Eugenio Montale

"Eugenio Montale, who won the 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature, brought the tradition of Italian lyric poetry that begins with Dante into the twentieth century. Montale forged a myth out of his own story that resonates profoundly with contemporary man's anguished existential experience of love and solitude, and his beautiful, stirringly individual work deals courageously and subtly with the dilemmas of the modern era: its tormented history and politics, its struggle with doubt and belief." "Jonathan Galassi's versions of Montale's major work - the arc stretching from Ossi di seppia (1925) through Le occasioni (1939) to La bufera e altro (1954) - are the clearest, most accurate, most convincing yet made. They are accompanied by an interpretive essay and by extensive notes that elucidate the extremely rich context of Montale's often dense and allusive poetry."--BOOK JACKET.

An English-language translation of works by the late Nobel Prize winner offers insight into his role in influencing Italian poetry and international Modernism, as well as his views on such topics as modernity, fascism, and war.

First published in Italy in 1971, Satura is the fourth collection of poems by the Nobel Prize winner Eugenio Montale (1896-1981). In Satura, the poet experimented with dialogue, journalistic notation, commentary, aphorism, and half-strangled song, and pressed Italian literary language into terrain it had never touched before. These are poems whose reductions and sacrifices define a new lyric art.

"The butterfly of Dinard, in our opinion, focuses on the poetry of Montale and Montale himself: born this prose on an imaginative level, is no longer autobiography and is not yet, or is not in its entirety, or is no longer poetry." It is this fascinating definition that opens Cesare Segre's essay on The Butterfly of Dinard, one of the most vivid interventions in the Montalian bibliography. When Montale published The Butterfly of Dinard in 1956, he confirmed that his poetic lyre vibrated through the prose string. The reader will be delighted with the "butterfly effect" of these fifty dazzling texts, by the variety of tones, the melancholy depth, the richness of inspiration. Between 1946 and 1950 Montale wrote short stories for the third page of Corriere della Sera. The stories are in this collection, The butterfly of Dinard, 1956. In the story that gives the title to the book, Montale says that he sat every day in a cafe in Dinard, a small town in Bretagne, and every day a saffron-colored butterfly visited him. Maybe it was a secret message from the beloved one now far or maybe just an illusion dictated by the absence. Montale received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1975.

"In 1990 Sun & Moon Press published the first American translation of the brilliant Soviet poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Description. The book garnered a great deal of attention in the United States and led one critic, Marjorie Perloff, to ponder about the possibility of influence of contemporary Soviet poetry upon American writers. Perloff notes that Dragomoschenko's "is a poem of the body, of the 'skin of sun that turned into the reverse side of touch....' Parody, pastiche, even irony - these play a subordinate role to passion, and especially to vision." Writing in The Hungry Mind Review, American poet C. D. Wright concluded: "This is poetry. Immodest. Magisterial. More or less impenetrable. The relation of language is potential but not improvisational. The vocabulary for this is happily idiosyncratic.... Description is a radical exercise book for life."". "In his new collection, Xenia, Dragomoschenko continues to explore the world about him, a world in which the natural, in which nature is more radical than most psychologically motivated and realist-oriented poets have ever recognized it to be. "I spent a life / which no one here ever saw in dreams." As Dragomoschenko makes clear at the very beginning of this stunning and profound work: "We see only what / we see // only what / lets us be ourselves - / seen."". "Visionary that he is, Dragomoschenko allows the whole terrifying universe into his vision: "Yesterday there was still poplar down - but today / the children burned the ox.""--BOOK JACKET.