In Butterfly of Dinard, the great poet Eugenio Montale leads the reader up to numinous looking points along the towers of everyday experience, pointing us towards an innate sublimity and magic—how individual vision and experience can strike pedestrian sceneries with an extraordinary intensity of meaning. Originally published as columns in the Corriere della Sera, fifty of these stories have been translated with extraordinary care and finesse by Marla Moffa and Oonagh Stransky, and in this interview, they speak to us about the affinity between Montale’s prose and poetry, the revelations of translation, and how such stories travel from the page into personal realities, deepening and celebrating the spaces, people, and objects that—if looked at closely—“reveal a great truth.”
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Xiao Yue Shan (XYS): I wanted to start with asking you both about the crossings between Montale’s poems and his prose works. What do both of you consider Butterfly of Dinard to be saying to us on its own? Is there an independent author to be found, or should we read his prose as dialogic with his poetry?
Marla Moffa (MM): I would say that there are various symbols in the poems that we can also find in the stories. Considering that he wrote Butterfly of Dinard when he was in his fifties—after the two main volumes of poetry, Cuttlefish Bones and The Occasions, and concurrently with The Storm and Other Things—it’s as if he’s regrouping in these stories everything that we find in the poems as well.
For example, as Jonathan Galassi points out in the introduction, Montale speaks about the eels in the story “The Best Is Yet to Come,” and just at the mention of the word eel on the menu for the protagonist, the narrator has this flashback, because the eels represented something special in his youth. There’s also the poem “L’anguilla / The Eel” in Montale’s poetry, which is one of his most important poems. It’s interesting to be able to read the two pieces in parallel, but at the same time, I feel like the stories are independent. If you don’t know his poetry, and you just read Butterfly of Dinard, you can still enter into Montale’s world. He even says himself that if one wants to know his story, that this is the book to read, because it is quite autobiographical.
Oonagh Stransky (OS): I agree with what Marla said, and the only thing I would add is that one of the things that appeals to me most about these stories is really the element of humour—the self-deprecating humour and irony. As in his poetry, there are moments of existential crisis, of gaps and sudden shocks, but there is also a delight in life, and a delightfulness that he attributes to so many different things. The nostalgia towards his past is one aspect of it, but I also like how he talks about himself—how he describes this figure, who may represent himself, as bumbling and Chaplin-esque, as Galassi calls it. It opens up new windows onto Montale the man, and who this very mysterious and obscure Nobel-winning poet was. Here we see him as a man in slippers, with a turban on his head, holding a rug up to scare away a bat—all those things are elements that allow the reader to feel more familiar with him.
MM: I’d like to add that if someone hadn’t read Montale, and they started with this book, it could incite curiosity about his poems; starting with the poems themselves could be difficult, as some of them are not easy to get into, so Butterfly of Dinard could be an interesting, alternative entry point.
XYS: Interesting, because this idea of deconstructing the myth of a national poet can also be ascertained in how these stories were originally published through the newspaper, so it’s as if he’s engaging with a reading public that he might not have encountered in his poems.
OS: Yes, for example, if you take the whole subset of stories that have to do with music—which were some of the most complicated to translate because of the technical aspects—they present a whole new side of Montale that we don’t really know much about—that he loved to sing, that he was an expert in bel canto, and that lends an interesting side to him.
MM: He started with these stories, but then parallel to that, he also wrote reviews—for example the opening performances at La Scala. There are published volumes of what he wrote on opera, which he did as a passion.
XYS: Do you think that this genre or this form, to say, was a method of putting out the content that he wanted to discuss, but could not necessarily find a way of incorporating into his poetry?
OS: He says about his own writing that he would manage to write one of these pieces in a couple of hours—which is pretty incredible—so maybe he did use it to draw on other thoughts. It was definitely a challenge, but it allowed him to express himself in a new way.
MM: And he really did just sort of fall into it in a sense. He was hired at the Corriere della Sera to write these articles, but he didn’t really know what he was going to do, so those limits that were in place—regarding word count and such—gave him a structure that he actually found very interesting to work in. Having limits is always an inspiring way to write, because it makes you work differently.
