Daniele Pantano

Home for Difficult Children: A Memoir in Verse is a book based on personal and familial experiences and memories of exile, trauma, migration, immigration, refugeeism, translingualism, transitoriness, social justice, and writing one’ s way home. Daniele Pantano writes with remarkable empathy and uncommon beauty. It is a book in defiance of solipsism. It is a book for us all.

The first complete publication of Robert Walser’s poems translated into English. Admired by the likes of Kafka, Musil, and Walter Benjamin and acclaimed “unforgettable, heart-rending” by J. M. Coetzee, Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) remains one of the most influential authors of modern literature. Walser left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence while producing poems, stories, essays, and novels. In 1933, he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium, where he remained for the rest of his life. “I am not here to write,” Walser said, “but to be mad.” This first collection of Walser’s poems in English translation allows English-speaking readers to experience the author as he saw himself at the beginning and the end of his literary career––as a poet. The book also includes notes on dates of composition, draft versions of the printed poems, and brief biographical information on characters and locations that appear in the poems and may not be known to readers. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Walser has seen in recent years, and this collection of his poems will help readers discover a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era.

Home for Difficult Children is a book based on personal and familial experiences and memories of exile, trauma, migration, immigration, refugeeism, translingualism, transitoriness, social justice, and writing one's way home. Daniele Pantano writes with remarkable empathy and uncommon beauty. It is a book in defiance of solipsism. It is a book for us all.

Home for Difficult Children is a book based on personal and familial experiences and memories of exile, trauma, migration, immigration, refugeeism, translingualism, transitoriness, social justice, and writing one's way home. Daniele Pantano writes with remarkable empathy and uncommon beauty. It is a book in defiance of solipsism. It is a book for us all.

This book brings English-language readers works by Walser in a rare form: dramolette. Few writers have ever experienced such a steady rise in their reputation and public profile as Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878–1956) has seen in recent years. As more of his previously little-known work has been translated into English, readers have discovered a unique writer whose off-kilter sensibility and innovations in form are perfectly suited to our fragmented, distracted, bewildering era. The short plays presented here, inspired by the German theater Walser enjoyed in his youth, while never meant to be performed, present scenes, characters, and situations that comment on the brutality of fairy tales, the impossibilities of love, the dark fate of the Christ child (and Walser himself), and more. At the same time, like all of Walser’s work they are shot through with a humor that is wholly genuine despite its shades of darkness. Gathering all of Walser’s plays, as well as his later, fragmentary dramatic writings, Comedies will be celebrated by the many devoted fans of this lately rediscovered master.

Nach seiner "Deformation" von Georg Trakls Gedichten in ORAKL setzt sich Daniele Pantano mit Friedrich Nietzsche in einer weiteren bung in konzeptueller Poetik und Performance-Theorie auseinander. HIMMEL-BIMMEL-BAM-BAM versetzt Nietzsches Dichtung ins 21. Jahrhundert, um Walter Benjamins Begriff der "Unterbrechung als] eines der grundlegenden Mittel aller Strukturierung" zu testen. In diesem Band zersetzt Pantano Nietzsches Gesammelte Gedichte, indem er alle Gedichte in einzelne Zeilen zerschneidet und das so entstandene "Textmaterial" umstrukturiert, die Zeilen in alphabetischer Reihenfolge nach ihren Wortanf ngen ordnet und diese Fragmente ber sechsundzwanzig Kapitel, d.h. die Buchstaben des Alphabets, organisiert. Der fertige Text ist, hnlich wie ORAKL, eine "kontrollierte Mutation" (Okla Elliott), die "au ergew hnliche Klang- und Sinnmontagen" (Piotr Gwiazda) hervorbringt und es erm glicht, Interpretation, Erz hlung und Bedeutung bei jeder Lekt re neu zu gestalten und zu ver ndern. Oder, wie Elisabeth Wandeler-Deck in ihrem Nachwort schreibt: "Dies zuckers sse Bimbambaumeln l sst eine bet rende, heftige Minimalmusik voll neuen Sprachsinns entstehen."

“ Pantano offers us a chance once again to see a poet live comparative literature the way Pound did. His poetry and translations reveal that writing is different languages influencing each other at the most intimate and experienced level.” – – James Reidel