Eugenio Montale (Author) Eugenio Montale produced only five volumes of poetry in his first 50 years as a writer. But when the Swedish Academy awarded the Italian poet and critic the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature, they called him one of the most important poets of the contemporary West, Publishers Weekly reported. Born in Genoa, Italy, in 1896, Montale had a long and distinguished career as a translator and critic in addition to his poetic achievements.
Montale gave the Italian lyric a dissonant new music, a rapturous counter-eloquence. He is the Debussy of modern poetry, and in Jonathan Galassi's fresh translation ... the English-speaking reader is given clear access to a body of work that has a severe majesty. * The New Yorker *