OS: As you read the collection, it’s easy to forget that they were articles. I like noticing the repeated motifs, they’re delightful, and they tell us that these stories all came from this deep inner magma of Montale himself—that he was telling his story and allowing himself to speak freely within a form.
XYS: There’s so much conversation around early Montale and late Montale, and the stylistically immense distance between the two polarities of his work. Do you think that this specific genre shift into prose was an impetus to that? Perhaps in that it initiated the idea that his poetry had to change to accommodate a changing world, and the changing positionality of himself, existing in it as a poet, a writer, a person of culture. . .
OS: I wonder if it’s because I read the stories while I was first reading his poems but I really do see it as a parallel form of writing—of a great writer who is experimenting with language and making a living for himself doing many different things. There are so many similarities between these stories and his poems. For example, I’m thinking of one of the famous lines about his goal with poetry, which is that he wanted to “wring the neck of the eloquence of our old aulic language”—and he did that with poetry, and he did that in a marvellous and hermetic and complex way, but he also does it here. There are many difficult, complex phrases that are almost distorted, which forced us as translators to analyse what is going on in the sentence. Then, when you start to see it, you start to get a bigger picture, much in the same way that you get while reading his poetry. So for me, I understand and I agree that there is a shift, but I would also say that it’s part and parcel of the whole Montale. It fits in beautifully. It’s him experimenting, and making his way through life using language.
MM: Especially I would say that the last piece, “Butterfly of Dinard,” can definitely be considered a prose poem, and even Cesare Segre, in his critical analysis of the book, said that it was like a poem that had escaped from The Storm—because of its brevity, because of the language, and I have to agree with that in the sense that it’s hard to define these stories as just stories. They are difficult to cohere, as one is so different from the other, and Galassi speaks a lot about that also—about how to define them.
But going back to “Butterfly of Dinard,” it’s so concise and perfectly fitted into his oeuvre; I wouldn’t see a difference.
XYS: It’s a wonderful discursion from the way that we tend to compartmentalise writers. I wonder if that can be drawn back to the form of elzeviri, which is a mode that we don’t have in the Anglophone. I’m curious about how Montale contributed to this genre and what he made out of it.
MM: In Italy, Butterfly of Dinard was not considered as one of Montale’s important works, and he even wrote as such in the introduction of the first English edition: that hopefully, when these pieces are translated into English, they might be appreciated by a different and bigger audience. And even today, very few Italians are familiar with Farfalla di Dinard, and many people still don’t know that Montale wrote prose.
Of this collection, I would say that the titular story is really the one that comes closest to an elzeviri. The other ones are. . . I have a hard time calling them short stories, but I wouldn’t say that they’re elzeviri.
In fact, I think that’s why he made “Butterfly of Dinard” the titular story, because it stands out on its own. That’s also my favourite piece, because it’s so unique. The other ones have irony and a lot of things I love, but if I had to choose one, I’d choose the final piece, because it goes in and touches upon those symbols—this idea that he’s the only one who’s seeing the butterfly, and that he’s in contact with a reality that manifests in poetic symbols. That butterfly only exists in his interior landscape, not the reality he lives in or the reality that he describes in the other stories—which is not always a pleasant place to be.
OS: Yes, I agree, and there’s a lot of darkness in the other stories, but “Butterfly of Dinard” is really a culmination of all these stories, and we can appreciate it better after having read the preceding pieces.
I’m doing a lot of reading these days of hybrid fiction—memoirs mainly—and I have to say that Montale feels like something of a precursor. He really taps into the questions of: how do we remember? Who would we have been if . . . ? He’s cracking open a very complex nut and holding up elements to us, and how we respond to it is just as interesting as the stories. I think your question is asking about the experience of reading these stories, and where they take us.
On another note, while rereading many of the stories, I realised that some of them are really strongly comprised of backstory. You get a lot of it, the story begins after a couple of paragraphs. He also addresses: “That’s the end of the backstory.” Then he gives you the story, which is a lot of fun.
