Daniele Pantano

TRANSLATION FROM THE GERMAN OF SEVENTY-EIGHT EARLY NOTES FOR A BIOGRAPHY OF AN UNKNOWN SWISS POET


                  1: “I knew him when he still considered himself a Futurist.”                             2: Swiss father, lawyer.                        3: Mother, nurse (1868–1912). 4: Born in Burgdorf, Canton of Berne (1889).                                       5: Followed his parents’ advice, plump yet handsome.                               6: Accident at age nine, fell from a third-story window.    7: Studied philosophy and literature at the University of Zurich. 8: Abandoned, static.                             9: (illegible) 10: It was the wrong year to offer Tzara his manifesto.                                                                                          11: “You have to hear, be read as being (about) collective movement, courageous, his brother acknowledged” (from Speed-Bird, p.156). 12:    Dropped   out   and   disappeared   in    1911. 13: This is all about timing.                                                                            14: Too early for Nabokov (1899–1977).                        15: It sat there for years. 16: Maybe Chaplin (1889–1977).                               17: His cousin discovered him on the Rue Saint- Cannat in Marseille.   18: Something about a patent for an electromagnetic device (Federal Office for Intellectual Property, Berne, 1908).  19: I’m unable to answer that question here.                                        20: Don’t forget his mother, who took her own life.                                    21: What made him a mark: his thorn stick à la Du Fu (712–770).        22: Why not the University of Berne?    23: Pistol, in the woods, near Melchnau.        24: Of course he’s Swiss. 25:—Ask Fritz how far I should go with this—.            26: A man, a bag (include only picture).        27: JJ, Wednesday, 5 April 1916, Seefeldstrasse 54. 28: “Speech and its taste of exile and homeland” (from Speed-Bird, p. 12).       29: So he decided not to go through with it (1919).                30: Information on early childhood spent with an uncle? Or family friend.                                               31: Speed Poems, he called them.                       32. His flat, however, was always left unlocked.                    33: “All you heard   when  you  opened  the  door  was  music.” 34: Birds.                  35: That’s what he wrote about.                              36: The case is exemplary, paradigmatic even.                                                                           37: Traveled and conducted experiments (draw map).                    38: (illegible)                       39: He wanted to buy that summerhouse Nietzsche wrote in, Sils-Maria, visit Mount Athos.                    40: A planned trip to Mexico with a Latin American poet.                      41: It wasn’t González Martínez. 42: But nobody gave a shit.         43: Once  she  (1900–1983) was still  young he kept fucking  her. 44: She kept quiet, no letters, but the diary.             45: His first collection sold 33 copies (Speed-Bird, 1909).                             46: On recycled materials. 47: Nothing offensive, though.       48: “It was too soon too late” (interview with friend and printer, Lausanne).                                                                                       49: Find civil record—1918.                   50: Several unpublished essays on the Sàmi people (found in 1979).                                            51: Chapter 4 . . . time and activities in Germany (February 1941–March 1943).          52: (This is the sensitive stuff!?)                         53: There were others: Isabelle               Eberhardt (1877–1904),       Peider Lansel               (1863–1943),  Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961),               Maurice Chappaz,                                             Ullmann (1884–1961), Walser (1878–1956), Albert Steffen (1884–1963), Alfonsina Storni (1892–1938), Paul Klee,                                                                                          Friedrich Dürrenmatt.                                                             54: JJ, Saturday, 11 January 1941, Schwesternhaus  zum Roten Kreuz,  last meeting. 55: The neighbors used to tell his children—Alois (1924–1941), Damaris (1927–1962?)—their father should keep the dog from barking.         56: He was the one who fought Jack Johnson (1878–1946), forget Lloyd!                        57: According to some (night with Célan                                                                            [uncanny resemblance]                                              in Neuchâtel [impossible]). 58: Another one with Hemingway, also impossible.   59: (1891–1975) Mother’s voice was “very formal.”                               60: “A matriarch.”                                                          61: —I’m not entirely sure she would’ve liked that designation—.   62: French, English, a bit of Italian and, to my surprise, Romansh.                                  63: Couldn’t stand her anymore.      64: They agreed to return his passport (1955).                                    65: Red Citroën DS (1956).                  66: He loved the stutter of that engine.        67: “The whole room stuffed its mouth with vomit, the sermon”           (from Speed-Bird, p. 42).                     68: (illegible)                           69: Notebooks #3, 8, 14.                     70: Note from Borges—new thoughts on Schopenhauer.                  71: “He came to see me off at the station.”            72: London, Barcelona, Paris, back to Zurich.                                                                   73: Rage and madness and literature.        74: “Then he hailed a taxi.”                                                           75: “So poetry is what it is.”        76: Our story ends with a meeting (1967).                                                   77: The mass grave.        78: “And we endure, amid seas of silence, bored to death” (from Speed-Bird, p. 72).