Ciao, Esther,

yes, please, do participate to this discussion since
you are the specialist and we can learn a great deal
from you. I can only speak about life experience as a
witness. Daniele was indeed a poet who never never
gave up his talent so I respect him a lot also because
of his desperate struggle.
I have Daniele's poems on my web site Transference but
they are not translated. There is a page dedicated to
him, where I have always published a review of his
work. I never tried to translate into English is poems
but some are spectacular, like "Cinghiale" (which is
the wild pig). I would be very grateful if you would
be interested in his poems adn publish them in your
magazine. Some years ago, when he was getting worse
and lonlier , he wrote and sent me a book of poems
asking me to translate a few. I promised him to do it
and find some poetry magazine to have them published,
but alas, I never did. So, I feel I failed him. If you
will give me this possibility to have Daniele
published in your web-site, it would be really
wonderful.


Here it the poem I love by Daniele :


""



Un cinghiale

s'aggira

tra le siepi

in cerca di Teresa



un cinghiale

si cinghia

tra nevi

in cerca di Teresa



un cinghiale

e' la mia anima

il mio folle desiderio

furioso

per la cerca

di Teresa



Un giorno quel cinghiale

ti troverà

ti annuserà

ti prenderà sul groppone

portandoti a me

trasformandomi

in daino gentile.



The sexual and sentiemntal desire for this woman ,
Teresa, is personified by a wild pig seraching for the
beloved in the wild.
Teresa was the woman that kissed Daniele only once in
his life and never more and she is the one he got
fixated on (he wrote all the books for her and never
had another woman).

This is all for now, Esther. I look forward to reading
your contributions to Poetryect and thank you for the
ebautiful pages you dedicated to my poem to my mother
(let'sleave the poem as it is, the only chage should
be to turn in the singular the "eye" that watches
me,,,,,since in the original text it is one eye (liek
God's eye)

Erminia

--- Esther Helfgott <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Interesting comments, Erminia.
>
> Crysta Casey, author of Heart Clinic, has written
> beautiful poetry and prose in the "psychotic" state.
> I have begun publishing her work on my site The
> Psychoanalytic Experience. You can read one of her
> diary entries under the section called "Stories of
> Confinement in Mental Institutions" and I will be
> posting some of her poems shortly.
>
> I would like to read Daniele's work. Is it
> translated into English? What you say about Daniele
> with respect to language - first a poet, then a sick
> person - is true of Crysta, as well.
>
> Thank you all for these erudite discussions. I will
> try to participate more. Esther
>
> www.analysands.homestead.com
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Erminia H. Passannanti" <[log in to unmask]>
> To: <[log in to unmask]>
> Sent: Saturday, August 04, 2001 1:47 AM
> Subject: Re: snow/self/suicide
>
>
> > Mark wrote....
> > >There are also the very rare cases of writers who
> manage to produce
> > >coherent and interesting work while psychotic.
> John Wieners, who is
> > >undoubtedly psychotic, has produced his best work
> when the psychosis was
> > >either under control or in a mild state.
> >
> >
> >
> > Daniele Medici, my dear friend who died suicide
> last August (we recently
> > celebrated in Salerno his life and poetry)wrote
> incessantly under the urge
> > of severe psychosis, while being always capable
> to keep control over his
> > use of language and choice of style. In the last
> 15 years of his tormented
> > life, he suffered from severe shifting in what you
> call internal weather,
> > in terms of his level of instability and feeling
> of self-rejection. Yet he
> > was a man of great creativity, full of hopes to
> get better, always making
> > attempts at communication (he was so eager at
> being with others that almost
> > exposed himself to other people's cruelty ore
> indifference) , and one
> > cannot at all describe his literary achievements
> as a sign of the outcome
> > of a language pathology, since he was in the first
> place a poet, then a
> > sick person.
> >
> > Daniele Medici wrote his last poem the night he
> killed himself and left it
> > on course on the table for people to find and keep
> it as his epitaph.
> >
> > As for the notion of internal weathers , people
> all suffer from its
> > changes. Some more than the others, but they
> indeed the guarantee that one
> > possesses a soul, rather than being a "machinery"
> to produce coherent
> > functional meaning in the publish sphere.
> >
> > Daniele Medici became a follower of the Reichian
> theory. When 10 years ago
> > I found out about this new interest of his -
> mainly because he started a
> > sort of stubborn proselitism - (he passed from
> being under the care of a
> > professional Freudian psychoanalyst to a kind of
> self-applied reichian
> > cooping strategy) I spoke to all the other friends
> about the risks of it,
> > but Daniele would not give up his conviction that
> the reichian therapy
> > would have helped him in being creative even in
> his sick state of mind.
> >
> > In spite of psychotic state, his system of
> language was not unstable and
> > did define in detail the possibilities of his
> character. His language did
> > not fail Daniele. Society did, as well as his
> bio-chemical internal balance
> > and organization. Even when he spoke about death,
> his voice was never
> > funereal, but resourceful and ingenious.
> >
> >
> > Daniele had a degree in sociology and was in
> constant touch with the most
> > recent and sustained study in the psychoanalytic
> field,
> > nevertheless......all this did not warrant any
> protection to him. The poems
> > that Daniele wrote in the final stage of his life
> will be soon published.
> > He published altogether 4 collections (the
> comparison with my history of
> > publication - only two, up to now - shows that
> psychosis did not prevent
> > him to be artistically more successful of a
> mentally stable and very
> > rational person like me, who tends to produce
> poems like one produces
> > pieces of an engine (that's why I called my
> collection Macchina).
> >
> >
> > Erminia Passannanti
>


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