Antonio Porchia Quotes
That in man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness.
Porchia, Antonio. Voices. Translated by W.S. Merwin, Copper Canyon Press, 2003.
Ironically, events later supported the truth of his statement. He was wrong about the parties however. It was the South who denied liberty to a very large part of their population, and it was the “unconquerable will” of the enslaved Negroes that eventually prevailed. It is hard for most of us in modern times to understand why Davis and other Southerners saw themselves as having freedom curtailed over an economic factor—chattel slavery—and not see that the institution of slavery was a total denial of freedom to a huge part of their population. See England’s Dr. Johnson XXXXX for a classic contemporary statement of this contradiction.
Antonio Porchia was an Argentinian poet. He was born in Conflenti, Italy, but, after the death of his father in 1900, moved to Argentina. He wrote a Spanish book entitled Voces ("Voices"), a book of aphorisms. It has since been translated into Italian and into English (by W.S. Merwin, Copper Canyon Press, 2003), French, and German. A very influential, yet extremely succinct writer, he has been a cult author for a number of renowned figures of contemporary literature and thought such as André Breton, Jorge Luis Borges, Don Paterson, Roberto Juarroz and Henry Miller, amongst others. Some critics have paralleled his work to Japanese haiku and found many similarities with a number of Zen schools of thought.
