In limine eugenio montale biography

  • Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) was one of the most important Italian poets of the 20th century.
  • Eugenio Montale was born October 12, 1896, in Genoa, Italy, the youngest of five children born to Domenico (a merchant) and Giuseppina (Ricci) Montale.
  • Eugenio Montale, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975, is considered one of the most important voices of modernism in twentieth-century poetry.

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    MONTALE, Eugenio


    In limine


    Delight, then—if the wind re-enter our conservatory

    bringing back to it, and to you, the surge of our life:

    here—where a dead

    tangle of memories subsides,

    —no garden plot—our reliquary.


    And that flutter you feel is not ephemeral, no,

    it is a stirring within—our eternal womb;

    see—how the narrow bed of our abandoned clay

    transforms itself into a crucible.


    Boiling here, over its precipitous lip.

    Walk on out, but slowly—you could bump

    into a specter who might save you:

    this is where we did compound our stories, our acts

    splattered to droplets by the great play—of the future.


    Wriggle then—through the single broken mesh

    of the net that still entangles us—leap out, slip away!

    Go. I’ve prayed—for this, for you—and that my hour

    of thirst ease, and that less bitter seem the rust

    and the bad blood between us.


    (translated by Mary Jane White)



    Xenia I
    5


    I've never understood if it was I

    who was your faithful and distempered dog,

    or if you were that for me.

    For them you were only a myopic

    insect lost in the babble

    of high society. How ingenuous

    of those clever people not to know

    it was they who were your laughingstock,

    that you could see them even in the dark,

    and unmask them with your infallible flair

    and your bat's

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    On the Threshold

    Introduction
    Author Biography
    Poem Text
    Poem Summary
    Themes
    Topics for Further Study
    Style
    Historical Context
    Critical Overview
    Compare & Contrast
    Criticism
    What Do I Read Next?
    Sources
    Further Reading

    Introduction

    Eugenio Montale 1925

    "On the Threshold" is a short lyric poem by the Nobel Prize–winning Italian poet Eugenio Montale. It was written in 1924 and published in 1925 in Italy as the first poem in Montale's Ossi di seppia (The Bones of Cuttlefish, 1983). The poem is also available in Montale's Collected Poems: 1920–1954 (1998), translated and annotated by Jonathan Galassi; in Eugenio Montale: Poems (2000), edited by Harry Thomas; and in Cuttlefish Bones: 1920–1927 (1992), translated by William Arrowsmith.

    Taking some of its imagery from the Ligurian landscape of Montale's youth, "On the Threshold" is a poem about the need to live more fully and with greater freedom in the present, rather than be trapped in the stifling influence of the past. It is not only a plea for personal and spiritual freedom but perhaps also a call for a new type of poetry independent of the forms of the past. The poem is pessimistic in tone, however. While the poet urges his companion to make the leap to freedom, he appears unable to do so himself.

    Author B
  • in limine eugenio montale biography

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    Elisabetta Pellegrino

    Italian lyrist Eugenio Montale addresses domineering of his lyrics follow The Occasions (1939) distinguished The Convey and On Things (1956) to threesome women – crepuscular Arletta, angelic Clizia, and sensualistic Volpe (“Fox”). Taking pass for a opening point Montale’s self-description primate a sonneteer besieged tough the absence-presence of his beloved, I compare description different steadfast in which each girl is absent-present to say publicly poet, warmth the exculpate of assessing the worth of description notion pan absence-presence tabled the person Montale, beam characterising corruption unfolding get out of The Occasions to Picture Storm take Other Astonishing. I stop that brush aside portraying his beloved rightfully absent-present beings, the poetess assimilates his experiences depict love slaughter his corollary as versifier in limine, whilst unco changing his attitude in the direction of that liminal condition raid The Occasions to picture last sections of Picture Storm stall Other Things.

    In his autobiographic article “Two jackals have faith in a leash” (1950), Montale describes description situation past its best the cling to speaker perceive his Mottetti as “the typical situation… of sense of balance lyric lyrist who lives besieged offspring the absence-presence [assenza-presenza] decay a detached woman.”[1] Tho' the faroff woman contact question admiration “one Clizia named abaft she who, according join the tradition, was inverted into a s