Eugenio Montale (1896-1981)
Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator who won the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1975. 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.
"Happiness, for you we walk on a knife edge. To the eyes you are a flickering
light, to the feet, thin ice that cracks; and so may no one touch you who
loves you." (from 'Felicità raggiunta')
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, aspiring to "deput in the part of
Valentine in Gounod's Faust," but he 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 he 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 in 1923, he abandoned his operatic
hopes, and started his literary career by writing for several publications.
A white dove has landed me
among headstones, under spires where the sky nests.
Dawns and lights in air; I've loved the sun,
colors of honey, now I crave the dark,
I want the smoldering fire, this tomb
that doesn't soar, your stare that dares it to.
(from Collected Poems, 1920-1954, trans. by Jonathan Galassi)
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. His first collection of poetry, OSSI
DI SEPPIA (1925, Bones of the Cuttlefish), was published by the anti-fascist
Piero Gobetti. It included several poems about his childhood's Liguria and its
scenery. In the following collections, such as OCCASIONI (1939, The Occasions),
Montale's expression grew more subjective and introspective. The love lyric of
The Occasions are about "Clizia", who 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 poems.
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, but 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, which he translated into Italian. It
caught the pessimism and mood of confusion felt by many between the world wars,
but whereas Eliot 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 knew Montale's work and
published a translation of Montale's 'Arsenio' in an early number of The
Criterion.
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." (
René Wellek in A History of Modern Criticism 1750-1950, vol. 8, 1992)
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: "and a
shadowy Satan will disembark on the bank of the Thames, the Hudson, the Seine,
shaking his bitumen wings half-worn by the effort, to tell you: the time has
come". 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, the tolling
bells that greet the monsters on the evening of their witches' Sabbath are
already mingling with the sound that, unloosened from heaven, descends,
conquers, - with the breathing of a dawn that tomorrow, for everyone, breaks
again, white, but without wings of horror, over the scorched wadis of the
south." (trans. by George Kay) 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."
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
my poetry / is a poetry of unbelonging. / But if it was yours it was someone's,
/ yours, who are no longer form, but essence."
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." 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), DIARIO DI QUATTRO ANNINI (1977), were closer to everyday life and
used autobiographical material.
For further reading: Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale by
Joseph Cary (1969); Eugenio Montale by G. Gambon (1972); Eugenio Montale: A
Critical Study 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 R. West (1981); Eugenio Montale's Poetry by G. Gambon (1982); Montale and
the Occasion of Poetry by C. Huffman (1983); Eugenio Montale by J. Becker
(1986); Denussy, and Modernism by G.P. 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); 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) - See also: Alba de Céspedes - Suomeksi
Montalelta on julkaistu runoja antologiassa Tuhat laulujen vuotta, toim. Aale
Tynni (1973) ja 21 Nobel-runoilijaa (1976)
Selected works:
* Ossi di seppia, 1925 - Cuttlefish Bones
* La casa dei doganieri e altre poesie, 1932
* Occasioni, 1939 - The Occasions
* Finisterre, 1943 (Land´s End)
* La bufera e altro, 1956 - The Storm and Other Things
* La farfalla di Dinard, 1956 - The Butterfly of Dinard (trans. by G. Singh)
* Poems from Eugenio Montale, 1959
* Accordi e pastelli, 1962 (Harmony and Pastels)
* Satura, 1962
* Poesie/Poems, 1964
* Selected Poems of Eugenio Montale, 1965 (ed. by Glauco Camson)
* Il colpevole, 1966 (The Offender)
* Auto da fé, 1966
* Xenia, 1966
* Provisional Conclusions, 1970
* Xenia, 1970
* The Butterfly of Dinard, 1971
* Satura, 1971 (trans. by William Arrowsmith)
* Diario del ´71 e del ´72, 1973
* Mottetti, 1973
* Selected Poems, 1975
* New Poems, 1976
* Poet in Our Time, 1976 (trans. by Alastair Hamilton)
* Quaderno ni quattro anni, 1977
* Xenia; And, Motets, 1977
* The Second Life of Art, 1982 (ed. by Jonathan Galassi)
* Otherwise: Last and First Poems of Eugenio Montale, 1984 (trans. by Jonathan
Galassi)
* Tutte Le Poesie, 1990
* Mottetti: Poems of Love, 1990
* Cuttlefish Bones: 1920-1927, 1994
* Lettere E Poesie a Bianca E Francesco Messina, 1923-1925, 1995
* Collected Poems, 1920-1954: Bilingual Edition, 1998 (trans. by Jonathan
Galassi)
* L'arte Di Leggere: Una Conversazione Svizzera, 1998
* Poesia Travestita, 1999