from Orphic Songs, and: Voyage to Montevideo, and: Autumn Garden, and: In the Mountains, and: Song of Darkness

from Orphic Songs /Dino Campana translatedby Charles Wright. Dino Campana, who, as Cecchihas said, "passedlike a comet, "maynot have exercised "an incalculable influence, "but the traces ofhis passing are anything but buriedin sand. There was nothing mediocre in him; even his errors we should not call errors but inevitable collisions with the sharp corners that awaitedhim at every step. The collisions ofa blindwan, ifyou will. Visionaries, even ifthey happen to be "visual"like our Campana, are inevitably the most artless, the blindest ofcreatures on this earth. Eugenio Montale Dino Campana s reputation has always been that of "the wild man"in modern Italian poetry. Born in 1885, he died at the age offorty-seven having suffered throughout his adult life from an acute mental disorder which subjected him, as one medical report described it, "to the grave dangers of an impulsively irritable state and the wandering life. " The original manuscript to his Canti Orfici (Orphic Songs) was lost by his publisher and had to be reconstructed completely from memory. In 1910, a year after having been released from St. Giles prison and the mental sanatorium of Tournay, Campana set out, on foot, on a pilgrimage from Marradi to La Verna, the place where St. Francis is said to have received the stigmata. The following are excerpts from the diary Campana kept on thatjourney. LA VERNA (diary) 15 September 1910 (on the road to Campigno) Three girls and a donkey on the mule track coming down the mountain . Complimentary wisecracks from the road workers. The donkey who rolls in the dirt. Laughter. Mountain profanities. The rocks and the river. The Missouri Review · 39 Castagno, 17 September The Falterona is still wrapped in fog. I can see only rocky run-offs that vein its sides, then lose themselves in a fog-sky which alternating waves of sunlight fail to thin out. Rain has made the grey mountain a slick darkness. In front of the fountain the people of Castagno have been sitting a long time now waiting for the sun, weighed down by the long night of rain in their flooded hovels. A girl in broken shoes walks by saying submissively, 'one day the truth that passes all understanding will bring us everything.' The swollen stream in its dark noise remarks on all this misery. Campigno, forest of the Falterona From the avenue of linden trees I watched a solitary star catch fire on the Alpine spur of rock and the ancient forest shadows coagulate and the deep-ditched rustlings of silence. From the sharp peak in the sky, over the drowsy mystery of the forest I ran my eye across everything going down the avenue of lindens toward my old friend the moon who rose up in a new red dress of coppery smoke: and I greeted my friend again without surprise as though the savage depths of the crag were waiting for her to surge up out of an unknown landscape. Stia, 20 September In the hotel an old Milanese gentleman talks of his distant love affairs to a white-haired lady who has a face like a baby's. Calmly she explains the vagaries of the heart to him: he is still amazed and becomes distressed: here in this old village enclosed in the woods. 21 September (near La Verna) I saw a turtle dove break off from the mystical solitudes and glide toward the open immensity of the valleys. The Christian landscape marked by crosses bent over by the wind was mysteriously quickened by it. The dove glided endlessly on its out-stretched locked wings, light as a little boat on the ocean. Goodbye, dove, O good-bye! The soaring rock columns of La Verna rose up into peaks grey in the twilight, all ringed around by the dark forest. The hospitality of the local peasants was enchantingly Christian. I was covered with sweat and they offered me water. "You will arrive at La Verna within an hour if God wishes it." A little girl watched me a bit sadly I thought, her black eyes amazed under an enormous straw hat. An unconscious absorption and a convent-like serenity sweetened each feature of her face. I'll remember...