Eugenio Montale
Eugenio Montale, (b.
October 12, 1896, Genoa, Italy—d. September 12, 1981,
Milan), Italian poet, prose writer, editor, and translator
who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.
As a young man, Montale
trained as an opera singer. He was drafted to serve in World
War I, and, when the war was over, he resumed his music
studies. Increasingly he became involved in literary
activity. He was cofounder in 1922 of Primo tempo (“First
Time”), a literary journal; worked for the publisher
Bemporad (1927–28); served as director of the Gabinetto
Vieusseux Library in Florence (1929–38); was a freelance
translator and poetry critic for La fiera letteraria
(1938–48; “The Literary Fair”); and in 1948 became literary
editor and later music editor for the Milan daily newspaper
Corriere della Sera (“Evening Courier”).
Montale’s first book of
poems, Ossi di seppia (1925; “Cuttlefish Bones”), expressed
the bitter pessimism of the postwar period. In this book he
used the symbols of the desolate and rocky Ligurian coast to
express his feelings. A tragic vision of the world as a dry,
barren, hostile wilderness not unlike T.S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land inspired Montale’s best early poems.
The works that followed
Ossi di seppia included La casa dei doganieri e altre poesie
(1932; “The House of the Customs Officer and Other Poems”),
Le occasioni (1939; “The Occasions”), and Finisterre (1943;
“Land’s End”), which critics found progressively more
introverted and obscure. Montale’s later works, beginning
with La bufera e altro (1956; The Storm, and Other Poems),
were written with increasing skill and a personal warmth
that his earlier works had lacked. His other collections of
poems include Satura (1962), Accordi e pastelli (1962;
“Harmony and Pastels”), Il colpevole (1966), and Xenia
(1966), the last work a gentle and evocative series of love
poems in memory of his wife, who died in 1963. Diario del
’71 e del ’72 was published in 1973. Montale published three
volumes of collected Poesie in 1948, 1949, and 1957.
Montale was considered in
the 1930s and ’40s to be a Hermetic poet. Along with
Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, he was
influenced by French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé,
Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Valéry and sought to convey
experiences through the emotional suggestiveness of words
and a symbolism of purely subjective meaning. In his later
poetry, however, Montale often expressed his thoughts in
more direct and simple language. He won many literary prizes
and much critical acclaim. In 1999 a volume of Montale’s
work entitled Collected Poems: 1920–1954, translated by
Jonathan Galassi, was published; in addition to its English
translations it offers helpful annotations, a chronology,
and an essay on the poet.
Montale also rendered into
Italian the poetry of William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and
Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as prose works by Herman
Melville, Eugene O’Neill, and other writers. His newspaper
stories and sketches were published in La farfalla di Dinard
(1956; The Butterfly of Dinard).
