Milan is associated in many people's minds with its two celebrated soccer clubs, its glittering fashion shows, its vibrant industry and commerce, its great art collections, its world famous La Scala opera house. But in the last century the city also seemed to exert a gravitational pull on Italian poets, many of whom settled there - notably the 1975 Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale, writes Joseph Woods
After Montale's death in 1981 an annual poetry prize was established to honour his memory - and last Monday evening in Milan the Irish poet Michael Longley became the 23rd recipient of the Premio Librex-Montale prize.
Until 2003, the award was presented to Italian poets only, and among the prizewinners were Giorgio Caproni, Andrea Zanzotto and Mario Luzi, one of Italy's finest poets, who died last month at the age of 90. In 2003, the prize was extended to include international poets and many international poetry organisations were invited to be involved and attend the ceremony.
The Polish poet Tadeuz Rozewicz was awarded that year's prize and, representing Poetry Ireland, I was asked to read the citation in English that recognised his contribution to poetry. His widely anthologised poem Pigtail remains one of the finest, most concise testaments to the holocaust.
Montale, born in Genoa in 1896, made Milan his home in 1948. He wrote a regular column for Corriere della Sera and on one occasion, while working in that distinguished newspaper's offices, he famously discovered his own obituary, which he promptly pocketed and disposed of.
He was a regular first-nighter at La Scala and was himself an excellent singer who had undergone voice training, but he was too shy to sing except in the company of a few close friends. His funeral was an enormous service held in Milan's city-centre cathedral, the Duomo - Montale had explicitly requested a religious ceremony.
Our day began there last Monday with a small party of us strolling around the vast, half-lit interior of the Duomo. The real revelation comes when one climbs to the roof - almost all of it paved with marble - where one can walk among the pinnacles, tracery, and countless statues of saints and come face to face with the gargoyles. The views across the city were immense, the Alps on one side and the rooftops surrounding, all mapped in March sunshine.
That evening in the Teatro Ventaglio Nazionale, we prepared for the award ceremony as upwards of a thousand people filed in to take their places for an evening of poetry and music. It was impressive to witness such an audience for a poetry event on a Monday night, but the name Montale and poetry seem to hold a special place for the people of Milan. A huge screen projected an image of Montale in his later years; the same screen would later project translations of Michael Longley's poems in Italian as he read from the originals.
A lemon tree on one side of the stage was a cue for I Limoni by Montale and the evening began with a short film of Montale's presumably beloved Ligurian coast and a reading of The Lemons.
A limited-edition bilingual pamphlet of seven poems by Michael Longley was prepared especially for the night, translated by both Giovanni Pillonca and Robert Bertoni of the Italian Department here in Trinity College Dublin and supported by the Ireland Literature Exchange. Italians produce beautiful books, especially pocket-books, and this pamphlet on yellow paper, entitled Fireflies at the Waterfall, is simple and elegant. Rather like fireflies themselves, the pamphlets flickered across the theatre when Longley came to read.
The Italian poet to win the prize this year was Franco Loi who, like Montale, was born in Genoa and then settled in Milan. He writes poetry in the Milanese dialect and, after being presented with the prize, read a number of poems which, to this untrained ear, sounded like Italian dipping in and out of French.
Loi, now aged 75, started out as a poet writing in standard Italian but eventually turned to dialect and found it a freer medium in which to express himself. His work is published in bilingual editions - Milanese with Italian translations by himself. It would be interesting to see an edition of his collected work translated into English.
Michael Longley has won many prizes for his poetry including the Whitbread and T.S. Eliot prizes, the Irish Times Poetry Prize and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. The Premio Librex Montale, however, comes from afar, from a country he and his wife Edna love to visit, and bearing the name of a poet he has long admired.
He has written poems entitled Montale's Dove, Leopardi's Song Thrush and Etruria and so, having accepted the prize, he read some of his works that chimed with Italy and others closer to home, including his marvellous and still urgent sonnet Ceasefire, which had its first outing on the pages of this newspaper in August 1994.
As the evening came to a close to the soothing jazz sounds of the Giuseppe Nova Trio, I realised that the setting of Montale's Dove - the interior of Ely cathedral - might just as well have been the Duomo that we had visited that morning,
He doesn't mention how the
stained-glass windows
Make walls a momentary
rainbow patchwork if
The sun is shining: instead he
lets one white feather
Drift among terrible faces up
in the roof.