry. I wait for poetry to visit me." (quoted in Eugenio Montale: A Critical Study of His Poetry, Prose, and Criticism by G. Singh, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973, p. 10) Montale developed a precise style that mixed archaic words with scientific terms and idioms from the vernacular. "Montale was the poet of exactness, of justified lexical choices," Italo Calvino has said. Carlo Bo has argued that Montale's poetry betrays a "contradiction between a lucid and ruthless cruelty and a very pure feeling of love". Montale's newspaper articles have been published with other things in Fuori di casa (1969). His last books, Satura, and his diaries in verse, Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973), Quaderno di quattro anni (1977), were closer to everyday life and utilized autobiographical material. For further reading: Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale by Joseph Cary (1969); Eugenio Montale by Glauco Gambon (1972); Eugenio Montale: A Critical Study of His Poetry, Prose and Criticism by G. Singh (1973); Eugenio Montale: The Private Language of Poetry by G. Almansi and B. Merry (1977); Eugenio Montale: A Poet on the Edge by Rebecca J. West (1981); Eugenio Montale's Poetry: A Dream in Reason's Presence by Glauco Gambon (1982); Montale and the Occasion of Poetry by Claire de C.L. Huffman (1983); Eugenio Montale by Jared Becker (1986); Montale, Debussy, and Modernism by Gian-Paolo Biasin (1989); Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba Ungaretti Montale by Jonathan Cary (rev. ed. 1993); Montale's Mestiere Vile: The Elective Translations from English of the 1930s and 1940s by George Talbot (1995); 'Montale, Eugenio,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, vol. 3, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Eugenio Montale: The Poetry of Later Years by Éanna Ó Ceallacháin (2001); Poetry and Intertextuality: Eugenio Montale's Later Verse by John Butcher (2007); Eugenio Montale, the Fascist Storm and the Jewish Sunflower by David Michael Hertz (2013); Eliot e Montale: 1916-1925: affinità indipendenti by Giancarlo Dall'Olio (2014); 'Eugenio Montale: translation, Ricreazioni, and Il Quaderno di traduzioni,' in Modern Italian Poets: Translators of the Impossible by Jacob S.D. Blakesley (2014); Montale, the Modernist by Giuseppe Gazzola (MMXVI); Eugenio Montale: a Poetics of Mourning by Adele Bardazzi (2022) - Suomeksi Montalelta on julkaistu runoja lehdissä, antologiassa Tuhat laulujen vuotta, toim. Aale Tynni (1973) ja 21 Nobel-runoilijaa (1976). Vuonna 2018 Kustannusliike Parkko julkaisi laajan 300 sivuisen kokoelman Tuo minulle auringonkukka = Portami il girasole: valitut runot 1918-1980 (suom. Hannimari Heino) Selected works:
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