There’s a careful construction to the collection, too, that we haven’t touched on yet. So, in going back to the importance of the final story, we have to consider how the entire text builds, and how the four sections work together to lead us to “Butterfly of Dinard.”
XYS: It’s true, the collection itself is curated with a lot of purpose, having gone through these editions and reprints, and Montale himself went back after the first edition and revised it, adding more stories. . .
MM: The first edition came out in 1956 with twenty-five stories divided into three sections. From 1956 to 1973, there were many editions, and every time, new stories were added. For example, “Marmeladov’s Second Period” is the last story he added, and I can’t imagine the volume without it. The difference with this volume is that, compared to the 1970 English edition that came out, which made reference to the 1969 Mondadori edition—it had five less stories, so this edition has new pieces that have never been published in English, and we’re really pleased to be able to bring them to the Anglophone public.
XYS: Another thing I wanted to talk about was both of your connections with the writer Mario Moffa, who wrote one of the first critical texts on Butterfly of Dinard: Lettura della Farfalla di Dinard. Of course, Marla, he is your father, and Oonagh, he was your professor. I wonder if you engaged with those insights while you were working on the translation, and what impact Mario Moffa’s text had on your readings of the story.
OS: I’ll just say that Professor Moffa was a great teacher and a very kind person. I learned so much from him! He really planted the seed for loving the Italian language the way that I do. I’m also so grateful that Marla and I were able to meet in 2016, that we bonded and discovered this shared passion for Butterfly of Dinard.
As for our engagement with the critical readings—yes, we did. We had to, because sometimes we needed to understand the circumstances of these stories better, and what other people have made of them. We often looked at Professor Moffa’s book, and it was of great help to us. We also looked at the previous English translation by G. Singh, to see what he had done for certain situations in which we couldn’t necessarily find a way out. We also referred to Niccolò Scaffai’s rich, detailed notes, which helped in the editing process and with the notes—which are a whole other topic.
MM: Farfalla di Dinard had always been on my father’s bookshelf since I was little, and I’ve always known that he’d written this critical analysis of the book, but to be honest, I was always just curious about the title. I didn’t even know what “Dinard” was, but I was intrigued by it.
Still, it wasn’t until my father passed away in 2015 that I actually opened the book—which, unfortunately, is what happens sometimes with parents. My father always had a great love for Montale, but he never pushed it on me, so when I actually started reading his book in parallel with Butterfly of Dinard, I just fell in love with the stories. I gave a copy of my father’s book to Oonagh, and that’s how this conversation started—that maybe we should work on this together because of the special connection with my father. It was the perfect project for us.
My father’s book—I went back to it several times. Also because, during the translation, we didn’t have Scaffai’s text of very helpful notes until 2021, when we had already finished our first draft. So I did work from my father’s book, and it constituted a lot of the research. Then, when we had Scaffai’s book on hand, we did double check the references, especially a lot of the complex musical ones.
XYS: Because Mr. Moffa’s book isn’t available in the English. I’m curious if there are any particular illuminations that he gave that you could tell us about.
MM: One thing I really appreciated was his reading of the last story, where he cites Hawthorne’s novella, The Artist of the Beautiful. I’ll just read this short passage that essentially goes along with the idea that poetry is only visible for the artist and not in the shared reality:
Thus it is that ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and for a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical. It is a requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy; he must keep his faith in himself while the incredulous world assails him with its utter disbelief; he must stand up against mankind and be his own sole disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is directed.
XYS: That’s such an interesting tension, because in Butterfly of Dinard, there’s a throughline in which a poet, or any kind of artist, keeps a personal, individualised layer of meanings strewn across the world—and this comes through specifically in the story “Crumbling Ash,” in which there is a woman watching a snail just crawl. She gets extremely emotional about it, and the onlooker says that she’s obviously endowed this snail with some “special private meaning.” I wonder if that comes across in not only the content, but also the style in which Montale writes—such as the backstory, Oonagh, that you spoke earlier about.
