Background
Eugenio Montale was born on October 12, 1896, at Genoa, and his youth was spent between that city and a property his family had in southern Liguria.
( A majestic translation of one of the Nobel Prize-winnin...)
A majestic translation of one of the Nobel Prize-winning masters of twentieth-century poetry. Hailed as one of the key poets of the modern era, Eugenio Montale changed Italian poetry forever and helped to create international Modernism. Steeped in the tradition of Dante, Petrarch, and Leopardi, yet fiercely innovative, in each new book Montale challenged the styles he had previously established. His poems chart an adventure of consciousness and conscience in response to the shocks of modernity, fascism, and two world wars, and they also present several of the greatest erotic sequences in modern poetry. The Collected Poems of Eugenio Montale publishes for the first time in English William Arrowsmiths pellucid translations of Poetic Diary 1971, 1972, and the Poetic Notebook, as well as his previously published translations of four volumes: Cuttlefish Bones, The Occasions, The Storm and Other Things, and Satura. With the wide range of Montales poetry at last available to the English reader, this collection reveals Montale to be the greatest Italian poet of the twentieth century.
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(Montales poems range from daily life through history and...)
Montales poems range from daily life through history and myth, and on to questions of metaphysics and divinity. As a love poet, a landscape poet, and a spiritual pilgrim he has few equals. Translators Galassi, Wright, and Young recreate the distinctive music of a poet whose poems prove rich and compelling to an ever-growing body of readers.
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(Then out of nowhere after years of silence the words we ...)
Then out of nowhere after years of silence the words we used, our unobstructed accents, will well up from the dark of childhood, and once more on our lips we'll taste Greek salt. -from "Salt," translated by Jamie McKendrick Eugenio Montale (1896 - 1981) was the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi, perhaps since Petrarch, and is generally acknowledged as one of the preeminent European poets of the last century. His lyrical, mysterious poems abound in natural imagesthe high cliffs and inlets of the Ligurian coast, golden sunflowers, scolding blackbirds, and sun-scorched landscapes. Indeed, in the view of James Merrill, whose superb translations of several of Montale's poems appear in this volume, Montale was "the twentieth-century nature poet," in whose lines "any word can lead you from the kitchen garden into really inhuman depths." Also full of mythological and literary resonance, Montale's poems poignantly explore the connection between nature, the individual, and the divine. Montale in English draws on the poet's eight major collections, bringing together translations, adaptations, and homages by fifty-eight American, English, Scottish, Australian, and Italian poets and scholars, including Samuel Beckett, David Ferry, Jonathan Galassi, Jorie Graham, Robert Lowell, Edwin Morgan, and Charles Wright. The editor's introduction gives a precise account of the history of Montale's reception in English, and by providing an analysis of four translations of a single poem, contributes to the controversial issue of poetic translation.
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( "Virtually incomparable. . . . Arrowsmith has quite lit...)
"Virtually incomparable. . . . Arrowsmith has quite literally distilled this poetry's essence in order to recompose it with all of its colors, scents, and exquisitely understated potency intact." ?Rebecca West
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(Eugenio Montale's (1896-1981) The Butterfly of Dinard ran...)
Eugenio Montale's (1896-1981) The Butterfly of Dinard ranks with his poetry as the most important work of this Italian master. By virtue of similarity of theme and background, this collection of prose sketches and the poetry complement one another, and of the fundamental aspects of the poems for which Montale is better known.
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editor politician translator poet
Eugenio Montale was born on October 12, 1896, at Genoa, and his youth was spent between that city and a property his family had in southern Liguria.
He studied literature at the University of Genoa and took voice lessons with the baritone Sivori, but he turned exclusively to literary pursuits after World War I, in which he had served as an infantry officer.
In 1927 he moved to Florence to work for a publishing house. There he was director of the Gabinetto Vieusseux from 1929 to 1938, when he was removed from the post because of his indifference to the Fascist regime. Throughout this time Montale contributed regularly to literary journals, such as Solaria, and, being also a perceptive critic, he was the first to point out, in 1925, Italo Svevo's importance as a writer. In 1928 he became head of the Gabinetto Vieusseux Library in Florence and was let go in 1938 due to his anti-Fascist views. He then spent a decade translating English and American literary works into Italian. In 1948 he became editor of a newspaper in Milan. Although it has been suggested that the closed and difficult style of hermetic poetry was a direct result of "inner emigration" during fascism, there is no doubt that artistic tenets played a dominant role in shaping it. Montale, who is one of the virtuosos of its contrived technique of obscuration, found in the resulting bare and arid style an apt vehicle for his pessimistic views of life that only in his later work show signs of moderation. The subject of Montale's poetry is the human condition, considered by and in itself, not this or that historical event. To treat such events would mean for Montale to mistake the essentials for their transitory aspects. Thus, his is the poetry of a man who extricates himself from the accidentals of human existence to perceive its essence. This notion no doubt contributed considerably to the "abstract" and intellectual aspect of his poetry. In Montale's first collection of verse, Ossi di seppia (1925), his desolate and pessimistic picture of life finds its pendant in the austere and arid Ligurian landscape, which forms the backdrop of many of his poems. Although there seems to be no hope of escaping the futility of human existence, in some pieces, such as In limine, there appears already a tendency to see a way out of the existential dilemma, if only for others. The second collection, Occasioni (1939), with its terse style and disconnected imagery, represents a further step in the application of hermetic tenets almost beyond any possible understanding; yet some of its poems belong to the best that were written in Italy in the 20th century. Finisterre (1943) is a reflective and removed reckoning with World War II. In La bufera e altro (1956) there is a noticeable easing of tension and a more balanced relation between the linguistic means and the message they carry. Satura (1971) contains 118 poems written between 1962 and 1970, more than two-thirds of them unpublished until then. The lyrical mode of this collection definitely indicates a departure from Montale's earlier abstraction and a turn toward a more open statement without reticence; it also gives the reader an insight into the poet's own personal sphere. He continued to write up until his death at his home in Milan on September 12, 1981.
(Then out of nowhere after years of silence the words we ...)
(Eugenio Montale's (1896-1981) The Butterfly of Dinard ran...)
(Montales poems range from daily life through history and...)
(A series of twenty poems deal with love, loss, remembranc...)
( A majestic translation of one of the Nobel Prize-winnin...)
( "Virtually incomparable. . . . Arrowsmith has quite lit...)
(Book by Eugenio Montale)
Quotations:
"Too many lives are needed to make just one. "
"The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough. He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present. "
"In reality art is always for everyone and for no one. "
"I have been judged to be a pessimist but what abyss of ignorance and low egoism is not hidden in one who thinks that Man is the god of himself and that his future can only be triumphant?"
"Many of today's verses are prose and bad prose. "
"Art is the production of objects for consumption, to be used and discarded while waiting for a new world in which man will have succeeded in freeing himself of everything, even of his own consciousness. "
Quotes from others about the person
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".