Eugenio Montale
Encyclopedia
Eugenio Montale was an Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.

Early years

Montale was born in Genoa
Genoa
Genoa |Ligurian]] Zena ; Latin and, archaically, English Genua) is a city and an important seaport in northern Italy, the capital of the Province of Genoa and of the region of Liguria....

. His family were chemical products traders (his father furnished Italo Svevo
Italo Svevo
Aron Ettore Schmitz , better known by the pseudonym Italo Svevo, was an Italian writer and businessman, author of novels, plays, and short stories.- Biography :...

's firm). The poet's niece, Bianca Montale, in her Cronaca famigliare ("Family Chronicle") of 1986 portrays the family's common characteristics as "nervous fragility, shyness, concision in speaking, a tendency to see the worst in every event, a certain sense of humour".

Montale was the youngest of six sons. He recalled:

We had a large family. My brothers went to the scagno ["office" in Genoese]. My only sister had a university education, but I had not such a possibility. In many families the unspoken arrangement existed that the youngest was released from the task to keep up the family's name.


In 1915 Montale worked as an accountant, but was left free to follow his literary passion, frequenting the city's libraries and attending his sister Marianna's private philosophy lessons. He also studied opera singing with the baritone
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...

 Ernesto Sivori.

Montale was therefore a self-taught man. Growing up, his imagination was caught by several writers, including Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...

, and by studies of foreign languages (especially English), as well as the landscapes of the Levante ("Eastern") Liguria
Liguria
Liguria is a coastal region of north-western Italy, the third smallest of the Italian regions. Its capital is Genoa. It is a popular region with tourists for its beautiful beaches, picturesque little towns, and good food.-Geography:...

, where he spent holidays with his family.

During World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, as a member of the Military Academy of Parma
Parma
Parma is a city in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna famous for its ham, its cheese, its architecture and the fine countryside around it. This is the home of the University of Parma, one of the oldest universities in the world....

, Montale asked to be sent to the front. After a brief war experience as an infantry officer in Vallarsa
Vallarsa
Vallarsa is a comune in Trentino in the northern Italian region Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, located about 30 km south of Trento...

 and Val Pusteria, in 1920 he came back home.

Poetic works

Montale wrote a relatively small number of works. Four anthologies of short lyrics, a quaderno of poetry translation, plus several books of prose translations, two books of literary criticism and one of fantasy prose. Alongside his imaginative work he was a constant contributor to Italy's most important newspaper, the Corriere della Sera
Corriere della Sera
The Corriere della Sera is an Italian daily newspaper, published in Milan.It is among the oldest and most reputable Italian newspapers. Its main rivals are Rome's La Repubblica and Turin's La Stampa.- History :...

.

The rise of the fascist regime
Italian Fascism
Italian Fascism also known as Fascism with a capital "F" refers to the original fascist ideology in Italy. This ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party which ruled the Italian...

 exerted a profound influence on Montale's work, especially in his first poetry collection Ossi di seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones"), which appeared in 1925: as an antifascist, he felt detached from contemporary life and found solace and refuge in the solitude of nature.
A famous poem of Ossi di seppia ends with these two verses:
Codesto solo oggi possiamo dirti,

ciò che non siamo, ciò che non vogliamo.

(Only this is what we can tell you today,

that which we are not, that which we do not want.)

The Mediterranean landscape of Montale's native Liguria was a strong presence in these early poems: they gave him a sort of "personal reclusion" in face of the depressing events around him. These poems emphasise his personal solitude and empathy with the "little" and "insignificant" things around him, or with its horizon, the sea. According to Montale, nature is "rough, scanty, dazzling". In a world filled with defeat and despair, nature alone seemed to possess dignity, the same that the reader experiences in reading his poems.

Anticonformism of the new poetry

Montale moved to Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....

 in 1927 to work as editor for the publisher Bemporad. Florence was the cradle of the Italian poetry of that age, with works like the Canti orfici by Dino Campana
Dino Campana
Dino Campana was an Italian visionary poet. His fame rests on his only published book of poetry, the Canti orfici , as well as his wild and erratic personality, including his ill-fated love affair with Sibilla Aleramo...

