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NOW AVAILABLE FROM BLACK LAWRENCE PRESS!
To order your copy of The Possible Is Monstrous: Selected Poems by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, click here.
Praise for The Possible Is Monstrous:
 Much the way Dürrenmatt himself reclaims in verse the psyche of the Minotaur from the ancient labyrinth, so Daniele Pantano brings down from the Alps and the secret land of bank vaults the poetry of Switzerland’s most important writer of the twentieth century. The fidelity of these translations not only owes itself to Pantano being one of Dürrenmatt’s countrymen. He is a poet as well, one with a real ear and eye for Dürrenmatt’s sardonic imagination that is peculiarly Swiss and pan-European at the same time.
--James Reidel
What was the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, author of The Visit and one of the greatest and most inscrutable dramatists of the 20th Century, really thinking––about life, love, drama and politics? Here, in The Possible Is Monstrous, a tremendously revealing and stimulating German-English dual language volume of his selected poetry, is a perfect place to find out. For in his poetry Dürrenmatt reveals sides of himself not readily discernible in his plays. In addition to providing English-speaking readers with new access to Dürrenmatt and his work, The Possible Is Monstrous will be of great interest to scholars of the dramatist.
Daniele Pantano's translations of Dürrenmatt's poems into English are themselves a significant achievement in poetic translation. His translations of Dürrenmatt's poems are a model of the elusive and delicate balance between accuracy and readability that makes The Possible Is Monstrous so satisfying.
--Dr. Victor Peppard, Chair, Department of World Languages, University of South Florida
This collection is long overdue. Long acknowledged as a master playwright and novelist, Dürrenmatt is at last presented as one of the great poets of the last century. Daniele Pantano's excellent translation captures all the wit of a writer frustrated by the times he lived in - balancing at once the personal and the political to produce work that is genuinely vivid and exciting.
--Rob Shearman
THE INEVITABLE WAITS
The inevitable waits
It’s not coming. You are
You are the mouse. So
Don’t be a hero
When for the fearless
Even the avoidable
Is unavoidable
Fear. Stay human
What belongs to you, doesn’t
What belongs to all, does
The right thoughts
They are friendly
Even when they seem hostile
You cannot think them alone
You cannot check them alone
You don’t strike on them alone
Alone you appear in front of them alone
They are your judges and ours
We are wrong and you, not they
Love their verdict, use it
Perhaps then the dark animal
Lolling under a bed
Or purring, crouched by a street
Will perform humanely
Its inhuman day’s work
And not devour you
In a gas chamber
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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
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