L’animo di un poeta

Un poeta nasce negli spazi tra crimini,
furti, uccisioni, frodi, violenze,
nelle zone più oscure di questo mondo.

Le parole di un poeta s’insinuano tra le
espressioni più volgari e basse,
nei quartieri più poveri della città,
e per qualche tempo dominano la società.

L’animo di un poeta è un solitario grido di verità
nato negli spazi fra mali e bugie del nostro tempo,
picchiato a morte da tutti gli altri animi.

L’animo di un poeta è condannato, non c’è dubbio.

 Ko Un

 

 

 
 

 
 

 

To get together and talk—let’s start with what’s most difficult.
Let’s start with the madness of getting used to the night
uncoiling across the sheets.

The river, like a dress lifted over your head,
still remembers the warmth,
still replies to the heart beating
closer to morning, when the poetics
of exhaustion realigned.

Here we are—shouted into the night,
faded like ceramics under the sun.
With a language like birdsquawk.
With voices like animals calling to each other
when fire encircles them.

People from breathless borderlands get together.
Butchers whose bloody fingers have stiffened
as though covered with ink get together.
Eternal drovers bearing the Easter spirit
of the slaughterhouse get together.

Books that smell of grass and milk.
Icons printed on the same press
as futurist manifestos.

The animals smell the sweet language of dawn.
They study the orthography of June fogs
hiding their killers.

Let’s start our march across a green emptiness,
the motherland in twilight,
let’s drive the sacrificial cattle
through the wheat choir tuning up.
Let’s start, all of us who saw
how the quail of souls hide in a field,
who stepped into the water
to dispel its ice-cold anxiety
with a sunburn.
Let’s start with what’s most difficult—with singing
and quenching the fires emerging from the night.

Let’s start by whispering the names,
let’s weave together the vocabulary of death.

To stand and talk about the night.
Stand and listen to the voices
of shepherds in the fog
incanting over every single
lost soul.
 

Serhiy Zhadan

 

 
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* immagine di copertina e poesia del poeta ucraino Serhiy Zhadan scelte dal MOMA di New York
** i trailer dei due documentari Barzakh (2011) sulla Cecenia e Mariupolis (2016) sulla omonima città dell’Ucraina sono del regista lituano Mantas Kvedaravicius, ucciso questa notte a Mariupol mentre cercava di abbandonare la città.