MM: Well, for sure in the story “Relics,” where they’re looking through these old photographs to find the missing image of the horse, Ortello. At one point, the character calls the animals that they’ve encountered throughout their life as their “godfathers,” as if they were custodians that were taking care of them. So there are all these pedestrian encounters that then become special, and they’re special just for them, but it’s because they’re given a poetic meaning. They’re seeing them as something that goes beyond what somebody else would see them as, and so in that list of animals—amidst them blackbirds and worms—they all become somehow special like the butterfly in “Butterfly of Dinard.”
OS: I’ll also mention the story “The Bat,” and the notion of these sudden shifts or breaks. This is a theme that runs through Montale’s poetry. In “The Bat,” it starts out with humour, but then there’s a shift, and the narrator wonders: “Could this bat be my father?” And we start to understand that something has happened. He listens to it, he leans into it, and there’s also a shift in that moment with the relationship with the female protagonist; she suddenly becomes softer, gentler, whereas before she was harsh and commandeering. Suddenly, she’s the one who’s helping him through this difficult moment of awareness. And those kinds of moments are definitely key to this collection. A mundane moment that splits open, and reveals a great truth.
And what we do with them—that’s the difference. Do we hold them, do we write about them, do we move them forward, do we string them on a necklace. We all have many butterflies, and we carry them with us. Translating is as much about reading as it is about self-reflection, and Marla and I are given to reflect on our own moments, relationships, people, intimacies, people who have appeared and disappeared. So translating this text was an amazing experience, because as with Montale’s poetry, if you can get into it, it’s really life-changing.
MM: And I just want to add one more thing about one of the special things he does which is, for example, in “The Bearded Woman” or “The House with Two Palms,” he writes about Maria, who was the family’s housekeeper, and he says that it’s a way to remember people who would’ve been forgotten, so by writing about them, he could express his gratitude towards these figures who were perhaps not important in the scheme of history, but were important to him on a spiritual level. Those are some of the most beautiful and touching stories.
OS: And when I think of “The Bearded Woman,” I can’t help but think of the ending. He runs into someone he knows, and he pretends that he has to rush off, so he gets into the elevator and the elevator disappears. The story takes us in, we experience it, then there’s a quick retreat, and we’re left with the experience. So these stories are really experiences, somehow.
XYS: It’s very cinematic—these stories, and the way that he positions his perspective. I get astounded by the endings sometimes, of how he will occasionally just put in a single sentence that’s like a huge zoom out, taking us from the focus of a private encounter back into the wider world.
MM: Yes, like “The Man in Pajamas,” for me, is really so clear. We could imagine it as a film—just watching him go down the hallway, back and forth—
OS: —the pillowcase stuck on a slipper. That’s because he knows how to capture the moment. There are moments of great drama in all of our lives, little or large. And it’s just a question of really narrowing in on them.
XYS: I do want to talk a little bit more about the finer details of the translation itself. You both mentioned how certain aspects were extremely difficult, or entailed a lot of research. I wonder if you could tell us more about the particulars.
MM: Montale makes use of Tuscan and Ligurian dialects, which in English, some of those words get lost, but we tried to give an alternative where possible, or add something that was just as rich.
An example of the latter instance, can be seen in “Angst,” where Montale has the character talk about l’Italia. We chose to add il bel paese, because we thought that English readers might like that alternative way of describing Italy.
OS: There are a couple of sentences that we really laboured over, trying to capture not only the logic, but also the beauty and the flow:
While radio-transmitted lies belched out a slop of harsh insults along the streets of the old part of town, and swastikas and German books were prominently on display, and the belt of our sudden national folly tightened around our collective girth, Mr. Stapps, with his gold teeth and the fatuous smile of an artificial forty-year-old, kept right on “delivrating” falcons, cutting and pasting Sumerian poems, feeding Snow Flake hypophosphates, and preparing his famously spicy stews, always calm, cool, wrapped up in a cloud of allusions, reserve, worldliness, and lousy literature.
