DANIELEPANTANO.CH © 2008-10

DANIELE PANTANO.CH

Welcome to the website of poet, translator,

critic and editor Daniele Pantano

 

HomePoemsBooksPressReadingsThe Oldest Hands in the WorldThe Possible Is MonstrousOppressive LightIn an Abandoned RoomGalleryLinksContact

 

 

 

 

To order your copy, please click here!

(p/p, s&h is free anywhere in the world!). 

 

 

Praise for In an Abandoned Room: Selected Poems by Georg Trakl:

 

 

Pantano has given us a purer and even painterly Trakl who is too often translated like cigarettes soaked in Paregoric. Here the Virgil in Trakl is experienced more, not just the Veronal. That is, Pantano has the Austrian's essential landedness, which is higher than his skies and birds.

 

--James Reidel


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IN AN ABANDONED ROOM

 

Window, brilliant bed of flowers,

An organ comes playing in.

Shadows dancing on wallpaper,

Fantastically mad sequence.

 

Ablaze, the bushes waver

And a pulsating swarm of gnats.

On distant fields scythes mow

And an ancient water sings.

 

Whose breath comes to caress me?

Swallows draw insane signs.

There through boundless space

The golden woodland softly flows.

 

Flames flicker in the beds.

Enraptured this crazed sequence

Scattered on yellowed paper.

Someone gazes through the door.

 

Sweet smell of incense and pears

And glass and chest in twilight.

Slowly the feverish forehead

Bows to the white stars. 

 

 

 

 

DANIELEPANTANO.CH

 

 

“I make a dish out of nothing” could be a poetic creed as well as a line from a Daniele Pantano poem, for he is an expert in molding the shapelessness of experience into a variety of crafted forms.  A romantic with a sharp intelligence, Pantano gives us poems where heart and mind move together as on a verbal bicycle built for two.

 

--Billy Collins

 

 

 

 

Pantano offers us a chance once again to see a poet live comparative literature the way Pound did–but without the frightening aspect of the extreme beard, the Roman broadcasts, or the open cage. His poetry and translations reveal that writing is different languages influencing each other at the most intimate and experienced level.

--James Reidel

 

 

 

 

It is a moral imperative to read and hear the work of Daniele Pantano, because it is one of the clearest ways by which we are able to bring the world inside. Pantano shows us a world-perspective that is increasingly necessary for us to remain alive.

--Nicholas Samaras