Figureheads

The sea, voyages, stories, myths, discoveries. And symbols. Like the polene – the figureheads that constitute the “eyes of the sea” – in the title of the new book by Claudio Magris, published by La nave di Teseo. These images of women on the prows of ships protect sailors from the fear of shipwreck. As always in Magris’s books, the journey becomes a story and the story takes us to other pages of literature, from Günter Grass to Nathaniel Hawthorne, to Karen Blixen and Juan Octavio Prenz, and from the ports of Antwerp and Buenos Aires to memories of the Battle of Lepanto. The figureheads plunge into the waves during storms and rise back up, the wounds in their wood showing the ravages of time and the elements, yet still today we see them in museums as evidence of a timeless and constantly new passion of man: to dream and to sail. And, of course, to tell stories. Polene. Occhi del mare Claudio Magris La nave di Teseo, 2019