Eugenio Montale: Google Doodle celebrates Italian poet and Nobel Prize winner’s 125th birthday

Google Doodle celebrates the 125th birthday of the Italian poet, prose writer, editor, and translator Eugenio Montale, who is generally viewed as one of the best poets of contemporary history and recipient of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature, on October 12, 2021.

Who was Eugenio Montale?

Eugenio Montale was October 12, 1896, in the Italian port city of Genoa. Italian poet, prose writer, editor, and translator who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.

As a young man, Eugenio Montale trained as an opera singer. He was drafted to serve in World War I, and, when the war was finished, he continued his music studies. Progressively he became engaged with literary activity. He was a 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”).

Eugenio Montale’s first book of poems, Ossi di seppia (1925; “Cuttlefish Bones”), expressed the harsh negativity 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 pundits found progressively more introverted and obscure. Montale’s later works, starting with La bufera e Altro (1956; The Storm, and Other Poems), were composed with expanding ability and personal warmth that his prior works had needed.

Eugenio Montale’s different collections of poems incorporate Satura (1962), Accordi e pastelli (1962; “Harmony and Pastels”), Il colpevole (1966), and Xenia (1966), the last work a delicate and suggestive 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 gathered Poesie in 1948, 1949, and 1957.

Eugenio Montale was considered during the 1930s and ’40s to be a Hermetic poet. Alongside Giuseppe Ungaretti and Salvatore Quasimodo, he was affected by French Symbolists like Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Valéry and looked to convey experiences through the emotional suggestiveness of words and symbolism of absolutely subjective significance.

In his later poetry, nonetheless, Eugenio Montale frequently offered his viewpoints in more direct and simple language. He won numerous literary prizes and much basic recognition. In 1999 a volume of Montale’s work entitled Collected Poems: 1920–1954, interpreted by Jonathan Galassi, was published; notwithstanding its English translations it offers supportive explanations, an order, and an essay on the poet.

Eugenio Montale additionally rendered into Italian the poetry of William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, as well as exposition, works by Herman Melville, Eugene O’Neill, and different writers. His newspaper stories and sketches were published in La Farfalla di Dinard (1956; The Butterfly of Dinard).

Eugenio Montale’s later works are Xenia (1966), Satura (1971), and Diario del ’71 e del ’72 (1973). Montale’s later poetry is wry and amusing, pondering on the basic reaction to his previous work and the continually switching world around him. Satura contains a piercing funeral poem to his wife Drusilla Tanzi. He additionally wrote a series of impactful poems about Clizia right away before his death.

Eugenio Montale’s fame by then had stretched out all through the world. He had gotten privileged degrees from the Universities of Milan (1961), Cambridge (1967), Rome (1974), and had been named Senator-for-Life in the Italian Senate. In 1973 he was awarded the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings in Struga, SR Macedonia. In 1975 he got the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Eugenio Montale died in Milan in 1981.

In 1996, a work seemed called Posthumous Diary (Diario postumo) that suspected to have been ‘compiled’ by Montale before his death, with the assistance of the young poet Annalisa Cima; the pundit Dante Isella believes that this work isn’t authentic. Joseph Brodsky dedicated his essay “In the Shadow of Dante” to Eugenio Montale’s lyric poetry.

On October 12, 2021, Google featured a Doodle on its homepage for celebrating Eugenio Montale’s 125th birthday. Google Doodle was represented by Aosta, Italy-based guest artist Andrea Serio.