Oberlin College Press

Dino Campana

ORPHIC SONGS (translated by Charles Wright)

Paper $14.95 (ISBN 0-932440-17-7) Cloth $11.50 (ISBN 0-932440-16-9)

Dino Campana's small and intensely magical body of poetry from the early years of the last century--prose and free verse that combine the visual and the visionary with astonishing vigor and haunting grace--is little known to English-speaking readers. Charles Wright, whose award-winning translation of Montale's The Storm launched the FIELD Translation Series, is Campana's ideal translator.

"Wright's sensitive translation of Campana's Canti orfici captures the disturbing cadences and obsessive melodies of Campana's verse and allows the English-speaking reader entry into a compelling poetic universe. A most welcome addition."
--Choice

GENOA WOMAN

You brought me a little seaweed
In your hair, and a wind odor
That came in from hundreds of miles away and arrives
Heavy with meaning, smuggled in your tanned skin:
--O the divine
Simplicity of your acrobat's body--
Not love not spasm, but something untouchable,
Necessity's ghost that walks aimlessly
Serene and ineluctable through the soul
And unties it with joy, as though under a sweet spell,
So that the desert wind
Can carry it out through infinity.
How small the world is
and how light it is in your hands.

--Dino Campana
translated by Charles Wright