Encounter - Poem by Czeslaw Milosz - Translated from English into Italian by Andrea Sirotti & Bruce Hunter

 

Un incontro

 

Attraversavamo all’alba campi ghiacciati su un carro.

Un’ala rossa si levò nel buio.

 

E all’improvviso una lepre corse sulla strada.

Uno di noi la indicò con la mano.

 

È stato molto tempo fa. Oggi nessuno dei due è vivo,

Né la lepre, né l’uomo che fece quel gesto.

 

O amore mio, dove sono, dove stanno andando?

Il lampo di una mano, una striscia di movimento, un fruscio di ciottoli.

Lo chiedo non per pena, ma per meraviglia.

 

1937

 

Traduzione dall’inglese di Andrea Sirotti e Bruce Hunter

 

Encounter 

 

By Czeslaw Milosz from Bells in Winter. Translated from Polish by the author and Lillian Vallee.

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.

A red wing rose in the darkness.

 

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.

One of us pointed to it with his hand.

 

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,

Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

 

O my love, where are they, where are they going

The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.

I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

 

1937

Czeslaw Milosz

Bruce Hunter is writer of poetry, essays and stories published internationally. Galestro is his 10^th book. His novel In the Bear’s House, translated as Nella Casa dell’orso will be published 2025.

Galestro is the term given to the schist or gritty soil in Tuscany that give Chianti wines their unique flavour.

Galestro by Bruce Hunter, the title poem for his latest  bilingual collection translated by Andrea Sirotti, and published in 2023 by iQdB  edizoni, Lecce, Italy.

 

Andrea Sirotti is a teacher, writer and translator from Florence, Italy. His revised and expanded translation of Emily Dickinson’s “My Letter to the World” was just published by Interno Poesia.