I mean, how beautiful is that?! We got it! We got it.
XYS So beautiful! I wonder if you could maybe make a metaphor of the reworking of these sentences to some other sort of act, just so we can get a clearer idea of your mindset. I’ve heard translators describe their craft as a dance, or as music transposition. . .
OS: Depending on the text, for me, it’s a lot like acting. I mean, you’re really taking on somebody else’s voice, and you’re listening for the tone, and you’re delivering a performance, if you will, of some kind. Here, it’s hard to really pin down, to find one metaphor that captures it, because there is musicality, there is a great deal of intelligence—the trying to think like Montale. . .
But I’d like to say that together, we were able to do this translation. Not alone. I’d loved this book from the first moment I read it, when I was a graduate student at Columbia, and I’ve dreamed of translating it, but I could never in my life handle this alone, and I could only do it with Marla. I can’t find anything to describe it, besides that we needed two brains, four eyes—we both wear glasses, so eight eyes, two big hearts, and a lot of history between us to handle it. That’s not the case with a lot of translations. Sometimes you can just dive in—but not with this.
MM: As I said before, this was “our” project. It could only be that way for us.
Personally, as a theatre director, when I translate, I do have that metaphor of bringing it to the stage—directing as a way of translating. My thinking is like that, and I love the idea of being faithful to the text, because that’s the director’s job to be faithful to the author, while finding solutions within the new genre to make it work. You need those solutions that are a part of another kind of creativity, to valorise the text in the new form.
XYS: I do want to conclude by asking if there’s anything that you both would love for readers to keep in mind while reading, or anything you want them to know while navigating the text.
MM: I’m actually very curious to have feedback from readers, because I feel that the stories are very Italian. I think they describe a period in Italy which is particular because of the war, but at the same time, when we think about the part regarding Montale’s childhood in Liguria, they’re so specifically Italian. So I’m curious to know how the character of Italian-ness comes across. I would just say that if you want to get a sense of Italy in those years, this is definitely an interesting book to read, because it gives you a slice of that.
OS: One thing you’ll find in this book are a lot of references of Montale’s refutal of fascism. That’s an important element, because it appears in all four sections—there are hints at his staunch refusal of dictatorship. We see it in “A Stranger’s Story” right at the beginning, with a reference to the blackshirts that he refuses to salute. We see it in “Mr. Stapps” when the iniquitous sanctions are mentioned—the Jewish laws that were passed—which meant that Irma Brandeis, one of Montale’s muses, had to return to the United States. We see it in “Honey” with the line: “. . . the madness of an Italian dictator who was initially so mild-mannered and charming, but in the end so cruel . . . .”. We see it in “Dancers at the Diavolo Rosso,” with the Rizzolini girls who are dancing with the two great poets; then in “Red Mushrooms,” when the characters imagine the death of the fascist leader. . . I want to say that as ephemeral, beautiful, and delicate as these stories are, they are firmly grounded in history, and Montale does not for a minute let us forget that. They are of the moment, and yet they are universal.
Marla Moffa was born in Massachusetts and has been living in Italy for more than twenty years. A theater director, writer, and translator of Italian literature, she has published two children’s books: Il leone con gli occhiali (2019) and Non ti senti speciale? (2021). Her first collection of short plays, Tre pièces da Borges, is forthcoming. Her father, Mario Moffa, a professor of Italian language and literature at Mount Holyoke College, was the author of Eugenio Montale, Lettura della Farfalla di Dinard (1986).
Oonagh Stransky has translated novels by Domenico Starnone, Carlo Lucarelli, Giuseppe Pontiggia, and Erminia Dell’Oro, as well as works of nonfiction by Roberto Saviano and Pope Francis. She has published short translations and essays in a number of journals, including the New England Review, Exchanges, and The Massachusetts Review. Stransky studied Italian at Middlebury College, UC Berkeley, Università di Firenze, and Columbia University, and currently resides in Italy.
Xiao Yue Shan is a poet, editor, and translator. shellyshan.com.
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