JOHN MONTAGUE, poet, short-story writer, memoirist and “friend of France”, was last night made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, one of the country’s highest honours.
At a ceremony at the Irish Embassy in Paris, Pierre Joannon, a historian of Ireland and the State’s honorary consul general in Cannes, chronicled the lifelong relationship between the Irish poet and the what he describes as “my other country”.
It began when the Brooklyn-born, Tyrone-reared Montague contracted “the virus of Francophilia” at an early age, Joannon recounted. His first visit to France was in 1948, when a bicycle trip across the country revealed to him the desolate aftermath of war.
“I’ve been in love with France since 1948, when I came on my bicycle,” Montague said last night. “I hadn’t learned French at school, but I had this feeling for France . . . I was half-mad with French poetry, which seemed so different from English poetry in the 19th century.”
In the 1950s he returned to Paris, where he translated French poets and wrote for The Irish Times. He became a neighbour and friend of Samuel Beckett.
“It’s meant to be for people who have done something for France,” Montague said of the decoration. “I think it’s partly to do with my work on translating, and that I usually have a good word to say for the French.”
Ambassador Paul Kavanagh said of Montague that his poems “speak of a deep attachment to time and place, but are not limited in place or time”. Montague and his wife Elizabeth live in Nice for part of the year, and last night’s decoration will be followed by another next week, when the poet will be awarded with an honorary doctorate at the Sorbonne.