 (1914) and the first lyrics by Ungaretti
Giuseppe Ungaretti
Giuseppe Ungaretti was an Italian modernist poet, journalist, essayist, critic and academic. A leading representative of the experimental trend known as Ermetismo , he was one of the most prominent contributors to 20th century Italian literature. Influenced by symbolism, he was briefly aligned...

 for the review Lacerba. Other poets like Umberto Saba
Umberto Saba
Umberto Poli was an Italian poet and novelist, born in the cosmopolitan Mediterranean port of Trieste when it was the fourth largest city of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Poli assumed the nom de plume "Saba" in 1910, and his name was officially changed to Umberto Saba in 1928. From 1919 he was the...

 and Vincenzo Cardarelli
Vincenzo Cardarelli
Vincenzo Cardarelli, pseudonym of Nazareno Caldarelli was an Italian journalist, writer and poet.Cardarelli was born in Corneto, Lazio, to a family of Marche origin. His studies were irregular and he tried different jobs...

 had been highly praised by the Florentine publishers. In 1929 Montale was asked to be chairman of the Gabinetto Vieusseux
Gabinetto Vieusseux
The Gabinetto Scientifico Letterario G. P. Vieusseux, founded in 1819 by Giovan Pietro Vieusseux, a merchant from Geneva, is a library in Florence, Italy...

 Library, a post from which he was expelled in 1938 by the fascist government. In the meantime he collaborated to the magazine Solaria, and (starting in 1927) frequented the literary café Le Giubbe Rosse
Giubbe Rosse
Caffè Giubbe Rosse is a café in Piazza della Repubblica , Florence. The giubbe rosse of its name are the "Red Shirts" of Garibaldi's forces during the Risorgimento, a badge of honour for liberal Italians, reflected in the silent allusion of the waiters' red jackets.The café has a long-standing...

 ("Red Jackets") on the Piazza Vittoria
Piazza della Repubblica
Piazza della Repubblica is a semi-circular piazza in Rome, at the summit of the Viminal Hill, next to the Termini station. On it is to be found Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri...

 (now Piazza della Repubblica). Visiting often several times a day, he became a central figure among a group of writers there, including Carlo Emilio Gadda
Carlo Emilio Gadda
Carlo Emilio Gadda was an Italian writer and poet. He belongs to the tradition of the language innovators, writers that played with the somewhat stiff standard pre-war Italian language, and added elements of dialects, technical jargon and wordplay.-Biography:Gadda was a practising engineer from...

, Arturo Loria and Elio Vittorini
Elio Vittorini
Elio Vittorini was an Italian writer and novelist. He was a contemporary of Cesare Pavese and an influential voice in the modernist school of novel writing. His best-known work is the anti-fascist novel Conversations in Sicily, for which he was jailed when it was published in 1941. The first U.S...

 (all founders of the magazine). He wrote for almost all the important literary magazines of the time.

Though hindered by financial problems and the literary and social conformism imposed by the authorities, Montale published in Florence his finest anthology, Le occasioni ("Occasions", 1939). From 1933 to 1938 he had a deep relationship with Irma Brandeis
Irma Brandeis
Irma Brandeis was a Jewish-American scholar of Dante Alighieri. Her work The Ladder of Vision was acclaimed as a breakthrough in Dantean studies, upon its publication in the 1960s....

, a Jewish-American scholar of Dante who occasionally visited Italy in short stints before returning to the United States. After falling in love with Brandeis, Montale represented her as a mediatrix
Mediatrix
Mediatrix in Roman Catholic Mariology refers to the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary as a mediator in the salvation process. It is a separate concept from Co-Redemptrix....

 figure like Dante's Beatrice
Beatrice Portinari
Beatrice "Bice" di Folco Portinari was a Florentine woman known as the muse of the poet Dante Alighieri. Beatrice was the principal inspiration for Dante's Vita Nuova, and also appears as his guide in the Divine Comedy in the last book, Paradiso, and in the last four canti of Purgatorio...

