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Reading Alfredo de
Palchi’s poetry: The Scorpion’s Dark Dance We live through
Alfredo de Palchi’s The Scorpion’s Dark
Dance[1] with the same kind of immediacy we feel
in reading Rimbaud’s Illuminations.
Dark exuberance, bright anger, cutting cynicism that hammers us to the other
side of apathy. These are the poems of a young man imprisoned, tortured by
the fanatical ideologue and zealot of every extremist philosophy and every
political color. His biographical note, written in the same staccato rhythms
as his poetry, reads: “A teenager in fall of 1944, during World War II,
tortured by Fascists and German soldiers, still a teenager, after the war
tortured by Communists and mythomaniacs of the ludicrous Italian resistance.
From Spring 1945 to Spring 1951, as a political prisoner defies and insults
the government, the army, the church, and decries Italy as a country
inhabited by vileness. Scratches first poem on a cell wall in Naples in 1946.
Begins serious writing in 1947, when encouraged by an older poet.” His first manuscript
of poetry was literally lost prior to its publication and his second,
finished in 1951, is The Scorpion’s
Dark Dance translated by Sonia Raiziss, late editor of The Chelsea Review. Raiziss, who died
recently, was a New York entrepreneur and translator of European poetry who
lived much of her life in Manhattan. She met de Palchi in Paris in 1952.
Later, in 1966, they would co-edit the Italian section of Modern European Poetry for Bantam
Books. De Palchi, who has lived in the United States for many years, has
translated Italian poets for The
Atlantic Monthly (1958), The
Quarterly Review of Literature, Poetry, and he is among the translators
of a collection: Eugenio Montale:
Selected Poems, for New Directions. He is currently an Associate Editor
at Chelsea magazine famous for its
publication of interesting and innovative poets of Europe and Latin America
as well as other cultures. As translator, Sonia
Raiziss explains in a succinct foreword, Alfredo de Palchi’s language is
“direct, unadorned, unconcerned with flow, figuration, fancy” meant to match
the anger of his protest. The impromptu metrics match the “spitting out of
his guts.” He has no regard for the tune of them because there is a ferocious
gush of agony and distrust of “ornament artifice or euphony.” There is no
artifice because de Palchi’s point is that civilization and culture have
failed humanity. De Palchi knows, as his stark poetry demonstrates, that
there is no use to a brilliant physicist like Joseph Teller playing
beautiful, ordered Bach on the piano, if he engineers the Neutron Bomb—which
would leave buildings standing for confiscation after the humans who owned
them have been vaporized to death. The poet is aware of the vanity of a fool
like Mussolini who expounded his “National Socialism” even as he allowed
Hitler’s Fascist and heinous crimes. De Palchi’s poetry is not so specific in
references in its placement in time, but constitutes a universal, caged and
abstracted howl of frustration and uncompromising rebellion against folly. This is a case where
form definitely follows function. The book is really one long poem set apart
on each page by plenty of white space to let its justifiable anger breathe
out at us. Alfredo de Palchi is like an enraged Italian giving an angry chin
salute to “civilization.” What good has it done us? he seems to say, if we
imprison and torture each other, prey upon each other’s vulnerable bodies
with fundamentalist ideologies simply meant to cloak our thievery of each
others’ lives and bounty. What good are the fabulous glories of nature, her
fruits and gifts, if we despoil her and each other with our hateful greed
and destruction: Summer Propitious
fruit blond breast heavy with an
onrush of sensations in the bleating of
trees the astringent light collides upsets it all:
green- green the sky-sky and the
rumble. The
rumble no doubt refers to the bombs, the artillery of the war as well as the
clatter of useless civilization set against the peace of the natural world
and its bounty. Some of the poems seem written from the poet’s prison cell
or the memory of it: “The cell is an oven that sweats out / my spit grappling
with their power / and the act of atoning for a life / choked to trash /
—what’s the good of adjusting to the why of their lies the immense pain
larger than I in this scenario. . . .” But, always the poet is
aware of the larger world and its suffering, not just his own. He morns those
shoved into forgotten graves as he himself is imprisoned and lost from the
world: “An owl in the jailyard palm / hoots for the mouse I am—the shit /
bucket bites my gullet / and the plunge of night / unhinges my mind.” Yet, to the end of
his howling poem and on each surging page of it, the poet remains true to his
own resolution not to participate in the lies that drive him and others
insane with their cruelty. He “dreams of magnificent anarchists” who refuse
corrupt fundamentalists with their murderous tortures, and finally he sighs
with an affirmation of life and human truth “. . . here is the wind
/ taking me under—ashes / sow the earth with my final / no / no / no.” This
is the fury of uncompromising youth influenced by the rebellious French poets
Villon and Rimbaud. The Scorpion’s Dark
Dance expresses that hunger for righteousness that we all feel in the
memory of our youthful rebellion against the corruption and the bloodbath of
our history. We desire to rail against it forever and long to evolve into a
full humanity. De Palchi gives that final, idealistic cry for all of us,
swallowed by pragmaticism or apathy, against man’s inhumanity to man. That is
what universalizes the poem. There is a satisfaction in reading the voice of
this young and uncompromising prisoner of war who refuses to give up and is
always awakened by that “thin beam of light” that “scratches at his eyes.” Xenos Books of
California has done a good job of bringing these minimalist poems in fine
book design to the eyes of American readers—for the first time—in a well
produced, 129 page bi-lingual edition with print large enough for tired
eyes. The cover is excellently organic to the style of the poems with its
black and white photograph of an impressionistic sculpture of guns, pine
needles, cedar twigs, and hardware by Jerilea Zempel. The late Sonia
Raiziss, who devoted much of her life to bringing European poets into the
vocabulary of American literature in a cross-cultural exchange, is owed a
debt of gratitude. She has done a commendable job of rendering de Palchi’s
book into English. The volume is divided into four themetic parts by the
poet: I) The First Cause; II) An Obsession of Flies; III) A Carnival of
Exiles; IV) The Shining Wall of Air. Less is lost in this translation than
in many, but the musical Italian vowels and the abrupt rhythms, the spit fire
stance of emotional rage cannot be captured with the same force as the
original language carries. Still, one is hard put to see how the translator
could have done a better job. The
Scorpion’s Dark Dance is written by a survivor of the utter cruelty of
World War II who seems to have endured by the very act of writing defiant and
powerful poetry of harsh music full of just outrage at human folly. As
Raiziss explains, this is a “primal and not pretty” poetry. James Dickey is
correct to say it is both “painful and exalting to read.” |
[1]Alfredo de Palchi, The Scorpion’s Dark Dance [a bilingual edition], trans. from the Italian by Sonia Raiziss (Xenos Books, 1995: P.O. Box 52152; Riverside, CA 92517–3152) ISBN. 1-879378-05-1; 129 pp. Paper: $9.95.