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Eugenio Montale Sometimes
regarded as the greatest Italian poet since Leopardi (1798-1837),
Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896, was awarded the Nobel Prize
in literature in 1975, and died in Milan in 1981. He served in the
infantry in World War I, and settled in Milan in 1948, where he became
the chief literary critic for Italy's foremost newspaper, the Corriere
della Sera. He was also a music critic and a translator, and, for
his courageous opposition to fascism, was made a lifetime member of
the Italian Senate in 1967. Montale's
poetry is deeply personal, at times almost hermetic. Often it is addressed
to an unknown "you" who, not infrequently, is dead, or to
certain women, presented under fictive names (in the manner of classical
and Renaissance poets), who played important roles in his real and
imaginative lives. They are called Esterina, Gerti, Liuba, Vixen,
Dora Markus, Mosca, and Clizia. Liuba, for example, was someone he
glimpsed for only a few minutes in a railway station, where she was
fleeing from Italy's Fascist, anti-Jewish laws. Dora Markus was someone
he never met; she was, he explained, "constructed from a photograph
of a pair of legs" sent him by a friend. Nevertheless, as one
of his finest translators, William Arrowsmith, declares, "the
poem devoted to her is no mere exercise in virtuoso evocation; it
is the objectification of the poet's affinity for a personal truth,
the existential meaning of a given fragment. 'The poet's task,' Montale
observed, 'is the quest for a particular, not general, truth.'"
His poems almost always deal with fragmentary experience, the meaning
of which is either obscure or, possibly, terrifyingly absent. As a
poet, he had a preoccupation with images of limitation. This is manifested,
Arrowsmith writes, in the form of "walls, barriers, frontiers,
prisons, any confining enclosure that makes escape into a larger self
or a new community impossible. Hence too his intractable refusal to
surrender to any ideology or sodality, whether Communist or Catholic."
("Eugenio Montale" by Anthony Hecht. Reprinted from the Summer 1998 Wilson Quarterly) |
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