Butterfly of Dinard

The great poet Eugenio Montale was also a remarkable writer of prose whose stories appeared regularly in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. Butterfly of Dinard is a collection of fifty of those stories, pieces about ＂silly and trivial things which are at the same time important,＂ whose sprightliness, subtle irony, and conversational ease defy the limits of traditional fiction. Taken together, they form a sort of autobiographical novel, evoking people, objects, and animals dear to the poet, while simultaneously shedding light on the social, cultural, and political events of the day. The book begins with Montale’s childhood in Liguria and goes on to explore his adult life in pre-Fascist Florence and the onset of Fascism. The last part of the book, focusing on his final years in Milan, forms what Jonathan Galassi in his introduction calls ＂a mosaic self-portrait of the writer himself, a bumbling yet proud, memory-obsessed Chaplinesque antihero, who sees himself as the only surviving, if unwilling, witness to a disappearing world.＂

The stories were first published in book form in 1956; Montale added further stories to subsequent editions, culminating in the final 1973 edition. Butterfly of Dinard is the first complete translation of this edition and includes five stories never before translated into English.

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) was an Italian writer, editor, and translator. Born in Genoa, Montale trained to be an opera singer in his youth, but following his service in World War I and the death of his voice teacher, he turned his focus to poetry. Upon publishing his first book, Cuttlefish Bones, in 1925, he was received by critics as an original and experimental poet during a time of upheaval in the Italian lyric tradition.He later became the chief literary critic for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and published a range of poetry and prose works, among them The Occasions and The Storm and Other Things. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975.

Oonagh Stransky is a translator of Italian literature, most recently of Domenico Starnone’s Via Gemito (2023).

Marla Moffa is a translator of Italian literature.

Jonathan Galassi is chairman and executive editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, as well as a poet and translator of Italian poetry, including the work of Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale. He lives in Brooklyn.