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Chi sono io senza l'esilio

Mireille Safa
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OriginalEnglish translation / الترجمة الإنجليزية / Traduzione inglese / Traduc...
CHI SONO IO SENZA L'ESILIO

L’acqua sola mi ricorda il tuo nome
e nient’altro ricorda il mio passato,
né il palmeto, né il canneto e le sue chiome
ondeggianti sullo stagno abbandonato.

Solo il mormorio dell’acqua mi ripete
il tuo nome mentre scorre fra gli ulivi,
per il resto è sempre vuota la mia rete
se la calo fra i ricordi non più vivi.

Son scomparse le colonne di Palmira
e ad Aleppo le sue spezie profumate,
e in Siria nelle terre devastate
non ha più nessuna nota la mia lira.

Ora vivo nell’esilio e la sua notte,
ed è lunga la mia siesta fra due miti:
il ritorno verso un ieri che t’inghiotte,
la speranza d’un domani senza riti.

Che farò? Che faremo tutti quanti
senza più nessuna terra che sia nostra,
non avremo più dimore e camposanti
siamo paria, siam fantasmi in bella mostra

Solo il vento serberà qualche ricordo
delle voci tanto amate e a noi vicine,
come erranti in un mondo muto e sordo
vagheremo in questo esilio senza fine.
WHO AM I, WITHOUT EXILE?

Who am I, without exile?
A stranger on the riverbank, like the river ... water
binds me to your name. Nothing brings me back from my faraway
to my palm tree: not peace and not war. Nothing
makes me enter the gospels. Not
a thing ... nothing sparkles from the shore of ebb
and flow between the Euphrates and the Nile. Nothing
makes me descend from the pharaoh’s boats. Nothing
carries me or makes me carry an idea: not longing
and not promise. What will I do? What
will I do without exile, and a long night
that stares at the water?

Water
binds me
to your name ...
Nothing takes me from the butterflies of my dreams
to my reality: not dust and not fire. What
will I do without roses from Samarkand? What
will I do in a theater that burnishes the singers with its lunar
stones? Our weight has become light like our houses
in the faraway winds. We have become two friends of the strange
creatures in the clouds ... and we are now loosened
from the gravity of identity’s land. What will we do … what
will we do without exile, and a long night
that stares at the water?

Water
binds me
to your name ...
There’s nothing left of me but you, and nothing left of you
but me, the stranger massaging his stranger’s thigh: O
stranger! what will we do with what is left to us
of calm ... and of a snooze between two myths?
And nothing carries us: not the road and not the house.
Was this road always like this, from the start,
or did our dreams find a mare on the hill
among the Mongol horses and exchange us for it?
And what will we do?
What
will we do
without
exile?



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