ABSTRACT
It is tempting to declare that Alfredo de Palchi (b. 1926) is the François Vil lon of contemporary Italian poetry. The poet himself solicits the comparison. Not only does he borrow lines from the fifteenth-century French poet in order to introduce each of his own six collections (now gathered and sometimes rearranged, enlarged, or revised in an authoritative Paradigma: tutte le poesie: 1947-2005), but many of his poems—their subject matter drawing on poverty and imprisonment, their razor-sharp images, their tense concision, their syntactic boldness, their forthright eroticism, their bitter yet somehow plucky existential out look—recall the candor and chiseled craftsmanship that we admire in the author of The Testament and the “Ballad of the Hanged Men.” Even a recent poem, beginning “In rue de l’Arbre Sec,” dated 29 June 2003, and included in the sixth collection, Ultime, stages an imaginary encounter between the admired French poet and his “gradito compagno di sventure,” that is his pleasant and likeable sidekick, fellow traveler, comrade-in-arms. The dried-up tree evoked in the name of this thirteenth-century street, which is located in the once-teeming first arrondissement of Paris and famous for the gallows—the dead tree?—at its northern end, conjures up the legend, indeed the possibility, that Villon was hanged, perhaps right there, for the diverse crimes of which he was accused. Interestingly, there is a restaurant called the “Caveau François Villon” near that northern end, and de Palchi claims to have composed his poem while he was lunching there. Villon has obviously been a cherished mentor for and comfort to de Palchi in dark times.
