Warble warble squashed blackberry - Dino Campana sings a love song

I think Charles Wright’s translation of Campana is better than the older I. L. Salomon translation.  If there is still such a thing as a great American poet, he is one of them, and his translations strike me as superior poems.  I am glad I read Salomon’s book, though; first, it has more poems and second it has the Italian.  I don’t know Italian.  Sometimes that does not matter.

from Serenade: Bitter False Melodramatic

The comedian with serious and deep voice
With a goat’s profile and a hollow
Infernal eye flashing
Sings a song of love:
Warble warble squashed blackberry
Dawn comes soon, the dawn’s awake.

That, you say, is the song of love sung by the Goat Comic.  Let’s glance at the original of the last two lines:

Trilla trilla mora pesta
Presto è l’alba, presto è desta.

Why, this is songful, with rhymes and assonance and all that poetical stuff.  This may even be, dare I say, beautiful, comparable to the most beautiful poem in English (Italian verse’s sad burden is that it is too easily beautiful).

Campana is a weird writer, but Salomon maybe plays up his weirdness.  If the alternative is flatness, all too common in poetic translation, the kind that makes a reader wonder what the big deal is, then Salomon made the right choice.  Still, there must be something better than “Warble warble squashed blackberry.”

Part of Campana’s genuine weirdness is that he read with deep appreciation not just Walt Whitman but Edgar Allan Poe.  Much of Orphic Songs is in prose; much of the prose sounds like:

I was in the shadow of an arcade which dripped drop after drop of blood-gorged light through the fog of a December night.  Without warning a door was flung open in a splendor of light.  In the foreground of the far end of the room in the luminescence of a red ottoman an older woman was lying up on one elbow, her head resting in her hand, her brown eyes like brown fire, her breasts enormous…  (“The Night,” tr. Wright)

Campana has read “The Philosophy of Furniture.”  Campana’s women are not Poe’s women, although they are similarly idealized.  Poe was not so interested in prostitutes.

The Poe-effect merges with another resemblance that everyone mentions, so I will, too, since I felt it first and then went looking for it:

I remember an old city, red walls and red battlements, on the immense plain burnt out from the August heat, with the far-away spongy cold comfort of green hills in the background… I raised my eyes unconsciously to the barbarous tower which dominated the long avenue of plane trees…  A Deserted little piazza, broken hovels like old bruises, dead windows: to one side in an enormous wash of light, the tower, eight-pointed arid impenetrably red and unadorned; a dried up 16th-century fountain kept silent, its stone shattered in the middle of its own Latin commentary.  (“The Night,” still, italics all mine)

I read this passage, and several others, trying to remember exactly which Giorgio de Chirico painting it was copying.  Several and none, presumably.  The Red Tower, above, is from 1913; Campana did not know De Chirico but could have seen his work in magazines.  Who knows.  Silent fountains, blue mountains, a woman off in the far distance, while “[f]rom among the twilit rocks a black horned immobile shape watches me I too immobile with its golden eyes” (“La Verna”)

A lot of fine weirdness.  Perhaps the next time I read Campana I will try to make some sense of it.  This time, I did not.

O poetry poetry poetry - some stuff about Dino Campana

from The Violent Sounds of Night

O poetry poetry poetry
Rise rise rise up
From the electric fever of the pavement at night.  (tr. I. L. Salomon)

Reading Dino Campana, author of Orphic Songs (1914), I was surprised to find myself in the presence of a poet deeply influenced by Walt Whitman.  I can hear Whitman in the beginning of the above poem.  That third line is not so bad in Italian (“Su dalla febbre elettrica del selciato notturno”).

Soon enough Whitman drops away – “At the crossroads a depraved whore screams / Because a fop stole her puppy” or “In a mantle of ogling velvety blood / Silence again.”  But traces appear again and again.  I do not know much about how Whitman was received in Europe, aside from Swinburne’s respect and the deep, complex use Fernando Pessoa made of him.  Campana is not so deep.  He was the kind of poet who hopped from movement to movement, trying out the role of Decadent and Futurist and several others.  Like many American poets, Campana somehow needed Whitman’s example to free himself from Italian poetry.

from Voyage to Montevideo

And I saw the dunes
Like dizzying mares that melted away
Into the endlessness of the grasslands
Deserted without a single human house
And we turned away fleeing the dunes where there appeared
On a yellow sea created by the prodigious abundance of the river,
The marine capital of the new continent.  (tr. Charles Wright)

Campana almost became an American poet.  Like so many of his countrymen, he emigrated, in his case to Argentina (the “marine capital” is Buenos Aires).  He could have joined the Argentinean Literature of Doom.  He would have fit right in.

In the Argentine he worked as a gaucho, miner, stoker, fireman with police duties.  He became a tumbler in a circus and its janitor.  In the maritime provinces, he tempered steel, played the triangle in an orchestra, groomed horses, cranked a barrel-organ.  He was also a pianist in a nightclub.  (Salomon’s Preface, p. xviii)

But he did not stay.  He hoboed around Europe, ending up in a jail a couple of times before getting back home, the mountains northeast of Florence, where he wrote his radical Orphic Songs, the manuscript of which was soon lost by a magazine editor.  Campana rewrote the book from scratch and published it himself.  This was in 1914, bad timing, or perhaps a stroke of luck, since a few years later Campana found himself in the insane asylum where he would die.  He had stopped writing poems.

A poet named Rei Terada has a biographical poem in the June 1996 Poetry titled “Dino Campana” that says all of the above and more:

I was a poet fine as you could find,
but had to stop, being of unsound mind.

A Whitman-quoting, circus-tumbling, piano-playing hobo poet: Campana is often compared to Rimbaud, but the more I got to know him, the more I thought of him as a Beat writing forty years early and in a prettier language.

The Salomon translations and Wright translations are from separate volumes titled Orphic Songs.  Wright’s are better; Salomon’s have facing-page Italian. The latter is a City Lights book, a subtle clue that Campana might have some interest to Beat poets.