QUATTRO CANTI
Postfazione di Pierre Van Bever
Traduzioni di Christine Gugolz
Stamperia Valdonega, Verona 1994
I.
Can the light filtering through
make the lust for life bloom
after days of desperate thinking
in our daily solitude?
If a flower were a mind,
if a person a written leaf,
if the voice, could sail away
and talk of itself with what came before,
with what will come afterwards and with the absent ones!
Ungrateful solitude: you crush,
you freeze, you kill and you laugh.
You arid, arrogant egocentric.
While the joy shades away
and the flowers fall, solitary like tombstones,
you, compound of deceit,
you're neither life, nor love;
you are not isolation,
nor the agony of illness,
not sweet thoughts:
you're the dull gasp of emptiness,
you're the memory of a rotting lake.
II.
The red dissipates,
the fear loosens,
the silence threatens no more.
It's the climb back from infernals depths
with shaken bowels,
with weightless brain.
Then everything is repellent,
the gaps are filled:
it's the apex of the yes.
The ruby returns
to race habitual paths,
and doesn't spray poison about anymore,
it doesn't rush like a brook
from the tightened lips.
Having left the furrow for an instant,
it tried different ways:
the old ill ruby.
I have beaten you, my foe.
Return to the brazier.
Run to your furrow
fire that knows not how to fail.
III.
Gasping breath
suspends desires
till an after that might not be,
till a lost moment.
If life retreats and then returns,
then I know that it exists, and only then.
I grab my awakening
from a sleepless night,
from a reflection I don't recognize,
I have no hope to cling to.
Now only the pallour of death,
mask of pain, I feel.
I ask but the song,
the song of the mind,
not this agony, that destroys
the will and hurls me into nothingness.
Unshouted pain kills
confuses peace with nothing.
Now hush, brave one, don't shudder.
This death may not be the end.
It was written that before dying
we shall fall into the void:
in the pit of darkness.
Days, torments, fire-games,
goddesses revisited, faded lives, adieu.
IV.
You observe of the glands the secretions,
you look at the threads of the grey cells,
of the transparent undulated fluid,
you regulate the stoppages and starts.
You explore the grains of silver,
let by efferent ducts,
there where the ego bristles,
moans, settles and dies.
You pry at death that slides away,
or that nests in the mind,
you see with a dismayed eye
the ruby-red that squirts.
You accept the challenge of everything,
of nothing, that time grants us.
You let those limbs, sing,
that man does not forget.
The furrow, filled with your light,
is the river where memory drowns.
The blood that bedews the cortex;
is life, is the trace that continues.
Monads are shiny and atoms
eternity without dimensions,
in the great womb of past,
where you shelter in emptiness, in the nothingness.
