credit: Giorgio Lotti, courtesy of New Directions Publishing Group |
:: Poet, prose writer, editor, and translator, Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa in 1896.
His original aspiration was to be an opera singer, and he served in the Italian Army in World War I;
but he soon began a literary career. He published his first collection Cuttlefish Bones, in 1925, and was marked from that time
as one of the chief voices in modern Italian poetry. Dismissed from his work in 1938 for refusing to
join the Fascist party, Montale continued to write and translate and returned to public life in Milan
after the war. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975, and died in 1981.
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