In the fifty short stories that make up Butterfly of Dinard, the great lyric poet Eugenio Montale turns to prose to inscribe the world that moves the psyche to its most extraordinary heights. As one of the most inviting additions to a remarkable oeuvre, the collection moves from mystery to comedy, from reminiscence to fantasy, taking the reader on excursions and immersions, introducing an Italy grasped in historical and personal material alike. The Montale admirer will find motifs that correspond with his most famed poems, and anyone new to the writer will find an assured, perceptive voice, dedicated to documenting the most curious and complex intersections of our social reality. Reissued now by New York Review Books in an updated translation from Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, and with an illuminating introduction by Jonathan Galassi, we are delighted to introduce Butterfly of Dinard as our Book Club selection for the month.
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Butterfly of Dinard by Eugenio Montale, translated from the Italian by Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, New York Review Books, 2024
After the walkman came into common use, a reporter in the Nouvel Observateur did a self-directed study on its effects, going around and asking its users if they considered themselves psychotic or schizophrenic. Clearly, the world of music had grown a new frontier. There would be communal listening, through the radio or some other form of public broadcasting, and solo listening; one could have a personal sonic timeline, running separately—though parallel—with the rest of the world’s sounds. Since then, we’ve only found new and improved ways to insulate ourselves from the social environment, so when a friend and I took a rental car around Los Angeles a month ago, I hadn’t heard the radio in probably a decade. When we turned it on, running through station after station, I catalogued the brief soundbites of the local airwaves—jockey banter, garbled trap, Christian rock, upbeat grupera. That frenetic soundscape accordioned over the brushed hills and highway traffic, and we synced to it, suddenly adopted into the city’s musical timestream as insiders. After a little while, we stopped at a light, and I looked to the car beside me. I couldn’t hear what the driver was listening to, but the taps of his fingers hit the exact same beats as those from our radio.
Music, and its innate potential for disrupting separation, was on my mind while reading Eugenio Monatle’s Butterfly of Dinard, a collection of prose pieces first published in the daily Corriere della Sera. The newspaper, similar to the radio, is a halfway-abandoned arena of public consciousness—a gathering place where people can experience the same thing at relatively the same time, and be joined, if not in opinion, then in engagement. But the days in which radically dissonant lives and perspectives could be unified via song or text are largely gone; though the cultural artifacts themselves are more proliferate than ever, we meet them on terms that are ever more individualised, ever more catered to the psychic patterns that we build, alone. Passing through Montale’s slice-of-life writings, some tell stories of the past, some follow the mania of dreams, but running through all of them is a sense that they are being told in the textual version of the town square—meant for all to hear, no matter if you are sat in the audience or just passing through. These stories are a spatial message; they tell of living amongst, and in this way, they belong to everyone.
Translated elegantly by Oonagh Stransky and Marla Moffa, the pieces of Butterfly of Dinard give us a more oblique, less crystallised vision of Montale, a master sometimes lauded for the concentrated lyric of Cuttlefish Bones, and sometimes for the subdued clarity of Poetic Diary. Poets who write prose often set themselves to enliven it with a sublimity, a musicality, or a playfulness that they find lacking in the pedestrian stratagems of sentences and paragraphs, but in these stories, Montale seems to seek out a reverse influence—of what communication, apparent transparency, and seemingly effortless grace can do for his poetry. If, for Montale, a poet is someone who describes his own world with the utmost immersion in personal inventions and visions, then prose is a method to step outside of that—to conversate with reality. Supposedly autobiographical, these pieces draw across places and individuals from the author’s life, approaching them as if to clear away the patina of neglect, and thus veering stylistically towards texts of memory. Yet, one never expects to find the confessional splayed across the pages of the daily paper, and true to the platform, nothing of the poet is exposed in these charming, enigmatic works. They shift focus, are ironic then ruminative, tender and then mocking, giving us blinking glimpses at the mind from which they came. Through their construction, Montale seems to investigate for the first time the duties and responsibilities of the storyteller, who must not only balance the disparate rules of authenticity and composition, but also, crucially, pick just the right story for just the right time, out of an infinite repertoire.
A good story keeps pace with time. It must encapsulate time and reproduce it—believably—within the structures of its own logic, and this is not something that poems are often interested in. Time passes differently in poetry—if it passes at all—and in Montale’s work especially, he regularly achieved that sense of the overarching, everlasting instant. But here, engaging with narrative, we see the poet exploring the patterns and various forms of fictional time, an alternative passage. Sometimes this is a periscope into the thickness of regional habits, as in “The Regatta”, in which two neighbouring towns are still indecipherable mysteries to one another; or it can be a transcription of a disarmingly honest, yet intensely coded conversation, such as in “The Best Is Yet to Come”. Throughout these varying subjects and approaches, one is made privy to how stories indulge us by carving out a small bite of life for us to chew on—how such tales are not meant to be definitive, or even representative, but intend to communicate something about that fragment of reality while hinting at the immense richness and variegation of the background. A sign of a good story is the feeling that reality takes over from the page’s negative space, and it is a testament to Montale’s skill that we are sensitive to the continual vivacity of these places and these characters, even as the pieces themselves come to perfect denouement. One is rarely left wanting more (or less) with the impeccable definition of such endings, but this is also grounded by the persistent knowledge that its figures and forces continue to live beside us.
