 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eugenio Montale | ||||
 "for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions" | ||||
| Date |
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| Location | Stockholm, Sweden | |||
| Presented by | Swedish Academy | |||
| First award | 1901 | |||
| Website | Official website | |||
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The1975Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the Italian poetEugenio Montale (1896–1981) "for his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions".[1] He is thefifth Italian laureate for the literature prize.
Along withGiuseppe Ungaretti andSalvatore Quasimodo, Eugenio Montale is associated with the poetic school ofhermeticsm, the Italian variant of the Frenchsymbolism movement, although Montale himself did not consider himself to be part of the hermetic school. His poetry is often compared toT. S. Eliot. When theSwedish Academy awarded him with the Nobel Prize in 1975, they called him “one of the most important poets of the contemporary West”.[2] His notable oeuvres includeOssi di seppia ("Cuttlefish Bones", 1925),Le occasioni ("The Occasions", 1939),La bufera e altro ("The Storm and Other Things", 1956),Satura (1962–1970) (1971) andDiario del '71 e del '72 (1973).[3]
According to theAssociated Press, Montale said that award had overwhelmed him and made his life, "which was always unhappy, less unhappy."[3]
In Italy, the awarding of the Nobel Prize to Montale was positively received. Their Prime Minister,Aldo Moro, congratulated him, said that the award "consecrates the validity of your poetical and human message, and, in you, honors the Italian culture,"[3] and PresidentGiovanni Leone commented that his work's contained "tormented and lucid singling‐out of the anxieties and the aspirations of modern man."[3]
At the award ceremony on 10 December 1975,Anders Österling of the Swedish Academy said:
"at his best Montale, with strict discipline, has attained a refined artistry, at once personal and objective, in which every word fills its place as precisely as the glass cube in a coloured mosaic. The linguistic laconicism cannot be carried any further; every trace of embellishment and jingle has been cleared away. When, for instance, in the remarkable portrait-poem of the Jewes Dora Markus, he wants to indicate the current background of time, he does so in five words: Distilla veleno una fede feroce (“A fierce faith distils poison”). In such masterpieces both the fateful perspective and the ingeniously concentrated structure are reminiscent of T.S. Eliot and “The Waste Land”, but Montale is unlikely to have received impulses from this quarter and his development has, if anything, followed a parallel path"[4]
Eugenio Montale delivered hisNobel lecture on 12 December 1975. Entitled "Is Poetry Still Possible?", he spoke about the art ofpoetry and poetry's place in the modern world ofmass communication.[5]
Montale was first nominated for the prize in1955 by Nobel laureateT. S. Eliot. It was followed in1961 and from 1966 he became a regular nominee. By 1973 the Nobel committee had received 23 nominations in total before Montale was eventually awarded.[6]
| No. | Nominee | Country | Genre(s) | Nominator(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ba Jin (1904–2005) |  China | novel, short story, memoir, essays | [7] |
| 2 | Saul Bellow (1915–2005) |  Canada United States | novel, short story, memoir, essays | |
| 3 | Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) |  Argentina | poetry, essays, translation, short story | |
| 4 | Jorge Carrera Andrade (1903–1978) |  Ecuador | poetry, essays, history, autobiography | Academia Ecuatoriana de la Lengua[8] |
| 5 | Graham Greene (1904–1991) |  United Kingdom | novel, short story, autobiography, essays | |
| 6 | Kim Chi-ha (1941–2022) |  South Korea | poetry, drama, essays | [9] |
| 7 | Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) |  Italy | poetry, translation | |
| 8 | Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) |  RussiaUnited States | novel, short story, poetry, drama, translation, literary criticism, memoir |
