Description
Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the Italian by Sonia Raiziss and others. Each new book by Alfredo de Palchi is both a surprise and a challenge. In ANONYMOUS CONSTELLATION we encountered the destructive forces of nature, moving blindly through the fishes and beasts to all mankind. In ADDICTIVE AVERSIONS we encounter the life-force of sex, expressed in the individual body of the poet, but just as blind, asocial and irresistible, hence the title.
"Alfredo de Palchi is both tough and imaginative. He is absolutely uncompromising, and his poems are painful and exalting to read. One does not come away from his stark and terrible and hilarious work untouched."—James Dickey
Author Bio
Alfredo de Palchi (1926-2020) was one of the major Italian poets of the last century and the beginning of the present century. He was born in Legnano, near Verona. As a teenager in World War II Italy, he was grabbed by self- proclaimed authorities, charged with a murder and thrown into prison. There he was tortured, but refused to confess. A fellow prisoner told him about François Villon, and he scratched his first poem on the wall of his cell. He spent the years of 1945-1951 in prison. In 1955 the Court of Assizes in Venice cleared him of charges, and after sojourns in Paris and Barcelona he came to America. Continuing to publish in his native tongue in Italy, he published bilingual editions of his work in New York with deft English translations, first by Isidore Salomon, then by Sonia Raiziss, and lastly by John Taylor. More than any other person in America, he faithfully promoted Italian poetry and prose, both with the New York journal Chelsea, which he ran from 1960 to 2007, and with his non-profit publishing house Chelsea Editions, which remained active up to the time of his death in August from leukemia. His first poetry collection, Sessioni con l'analista [Sessions with My Analyst], appeared in 1967 with Mondadori and won immediate acclaim. In the United States, following Sessions, he published exclusively with Xenos Books: THE SCORPION'S DARK DANCE (1993), ANONYMOUS CONSTELLATION (1997), ADDICTIVE AVERSIONS (1999), NIHIL (2017), THE AESTHETICS OF EQUILIBRIUM (2019) and now TERMINAL EVENTS (2020). He issued his collected works in 2013 with Chelsea Editions under the title PARADIGM: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1947-2009.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA