Eugenio Montale: Google Doodle celebrates 125th Birthday of Italian poet, critic & translator


Devdiscourse News Desk | Rome | Updated: 12-10-2021 10:25 IST | Created: 12-10-2021 10:25 IST
Eugenio Montale: Google Doodle celebrates 125th Birthday of Italian poet, critic & translator
Google dedicates a doodle to celebrate the 125th Birthday of renowned Eugenio Montale Italian poet, critic, and translator. Image Credit: Google Doodle
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Happy Birthday, Eugenio Montale!

Google dedicates a doodle to celebrate the 125th Birthday of renowned Eugenio Montale Italian poet, critic, and translator. He is known for his masterful ability to capture human emotion, he is widely considered one of the greatest poets of contemporary history. Today’s Doodle, illustrated by Aosta, Italy-based guest artist Andrea Serio.

Eugenio Montale was born in Genoa. His family was chemical products traders (his father supplied Italo Svevo's firm). 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 humor".

Montale was the youngest of six sons. He recalled:

We were a large family. My brothers went to the scagno ["office" in Genoese]. My only sister had a university education, but I had no such opportunity. In many families, the unspoken arrangement existed that the youngest was released from the task of keeping up the family name.

Eugenio Montale first pursued a career as a baritone opera singer before finding his true voice as a poet. In a poem from “Ossi di Seppia”(“Cuttlefish Bones,” 1925), his first published collection, Montale used the rocky Italian coast as a symbol to provide both his readers and himself an escape from the anxiety of postwar Italy. This critically acclaimed collection differed from the extravagant language in poems of the time and represented a turn in the tide for 20th-century literary symbolists.

Although he rejected the label, Montale is considered among the founders of the modernist poetic movement of Hermeticism—a “hermetic” (hidden or sealed) literary style often achieved through purposefully hard-to-interpret analogies and emotional vocabulary. Montale garnered worldwide fame for five volumes of symbolist poetry published during his 50-year writing career. In addition, he worked as an internationally renowned essayist, music and literary critic, and translator of English classics ranging from Shakespeare to Mark Twain.

In 1975, Montale’s uncompromising verse was recognized at the highest level when he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Often alluded to in the work of modern poets—Montale’s famously difficult poetry continues to have a profound effect on the literary world today. He died on September 12, 1981, at the age of 84.

Source: Google Doodle, Wikipedia

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