Description
Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Translated from the Italian, and with a preface by John Taylor. Alfredo de Palchi, NIHIL. A profound book of poetry and prose in which the author imaginatively floats down the river of his youth, the Adige, describing scenes of beauty and horror, and commenting upon them. Each section of NIHIL leads to more remote reaches of human experience and understanding.
"Alfredo, dearest Lion! NIHIL offers superb reading and delightfully makes the reader lose his or her existential bearings. Page after page, I feel as if I am dangling from a kind of Judgment and never propped up by the earth. As if the earth, the river, the same memories that have constituted the earth, the same Time that has made up the earth, were your jungle, your realm, whereas we had been sentenced to the perspective of an endless suspended punishment. The prose parts, which especially reveal your poetic craft, create an apocalyptic impression in which gentleness—barred from the human race, which does not even establish its own kingdom—ultimately falls only to those unhappy animals that you embrace one by one. The victims."—Cristina Annino
Author Bio
Alfredo de Palchi was born in Legnano (near Verona) in 1926. After sojourns in Paris and Barcelona in the 1950s, he moved to the United States in 1956. His first poetry collection was Sessioni con l'analista / Sessions with My Analyst (1967). Xenos Books has published three bilingual editions of de Palchi's work: THE SCORPION'S DARK DANCE (1993), ANONYMOUS CONSTELLATION (1997) and ADDICTIVE AVERSIONS (1999). In 2013, Chelsea Editions issued his PARADIGM: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1947-2009, with Italian and English texts of his lifework. Books about the poet include: A Life Gambled in Poetry: Homage to Alfredo de Palchi (Gradiva Publications, 2011); Guiseppe Panella, The Poetry of Alfredo de Palchi: An Interview and Three Essays (Chelsea Editions, 2013); and Giorgio Linguaglossa, La poesia di Alfredo de Palchi (Edizioni Projetto Cultura, 2017). He lives in Manhattan.
Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA
John Taylor is an American writer, critic and translator who lives in France. In 2013, he won the Raiziss-de Palchi Translation Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for his project to translate the Italian poet Lorenzo Calogero. This book was published as An Orchid Shining in the Hand: Selected Poems 1932-1960 by Chelsea Editions in 2015. Taylor has translated several French poets, including Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, José-Flore Tappy, Louis Calaferte, and Pierre Chappuis. His critical essays on European literature have been gathered in five volumes by Transaction Publishers. He is the author of several volumes of prose and poetry, three of which have been published by Xenos Books: THE APOCALYPSE TAPESTRIES (2004), Now the Summer Came to Pass and THE DARK BRIGHTNESS (2017).
Author City: USA