Dino Campana
Canti Orfici

There's a poet in the woods and he's a poet in disarray. In just a few months, he'll end up in an asylum.

At a certain point, halfway down a small path, the poet encounters a toad. And, although it might seem strange, it's like looking in a mirror.

Have you ever talked to a toad? I imagine not. Talking to a toad is quite a crazy thing. Especially if you're actually talking to yourself.

"Poor Dino. Don't stay in the middle of the road, they'll crush you." A small phrase that pierces with tenderness. I imagine an enchanted silence, a sort of sad sweetness, a coming to terms.

Well, when I think of Dino Campana, the toad/poet (or the poet/toad) is the first thing. The second is Faenza. Because in Faenza "time's course was suspended." It's in Faenza that the Canti Orfici begin.

"Involuntarily I lifted my eyes to the barbarian tower that dominated the long avenue of plane trees."

Faenza is fifteen kilometers from my house. It takes just a moment to get there. Well, I can tell you now that the tower, partially hidden by houses, no longer dominates. And at the beginning of the avenue, near the outdoor cinema, they've placed a kind of plaque: "Dino Campana in Faenza." They've also placed one in the square, and rightly so, it was there that Dino saw "a brown aquiline face of a fortune-teller like Michelangelo's Night."

Well, if we wanted, we'd already have all the elements, the suspension of time, the vision, a language sometimes archaic, sometimes ultramodern. And a toad. A toad that will be crushed...

Then there's the third thing, and the third thing is a bouquet of scattered piercings. Dozens and dozens of verses I could list for you, which come down like rain. The fourth thing, instead, is Imola, my city. Here Dino was admitted to an asylum for the first time. He was only twenty.

Well, Dino Campana's life is a kind of perfect tragedy, one where not a single ingredient is missing. However, I don't want to talk to you about it.

I want to talk to you about his poetry.

Of course, the terrible relations with his mother, the pure poet set against the rabble of Marradi, the shabby genius mocked by fashionable writers, the eternal retreat into woods and mountains, the arrests, the asylum, the syphilis, are significant. They're significant indeed.

It's just that we always fall back on the naive, on the huge fallacy of the mad genius. The usual cheap myth that only obscures his poetic greatness. After all, when madness truly arrived, Campana didn't write a single verse anymore. And his letters from the last year are heartbreaking, as he repeatedly tells of how poetry had permanently abandoned him.

The problem is that the originality of his style has often been downgraded to a symptom. But the constant repetitions, the syntactic harshness, the frenzied adjectivization, the expansive phrasing, don't represent the chaos of a lost mind at all. They are, in fact, the result of continuous reconsiderations, an incessant labor of chiseling and rewriting, where, in the attempt to bring order, poetry shines through its creation. Chaos might be narrated, but the narrator does it in full health, or at least in the face of that chaos, it's still health. In short, poetry, as long as it can, saves life.

Not only that, Campana, far from being the barbarian, the great savage, the amateur genius, was instead a man of the most refined culture, someone in constant dialogue with the kindred souls he had chosen. Only he stayed far from enclosed rooms and had as his home the road, the dust, the light, the elements of nature.

With poetry finally breathing, taking air. Thanks also to a kind of contagious enthusiasm, a sort of love/devotion, for what, to him, was the goddess of memory, the ancient chimera, the great friend, the great dream, oblivion.

Steeped in Dante, Michelangelo, Leonardo (constantly evoked in his pages), a deep connoisseur of Goethe, Nietzsche, Baudelaire (whom he read in the original language thanks to having acquired, through travels, a fair command of at least five languages) he was anything but a naive poet.

But let's come to the meaning, the profound significance of the work.

Campana, in the prose poem "La Verna", describing an annunciation by Andrea Della Robbia, says that the angel "appears at the very moment in which dreams appear"...

It’s a key phrase because all his poetry is exactly that moment, that particular suspension, that allows the eruption of vision or memory.

Everything becomes ancient again, and things are what they have always been...

"The most powerful second soul breaks our chains," the visions throw a bridge over infinity.

"Which bridge, we asked, which bridge have we cast over infinity, that everything appears as a shadow of eternity?"

But what's more extraordinary is that the Canti Orfici are pure poetry in motion. A kind of cinema on the written page. A long wandering out of time, where everything refers to something else, where past and present blur in an expressive freedom that leaves one breathless...

And now let's return to that toad... to the letter written to Giovanni Papini, four months before the final admission to the asylum in Castelpulci.

Remember this name, Giovanni Papini, one of the many "stained with the blood of the child," that is, the blood of Orpheus, the blood of Dino. And if you want to know more, note this name, Sebastiano Vassalli, and this title, "La notte della cometa".

But here is the excerpt of the letter:

"Like a disappointed faun, I take the ice from the water of a basin under a small mountain waterfall. The sun has not yet shown itself behind the chestnut trees. On the way back, I meet the nocturnal friend crapaud, (the toad) deceived by the freshness of the downpour. Poor Dino. Don't stay in the middle of the road, they'll crush you. But he stays in the middle of the road. The grasshoppers have emerged outside and jump around me with red wheels. Yet in everything there is a certainty that I..."

Well, that certainty is madness. The real kind.

Campana hadn't been writing verses for some time. Yet listen, even in a state of complete disillusionment, to how much descriptive capacity, listen to how much light...

Listen to how much vividness still remains.

And so I think that this happiness that is no more speaks of past happiness. And that Dino Campana, in spite of a tragic life, was nonetheless a happy man...

Happy with a happiness, perhaps rhapsodic, perhaps elusive, but at certain moments, even too great.

So great that those who are always where you expect will never understand...