Around the bend
There were naked trees
Letting the breeze through
Shading their own roots
In snow and
Greeting lonesome souls
But I walked by
To follow the road
And when I reached the meadows
Where in rocks I once covered
A name I had given
To those I had not yet met
I looked back.
The road was following me
July 21, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
The summer heat has settled upon Arizona’s desert,
and I have to minimize my outdoor activities for a short while. My dog agrees, and takes only two long walks these days – one before sunrise, and another two
hours after sunset.
So, this morning I found refuge in thoughts
especially about seas and lakes.
The Mediterranean, the bluest of seas, shaped my
youth. As an adult I have traveled on and around all the oceans of our planet
and countless lakes. Yet, when I think of the Mediterranean, the origin of the
Greek words nostos and algos always come to mind. The western
combination of these words is nostalgia, translated as “acute homesickness”, or
returning home (nostos) and pain (algos).
As a healthcare professional, I spent many years in
Italy, especially Bari, Bologna and Ferrara. At the University of Bologna I
learned about Giovanni Pascoli, a 19th century poet and homme des letters.
His poetry was a celebration of the quotidian, written simply but with a touch
of mysticism. One of his poems, title “Mare”
(Sea) is a classic.
I had not read that poem for decades, and this
morning’s nostalgia lead me to a search for “Mare”.
I found a lovely literary blog site by Matilda
Colarossi, a writer who translates in English classic and modern fiction Italian
works. Her translation of Pascoli’s “Mare”
is beautifully done and can be found via this link: https://paralleltexts.blog/2022/06/08/giovanni-pascoli-mare-sea/
Here is the
poem, in its original language and the translation to English by Colarossi:
|
Mare
|
Sea |
Celebrating the daily moments many of us take for
granted or find ordinary has been the impetus of the expression genres I have pursued
in the past half a century. As a photographer, I have looked for stories in
streets of four continents, and captured them in B&W. My first book was a
novella, and the half a dozen that followed were travel stories about people
and places. My poetry was published in anthologies and British medical journals
always dealing with people’s attitudes to the basic joys, fears and hopes, no
matter their cultural inheritance, language they spoke or history they never
forget.
As such, it has always been about “returning home”,
the pain of that return never shadowing the joy of each return. It has been
about nostalgia, which I have renamed as “The
Salmon Syndrome” – we return home to give a chance for the next generations
to return home, at their own time, for one last time.
Back to Pascoli’s poem.
The first stanza’s imagery is elegant yet simple. We all have experienced the waves and stars
when near a sea. What breaks that usual scenery is poet’s description of the
sea suddenly sighing, winds exhaling and the waters acquiring a human
expression. And, there is the mysticism – a silver bridge appears out of that
transformation. More, that bridge is not only in or above the sea, but the poet
has also seen it over “silent lakes”, bodies of water that perhaps do not sigh,
and winds do not exhale. And Pascoli suggests that silver bridges are made for
lakes, even when he sees one in the sea.
Those four short lines make us think. Not about the
poet, but about ourselves. Where do these bridges lead? Is the sea, home of
rivers, also home of lakes? Are those bridges even more transcendent as paths
to our own consciousness? Do they make us homesick, be that of a terrestrial or
a mystic home?
… And, I recalled a moment in Trento, next to Lago
Di Caldonazzo, with a friend. We looked at the calm lake but somehow she
thought of bridges too, and used a charming Italian saying to bring her own
thoughtful mysticism to the apparent serenity surrounding us:
“Ma, l’aqua cheta la butta giú I ponti” –
our best bridges can be destroyed by calm waters.
I wrote about that moment here: https://vahezen.blogspot.com/2023/04/i-muri-hanno-orecchi-ma-aqua-in-bocca.html
I am glad it is 102F degrees outside and that my dog
is snoring under my desk as I write. It was a refreshing, memories journey back to
Bologna and re-reading Pascoli’s “Mare”.
PS/ The photo of the bridge is one I took in Paris,
over the Seine. The man on the river wall is pensive. The bridge is not made of silver. And the ducks are listening to the water sigh.
July 4, 2024
© Vahé A. Kazandjian, 2024
