Author: Monti, Vincenzo
Biography:
MONTI, Vincenzo (1754-1828: NBG)
A celebrated but in some ways controversial contemporary Italian poet, Monti was taken up by Henry Boyd (q.v.), who produced the first volume-length translation of one of his works into English, and by Frances Burney (q.v.), who published her version of his play Aristodemos along with her own dramas. He was born on 17 Feb. 1754 in Alfonsine, Ravenna, Emilia-Romagna, the son of landowners, and was educated at a seminary in Faenza and at the University of Ferrara, where he became an excellent Latinist. He apparently never studied Greek; his famous translation of Homer’s Iliad (1810) was based on Latin versions. In 1778 his first patron, the Cardinal Borghese, took him to Rome, where he became secretary to the prince Luigi Braschi: many similar positions followed. After the publication of his first volume of poems in 1779, he maintained a steady stream of verses, plays, and translations, many of them at the request of or in celebration of his employers. In 1791 he married Teresa Pikler or Pichler (d 1834), with whom he had a daughter—later married to an Italian count—and a son who died young. Monti’s verses were admired for their accomplished style but his politics shifted as the wind blew. The pro-Revolutionary La Bassvilliana, which Boyd translated as The Penance of Hugo, was abandoned unfinished after four cantos when war was declared against France. When the French occupied Italy and established a republic with its capital in Milan, Monti moved there and worked for the government. When the republic was overthrown in 1799, he fled to France, but was able to return after the French victory at Marengo (1800). When Napoleon was crowned King of Italy, Monti became the court poet and historiographer, accruing honours, and when Napoleon was replaced by the Austrian Emperor in 1814, he stayed on in his post and kept his pension. He died at Milan on 13 Oct. 1828 and was buried at the cemetery of San Grigorio there. (NBG 36, cols. 299-302; ancestry.com 9 July 2023)