Cuttlefish Bones
by Eugenio Montale
Summary
Montale's first collection, published in Italian in 1925, and still the book most readers meet him through.
The setting is the Ligurian coast where he grew up: dry stone, salt, scrub, cicadas, a sea that offers no consolation. The cuttlefish bone of the title is the thing left on the beach after the animal is gone, and that is the register throughout. These are poems about residue, about what remains and what cannot be recovered, written by a young man in a country sliding into fascism who declines to say so directly.
The tone is the achievement. Montale writes in a conversational, associative voice that after a century still sounds modern, and he does it by deliberately refusing the grand rhetorical manner that dominated Italian poetry before him. He is dry where his predecessors were ornate, hesitant where they were certain.
For an English reader the translation matters more than usual, since so much depends on cadence. William Arrowsmith's version is the one to look for.
This is not difficult poetry in the sense of requiring decoding, but it is withholding. Montale offers images rather than statements and expects you to sit with them. Read a few poems at a time, out loud if you can. The famous lines about not asking the poet for a formula that can open worlds, and about what he can tell you being only what he is not and does not want, are as good a description of his whole project as anyone has managed.
Historical Context & Significance
Eugenio Montale won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1975, and the prize honored his life's work rather than this or any single collection.
The gap is worth noting. Cuttlefish Bones appeared in 1925 and the Nobel came fifty years later, by which time the young poet of the Ligurian coast had become the senior figure in Italian letters. The Academy's citation praised his distinctive poetry which, with great artistic sensitivity, had interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life with no illusions, a description that fits the first collection as closely as the last.
His effect on Italian poetry was to change what it sounded like. By stripping out the rhetorical grandeur associated with Gabriele D'Annunzio and writing in a spare conversational register instead, Montale set the terms that Italian poets have worked with, or against, ever since.