The Italian Cultural Institute in NY presents: The Browning Montale Transference, a live illustrated lecture on the relationship of Eugenio Montale to Robert Browning, to take place on Montale’s birthday, October 12th, 2022,
organized by The NY Browning Society.
Wednesday, October 12, 2022
6:00PM
The NY Browning Society
Westbeth Community Room, 155 Bank St. NYC
free and open to the public
Italian poet Eugenio Montale was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature of 1975. Despite the best efforts of his translators, including Robert Lowell, who called him “one of the best poets alive”, he was largely unknown in the English-speaking world at the time of that great honor. His fellow Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky said of his “Piccolo Testamento” that it “easily matches Yeat’s “Second Coming “; and the power of his poetry has been compared with that of the Eliot of “The Four Quartets”, the Valery of “Cemetery By The Sea”, and the Rilke of “The Duino Elegies”.
A poet difficult even for his fellow Italians, who may well keep a dictionary handy while wrestling with his tricky syntax, Montale from the start did not seem to come out of any Italian poetic tradition. And yet, difficult and serious as Montale is, Martin Seymour-Smith singled out his “Dora Markus” as “one of the most beautiful love poems of all time”. To read more click HERE
Tom d’Egidio, poet & translator, is Director-At-Large of the NY Browning Society. His talk on contemporary Roman poet Valerio Magrelli (described by Magrelli himself as “bella, attenta, vivace e pepata” (“beautiful, attentive, lively & peppery”), given in conjunction with National Translation Month on September 29, 2021, is viewable on YouTube as part of “Four Poets And Their Translations”. He is at work on a novel set in the downtown Manhattan bohemian scene (Jean- Michel Basquiat et al.) of circa 1980. His chapbook “The Enigma of Arrival” is available from UNDERGROUND BOOKS.ORG