Poetry
Cuttlefish Bones
Ossi di seppia
Eugenio Montale · 1925
Synopsis
Poems born on the Ligurian coast of the Cinque Terre: rocks and walls burned by light, a dazzling sea, debris cast up on the shore, like the cuttlefish bones that give the book its title. The speaker feels cut off from the world, shut in as if behind a wall, and refuses in advance the word that would explain everything: he can say only what he is not, what he does not want, watching for a crack through which something might open.
Context
The collection was published in Turin in 1925 by the publisher Piero Gobetti, the very year in which the author signed the manifesto of the anti-fascist intellectuals; it was expanded for the 1928 and 1931 editions. The author spent his summers at Monterosso, whose landscape nourishes these poems. In French, Patrice Angelini has produced a bilingual edition, and the collection opens the author's “Poésies” at Gallimard; in English, William Arrowsmith translated it in 1992 under the title “Cuttlefish Bones”.
Who it is for
Short poems, in a hard, concrete language, which are read slowly and gain from being reread.
Prizes and reception
According to Ebsco's Research Starters database, the poems express alienation, isolation and the quest for an authentic life.