Montale's Critical Friendship with Henry Furst, "il falso cardinale"

Abstract

My aim in this essay is to shed new light on the nature of the ambiguous literary friendship which subsisted between Eugenio Montale and Henry Furst (1893-1967), the American translator, writer, journalist and sometime librarian. Drawing on recent scholarship and on previously unpublished archival documents, my first objective is to give a more credible explanation for the modus operandi of their post-World War II 'collaboration' on articles for Il Corriere della Sera than the ones put forward in the Italian press in the winter of 1989. My second objective is to trace the publication history of Montale's two wartime prose poems which have Furst as their subject, in order to offer fresh insights for their interpretation.