The collection, split into four parts, brings certain themes to the surface. The first is pastoral—very Italian in its settings and occupations. There are trips to the sea, nosy neighbours, garlic, onions, and basil. The second is largely composed of character studies, starring friends, acquaintances, lovers, and strangers; in these animated portraits, Montale is at his most humourous—a brilliant dryness: “Unwittingly and unwillingly, I had been enrolled in the ever-growing ranks of his enemies. I comforted myself with the thought that perhaps I was more useful to him that way.” In part three, he goes theatrical, and the stories find themselves in hotel rooms, backs of taxis, in gondolas. Most of them portray a situation between a man and a woman, which can be glimmeringly sentimental (as in a tale of lost mementos) or delightfully ridiculous (as when a man accidentally compares his date to a water rat). Then, in the final part, the poet turns to the mirror. He has a vision of his own death, goes through the archive of what is remembered and misremembered, looks at the objects that have accompanied him a long way. It’s not necessarily that every single moment has profundity or deep significance, but as they are written, so had they risen in the mind. They fill the present. All these meetings, drinks, train rides, paintings, lost friends, dinner parties, ironies, dreams. . . In “Angiolino”, a man asks his partner: “What if we were highbrows of life, rather than art?”
What if we paid life the attention it deserves? There is a particular piece, “Stopping in Edinburgh”, in which Montale describes a “polygonal church with an inscription that extends all the way around its perimeter”. One day, the poet attempts to follow that message, a line that begins with “GOD IS NOT WHERE. . .”, but it appears to be unending. After some time and much frustration, a man suddenly arrives on the scene, and begins to preach out of a Bible. Soon, he attracts a crowd, and as it grows, so does it become more diverse: “Staunch Presbyterians, lax Armenians, Baptists, Methodists, Darbyists, and Unitarians; lukewarm and indifferent bystanders; men, women, and young people; the middle class and the working class; employees and proprietors; everyone listened or spoke with a strange glow in their eyes.” Amidst this cacophony of debate and opinion, it seems that the great metaphysical problems themselves don’t care much for our presence; god doesn’t need us to know anything—it’s the thoughts and ideas of our fellow people that encourage and incite us.
In his early work, Montale often wrote in the forceful we as well as the pointed you, and as such, the most profound richness of these verses is their timbre—the grandeur by which his voice conducts symbols, images, memories, and landscapes along the cadences of language. Those poems held a drama and a fury, betraying the poet’s operatic training as a young man (as well as the weighty legacy of Dante and D’Annunzio), and upon the page, they enact their own theatre. A savage sea, a racing heart, divinities, marvels, “astounding / that rim of the world”. The nature of the book is to be both entirely public—in the way that it is produced and distributed openly in the world—and entirely private—for the secret communion between a writer and their expressions, or between a reader and their interpretations. But Montale was a poet that was distinctly and powerfully public. Those poems read like declarations.
Gradually, however, Montale tempered that charged, bel canto blaze, and in awarding him the Nobel Prize in 1975, the Swedish Academy would laud his “strict discipline” and “anti-poetic tendency”. The work changed; it no longer sought to rise from the page and enrapture an audience of thousands, but subdued its voice to confide. To tell us—as if it were very late at night, and the show was long over, and only two people remained at the table—of what he had seen and what he knows: “Unfortunately, all I had was words, / things that approximate but don’t touch”. A public not en masse, but of discrete listeners. Perhaps it had something to do with all these stories on page three of the Corriere della Sera, and how the newspaper had daily synthesised our most intimate spaces with the polis.
Butterfly of Dinard was published in 1956, the same year as the poet’s third collection, The Storm and Other Things. By then, the poet was sixty, and had likely already recognised himself to be the man that, as he confessed in an interview, “. . . never had this ability to dive into life”. His poems had become less transcendent, less overtly flowering, and he had been sharing these compelling, “unpoetic” stories for nearly a decade. A part of this collection’s fascination is seeing how the language of a single individual can transform alongside the world’s material, but throughout the entirety of Montale’s oeuvre, no matter the drastic shifts in tone or rhetoric, there is a lasting essence of the writer traversing that shadowy space between private and public more fluidly and conscientiously than his contemporaries—that his job was to constantly bring things from one side to the other. “He who fails to grasp the religious meaning of collective life also fails to grasp the better part of individual life.” In these stories, no one’s life belongs to themselves alone. We would do well to recognise one another. And actually, Sony’s first walkman included two headphone plug-ins. The music was always meant to be shared.
Xiao Yue Shan is a writer, editor, and translator. shellyshan.com.
*****
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