Reading and a Conversation on Eugenio Montale, the Fascist Storm and the Jewish Sunflower by David M. Hertz
This new book (University of Toronto Press 2013) uncovers one of the great hidden sagas of modern literature. During Italy’s Fascist period, Eugenio Montale – winner of the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature and one of the greatest modern poets in any language – fell in love with Irma Brandeis, a glamorous and beautiful Dante scholar and an American Jew. While their romance would fall apart, it would have literary repercussions that extended throughout the poet’s career: Montale’s works abound with secret codes that speak to a lost lover and muse.This study is the first to completely unlock the cryptic thematic link that connects many of Montale’s most important poems, which, taken together, form the most significant hidden poetic cycle of modernism. David Michael Hertz explores the intersecting poetic myth and background biography, with precision made possible through recently published archival materials. Bringing the reader into an intense experience of great poetry while telling an engaging story, Hertz vividly shows that close reading in conjunction with biographical and historical materials can be an unforgettable and rewarding experience.
David M. Hertz . Currently chair of the department, David Michael Hertz is a professor of comparative literature at Indiana University in Bloomington. His earlier books include Frank Lloyd Wright in Word and Form; Angels of Reality: Emersonian Unfoldings in Frank Lloyd Wright, Wallace Stevens and Charles Ives; and The Tuning of the Word: the Musico-literary Poetics of Symbolist Movement. Hertz has written on modern poetry, music, drama, and architectural history. A composer and pianist, Hertz is the co-founder of the Center for Comparative Arts at Indiana University. He has received grants from the Mellon and Graham foundations and is listed in Who’s Who Among College Teachers. He earned B.A. (comparative literature), B.S. (music), and M.A. (comparative literature) degrees at Indiana University, and a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. Since 2002, he has served as a member of the National Council on the Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington, DC.
Edward Hirsch is a poet and a critic, and the fourth President of the Guggenheim Foundation since 2003. He has published eight books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008), and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010). He has also written four prose books: the bestseller How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), Responsive Reading (1999), The Demon and the Angel: (2002), and Poet’s Choice (2006). He is the editor of Transforming Vision: Writers on Art (1994) and ofTheodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005). He is also the co-editor of A William Maxwell Portrait(2004) and The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008), and he edits the series The Writer’s World (Trinity University Press). He has received the Prix de Rome, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry in 1985.
Jonathan Galassi is President and Publisher of Farrar Straus & Giroux. In addition to publishing two volumes of poetry, Morning Run (1998) and North Street(2000), Jonathan Galassi is an eminent translator of Italian poetry. He has spent over 25 years studying Eugenio Montale’s poetry and has published several collections of Montale’s work, including Eugenio Montale: The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays (1982) and Collected Poems 1920–1954 (1998). Raised in southeastern Massachusetts, Galassi studied poetry at Harvard University with Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and is an honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets. In addition to acting as poetry editor of the Paris Review for 10 years, Galassi has served as a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin, before joining FSG. In 2008 he received the Maxwell E. Perkins Award.