Dino Buzzati's 'Poem Strip'
Cover of Poem Strip, written by Dino Buzzati in 1969 and translated in 2009 by Marina Harrs.
Poem Strip is a daring reinterpretation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice in a noir-tinged Milan in the swinging ’60s. Its starting point is a mysterious, frightening street in the middle of Milan, a street you won’t find on the maps of the city, where uncanny events seem to be taking place. Orfi, a young and successful pop singer who lives there, sees his beloved girlfriend Eura disappear one night like a ghost through a door in the high wall that surrounds a mansion across the street. As soon as he sees Eura’s funeral cortege the next day, Orfi grabs his guitar and ventures through the same door his girlfriend vanished through the night before.
Thus begins Orfi’s descent into the land of the dead. His Virgil is an empty anthropomorphic man’s overcoat—it calls itself a “guardian demon”—which primes Orfi on the nature of the afterlife. The dead have all they can possibly ask for (even color TV)—but they lack “the most important thing: the freedom to die.” Desensitized, they pine for love and lust, struggling to retrieve their memories of the feelings of the living. It is precisely in order to reawaken the lost memories of the innumerable, disconsolate dead that the guardian demon asks Orfi to perform. He breaks into song, evoking powerful images of solitude, fear, and sexual abandon. The dead, rapturous, ask for more. But Orfi’s goal is to find Eura, so he leaves his ecstatic audience and goes all the way to the station where the trains leave for eternity.
Poem Strip is exhilarating in its inventiveness and highly provocative. Enticing and terrifying in turns, it reinvented the whole concept of the comic book by merging experimental graphics, erotically charged illustration, avant-garde poetry, psychedelic songwriting, and occult fiction.
Poem Strip is also programmatically postmodern in its matching of quotation and travesty. Buzzati’s prefatory note cites a number of painters, filmmakers and photographers for their “valuable input” to specific pages. His literary references are Virgil and Dante among others—along with his own previous works. The pictorial quotations (from Dali to Caspar Friedrich, from Bosch to Escher, from porn magazines to Arthur Rackham’s illustrations for children’s books) are at times subtle, at times overt—like the filmic references, intertwining Federico Fellini’s big-breasted women and surrealism a la Un Chien Andalou with the Gothic atmospheres of Murnau and the arcane horror of the cult director Mario Bava. Buzzati’s personal sphere and acquaintances also play a role—some of the characters are based on the photographs Buzzati took of his wife, of the painter Antonio Recalcati (who posed as Orfi) and of the model Runa Pfeiffer, who lent her face to Trudy, Orfi’s guide to Avernus.
When Buzzati conceived his pathbreaking graphic novel the sexual revolution was in full flow—therefore his bold depiction of female sexuality might come as no surprise. Buzzati clearly reveled in drawing nude women, and his topless female demons are exuberantly confident in their eroticism. At the same time though, the author’s take on female sensuality is more ambivalent that it might seem at first: the women’s genitals are only hinted at, while their overinflated breasts betrays an almost naive, infantile approach to female eroticism. His female nudes seem to embody his own contradictory impulses toward the sexual revolution and the liberation of the female body from the traditional constraints of patriarchy. His erotic panels and Orfi’s song about “the witches in the city” reveal a man captivated and at the same time deeply unsettled by the sexual revolution underway and by the new, liberated woman.