. Le occasioni contains numerous allusions to Brandeis, here called Clizia (a senhal). Franco Fortini
Franco Fortini
Franco Fortini was the pseudonym of Franco Lattes, , an Italian poet, writer, translator, essayist, literary critic and Marxist intellectual.- Life :...

 judged Montale's Ossi di seppia and Le occasioni the highest point of 20th century Italian poetry
Italian literature
Italian literature is literature written in the Italian language, particularly within Italy. It may also refer to literature written by Italians or in Italy in other languages spoken in Italy, often languages that are closely related to modern Italian....

.

T.S. Eliot, who shared Montale's admiration for Dante, was an important influence on his poetry at this time; in fact, the new poems of Eliot were shown to Montale by Mario Praz
Mario Praz
Mario Praz KBE was an Italian-born critic of art and literature, and a scholar of English literature. His best-known book, The Romantic Agony , was a comprehensive survey of the erotic and morbid themes that characterized European authors of the late 18th and 19th centuries...

, then teaching in Liverpool. The concept of the objective correlative
Objective correlative
An objective correlative is a literary term referring to a symbolic article used to provide explicit, rather than implicit, access to such traditionally inexplicable concepts as emotion or colour.- Origin of terminology :Popularized by T. S...

 used by Montale in his poetry, was probably influenced by T. S. Eliot. In 1948, for Eliot's sixtieth birthday, Montale contributed a celebratory essay entitled "Eliot and Ourselves" to a biblio-symposium published to mark the occasion.

Disharmony with the world

From 1948 to his death, Montale lived in Milan. As a contributor to the Corriere della Sera he was music
Music
Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

 editor and reported from abroad, including Palestine, where he went as a reporter to follow Pope Paul VI
Pope Paul VI
Paul VI , born Giovanni Battista Enrico Antonio Maria Montini , reigned as Pope of the Catholic Church from 21 June 1963 until his death on 6 August 1978. Succeeding Pope John XXIII, who had convened the Second Vatican Council, he decided to continue it...

's voyage there. His works as a journalist are collected in Fuori di casa ("Out of Home", 1969).

La bufera e altro ("The Storm and Other Things") was published in 1956 and marks the end of Montale's most acclaimed poetry. Here his figure Clizia is joined by La Volpe ("the Fox"), based on the young poetess Maria Luisa Spaziani
Maria Luisa Spaziani
Maria Luisa Spaziani is an Italian poet.She was born in Turin in 1924. At nineteen, Spaziani founded the review Il dado, working with collaborators such as Vasco Pratolini, Sandro Penna and Vincenzo Ciaffi. Virginia Woolf sent her a chapter of her novel The Waves, autographed to Alla piccola...

 with whom Montale had an affair during the 1950s.

His later works are Xenia (1966), Satura (1971) and Diario del '71 e del '72 (1973). Montale's later poetry is wry and ironic, musing on the critical reaction to his earlier works and on the constantly changing world around him. Satura contains a poignant elegy to his wife Drusilla Tanzi. Montale's fame at that point had extended throughout the world. He had received honorary degrees by the Universities of Milan (1961), Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

 (1967), Rome (1974), and had been named Senator-for-Life
Senator for life
A senator for life is a member of the senate or equivalent upper chamber of a legislature who has life tenure. , 7 Italian Senators out of 322, 4 out of the 47 Burundian Senators and all members of the British House of Lords have lifetime tenure...

 in the Italian Senate. In 1975 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

He died in Milan in 1981.

In 1996, a work appeared called Posthumous Diary
Posthumous Diary
Posthumous Diary is a series of poems attributed to the Italian poet Eugenio Montale which first appeared in full in 1996 . It was purported to be conceived as a literary time-bomb carried out with the help of a young fan, Annalisa Cima.In 1969 Montale began to give a poem to Cima at each meeting...

(Diario postumo) that purported to have been 'constructed' by Montale before his death with the help of the young poet Annalisa Cima; the critic Dante Isella thinks that this work is not authentic.

