Dino Campana

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Dino Campana (20 August 1885 - 1 March 1932) was an Italian visionary poet. He wrote one book of poetry, the Canti orfici ("Orphic Songs").

[edit] Biography

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Campana was born in Marradi, near Faenza, northern Italy.

Beginning in 1900, at the age of 15, Campana suffered numerous bouts of sometimes-violent mental instability. He was institutionalized for the first time at the age of 21, but he managed to escape. He went into an asylum in 1918 and remained there, until his death in 1932.

Campana had a love affair with writer Sibilla Aleramo.

[edit] Canti orfici

In its original form the book was composed between 1906 and 1913, and was submitted for possible publication to the poet/painter Ardengo Soffici in Florence. Soffici subsequently lost the manuscript. Campana spent the next six months reconstructing the book from memory. In 1914, with the help of a local printer of religious tracts, he self-published a first edition of around 500 (originally meant to be 1,000). 44 copies were sold on subscription and Campana attempted, with marginal success, to sell the remainder of his portion of the run (the printer had taken half the books as partial printing payment) himself at cafes in Florence.

The text is an autobiographical journey from Marradi through Bologna, Genoa, Argentina and back to Genoa. Paralleling the actual physical journey is a spiritual and mystical voyage undertaken by Campana in search of The Longest Day of Genoa (il più lungo giorno di Genova)- his concept of an eternal moment (il eterno presente) outside of normal space-time in which everything and everywhen exists simultaneously. This concept is not explicitly defined in the text, which is less expository or didactic than incantatory in nature. Indeed, it has been left to his critics to extrapolate much of the underlying theory in Campana’s work.

An erratic autodidact, Campana taught himself functional French, German and English- enough to read the Symbolists and Whitman in the original languages. The text is subtitled, in German, The Tragedy of the Last German in Italy and is dedicated to Kaiser William II. Campana ended his book with a quotation in English from Leaves of Grass: “They were all torn and cover’d with the boy’s blood”.

The original manuscript was found amongst Soffici’s belongings in 1971. This find demonstrated that not only had Campana rewritten the original text almost perfectly but had also nearly doubled it in size. This has led some to suggest that Campana had another copy of the manuscript from which he “reconstructed” the work.