"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.