Works

Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in literature" or "[year] in poetry" article:
  • 1925: Ossi di seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones"), first edition; second edition, 1928, with six new poems and an introduction by Alfredo Gargiulo; third edition, 1931, Lanciano: Carabba
  • 1932: La casa dei doganieri e altre poesie, a chapbook of five poems published in association with the award of the Premio del Antico Fattore to Montale; Florence: Vallecchi
  • 1939: Le occasioni ("The Occasions"), Turin: Einaudi
  • 1943: Finisterre, a chapbook of poetry, smuggled into Switzerland by Gianfranco Contini; Lugano: the Collana di Lugano (June 24); second edition, 1945, Florence: Barbèra
  • 1948: Quaderno di traduzioni, translations, Milan: Edizioni della Meridiana
  • 1948: La fiera letteraria poetry criticism
  • 1956: La bufera e altro ("The Storm and Other Things"), a first edition of 1,000 copies, Venice: Neri Pozza; second, larger edition published in 1957, Milan: Arnaldo Mondadore Editore
  • 1956: Farfalla di Dinard, stories, a private edition
  • 1962: Satura, poetry, published in a private edition, Verona: Oficina Bodoni
  • 1962: Accordi e pastelli ("Agreements and Pastels"), Milan: Scheiwiller (May)
  • 1966: Il colpevole
  • 1966: Auto da fé: Cronache in due tempi, cultural criticism, Milan: Il Saggiatore
  • 1966: Xenia, poems in memory of Mosca, first published in a private edition of 50
  • 1969: Fuori di casa, collected travel writing
  • 1971: Satura (1962–1970) (January)
  • 1971: La poesia non esiste, prose; Milan: Scheiwiller (February)
  • 1973: Diario del '71 e del '72, Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore (a private edition of 100 copies was published in 1971)
  • 1973: Trentadue variazioni, an edition of 250 copies, Milan: Giorgio Lucini
  • 1977: Quaderno di quattro anni, Milan: Mondadori
  • 1977: Tutte le poesie, Milan: Mondadori
  • 1980: L'opera in versi, the Bettarini-Contini edition; published in 1981 as Altri verse e poesie disperse, publisher: Mondadori


Translated in Montale's lifetime
  • 1966: Ossi di seppia, Le ocassioni, and La bufera e altro, translated by Patrice Angelini into French; Paris: Gallimard
  • 1978: The Storm & Other Poems, translated by Charles Wright into English (Oberlin College Press), ISBN 0-932440-01-0


Posthumous
  • 1981: Prime alla Scala, music criticism, edited by Gianfranca Lavezzi; Milan: Mondadori
  • 1981: Lettere a Quasimodo, edited by Sebastiano Grasso; publisher: Bompiani
  • 1983: Quaderno genovese, edited by Laura Barile; a journal from 1917, first published this year; Milan: Mondadori
  • 1991: Tutte le poesie, edited by Giorgio Zampa. Jonathan Galassi calls this book the "most comprehensive edition of Montale's poems".
  • 1996: Diario postumo: 66 poesie e altre
    Posthumous Diary
    Posthumous Diary is a series of poems attributed to the Italian poet Eugenio Montale which first appeared in full in 1996 . It was purported to be conceived as a literary time-bomb carried out with the help of a young fan, Annalisa Cima.In 1969 Montale began to give a poem to Cima at each meeting...

    , edited by Annalisa Cima; Milan: Mondadori
  • 1996: Il secondo mestiere: Arte, musica, società and Il secondo mestierre: Prose 1929-1979, a two-volume edition including all of Montale's published writings; edited by Giorgio Zampa; Milan: Mondadori
  • 1999: Collected Poems, trans. Jonathan Galassi
    Jonathan Galassi
    Jonathan Galassi born in Seattle, Washington, is the President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the eight major publishers in New York. He began his publishing career at Houghton Mifflin in Boston, moved to Random House in New York, and finally, to Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He...

     (Carcanet) (Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
    Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize
    Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize is an annual literary prize for any book-length translation into English from any other living European language...

    )
  • 2004: Selected Poems, trans. Jonathan Galassi, Charles Wright, & David Young (Oberlin College Press), ISBN 0-932440-98-3

External links

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