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Publié par Alessandro Zabini





Sometimes, for a fleeting span,
they may stand afloat on the dull sluggish waters,
among the thick reeds and canes growing on the miry side,
as castaways and stream drifts of the River Rhine
—a stray slain Captain Action and stray toy soldiers from a missing army of yore
—a broken toy gun—the silver damask handgun of Zorro—

a ruined comic book and a dim ungraspable map embossed on brass.

Images and words combine to preserve them all,
abismally meaningful imaginative devices as dense as divinatory signs,
spawning shorelessly meaningful images and links—

«For all poetry is in a sense memory: all art, indeed, is
a mnemonic gathering of the innumerable and lost
into the found and unique.»

Thus,
«straordinariamente cara e dilettevole nel progresso della vita nostra»,
comes afloat sometimes from the deep
«la memoria della fanciullezza e dei pensieri e delle immaginazioni di quell’età»,
in which
«la fantasia […] spesso e facilmente s’infiammava, […] libera e senza freno, impetuosa e istancabile spaziava, […] ingrandiva le cose piccole, e ornava le disadorne, e illuminava le oscure, che simulacri vivi e spiranti che sogni beati che vaneggiamenti ineffabili che magie che portenti che paesi ameni che trovati romanzeschi, quanta materia di poesia […]».

And thus, from childhood recollections comes afloat, bright yet dim,
the same picture suddenly appearing through the green forest twilight
to the eyes of Kalar made captive:
wasted buildings and walls, wrenched and severed by roots and half-covered by creepers, foliage and weeds, crumbling pediments and broken columns, shattered monuments and trailers-robed statues
—ruins of an ancient Roman town amidst African primeval forest


From where the quotes are drawn, in order of appearance …

Fiona Macleod,
From the Hills of Dream: Threnodies, Songs and Other Poems,
Portland (Maine), Thomas B. Mosher, 1901, p. 85.

Giacomo Leopardi,
«Discorso di un Italiano intorno alla poesia romantica»,
in Tutte le opere, a cura di Walter Binni ed Enrico Ghidetti,
2 vols., Firenze, