I nomi di Dio nell’opera poetica di Eugenio Montale e Wisława Szymborska

Abstract

The complex relationships that two giants of world literature, Eugenio Montale and Wisława Szymborska, have entertained with ‘the Other’ throughout the span of their poetic production follow surprisingly similar paths. Both were agnostics, but not atheists, and both were engaged in a lifelong dialectic with the metaphysical, a dialectic which sees reason in a continuous confrontation with the miraculous and the unexpected, the imponderable and the unconditioned. The lyrics they have left us testify to a surprising affinity between the two writers, so distant in culture, language and tradition, but so close in that both are animated, on the one hand by a deep respect for all religions, on the other by mistrust of any ideological,
philosophical or religious theory that attempts to pigeonhole and explain ‘every-thing’. Their search for ‘the divine’, to which the most unusual names are attributed, and which sometimes have very little to do with the sphere of the transcendent, gives rise to perplexity, expectations, pressing questions and, not infrequently, a subtle vein of humor, another trait that unites these two great ‘poets of doubt’.