Dino Buzzati, Orphic Literature and Afterlife

“Close the doors, you uninitiated,” begins the ancient commentary (Derveni papyrus) on a poem ascribed to Orfeus. Discovered in 1962, it is said to be Europe’s oldest manuscript. The fragments, as we see, begin with a deterrent. But what reader would stop there? The transgression itself–the walking through the doors–creates the room, the sense of secrecy in the room, and a door to close behind us as we go in. Dino Buzzati‘s Poem Strip, recently translated by Marina Harss and republished by the NYRB, is a poem illustrated by its author, a comic book that is a blend of Haight-Ashbury and Rene Magritte, the Orphic mysteries and Dylanesque rhythms, transgression and ritualization of culture, a secret door in Milan on the Via Saterna–a street existing only in the fantasy of this book.

The book blends its poetry and images into a whorl of naked women, hellish nightclubs, abysmal courtyards and bizarre creatures crawling in the alleys. Orfi, a troubadour, teeny-bopper superstar who has lost his love on a mysterious street in Milan, sets out to find her and discovers that the gatekeeper to the land of the dead is a Talking Jacket. The Jacket tells him:

To you, Orfi, it’s Milan, because Milan is your life,

But to another it’s Zagreb, Karlsruhe, Parana.

Or did you think it was as Dante described it?

The Afterlife, Pale Avernus, I mean, did you really think it contained all

The Men and Women who lived before, the millions and millions

All the civilizations of the distant ages,

is that what you imagined?

All of them together in the Valley of Jehoshaphat?

Life is Orfi’s afterlife–his Milan is a tired Milan–a Milan diseased with a mysterious illness–which Orfi can only move through with his songs. And as he descends, the spirits of Milan ask that he sing of the beloved mysteries, of the things they have lost.

All I’m asking is for you to tell

Us of

The Places the Hours the Ache

The Secrets

The Fear the Dreaded Thud the

Beating Heart

Outside the Door of the Famous,

The Propitious Rustle

Of the Wind in the Old Cemetery.

So Orfi begins to sing his songs.

“Orfi’s Songs,” the third part of the book, just after the “Explanation of the Afterlife,” are a stream of rambling lyrics segmented as songs but alluding to each other and responding to the spirits as Milan comes to life transfixed with Orfi’s tunes. Sometimes the songs are led by the lyrics. Sometimes they are driven by scriptless, graphic representation of what is happening in the music–such as in “A Visitor in the Afternoon,” a song of two lines but four pages depicting the seizure and sparagmos of a woman by an arachnidan machine from the night.
The images, it is worth mentioning, are not only transmogrifications of the words, but also intrusions of Buzzati’s cultural world into the work. Characters and scenes are based on the portraits and influences of Buzzati’s colleagues, such as the artist Antonio Recalcati (who posed for the drawings of Orfi), as well as Salvador Dali, Federico Fellini, and Runa Pfeiffer. The milieu, which includes artists, filmmakers, models, critics, and musicians, suggests that the poem is not a descent accomplished in isolation. This is not a descent into James Thompson’s City of Dreadful Night, where the poet enters the hellish poem alone. That sense of poetry is indeed dead in this poem.

Poem here includes milieu–must contain a world of pop music, celebrities and cartoons–if it is to be a poem of its time. Milan is transplanted into the Orphic mysteries and the Orphic mysteries give Milan resonances of eternity and the kingdoms of myth. Buzzati’s book creates the room, the sense of secrecy in the room, and a door to close behind us as we go in.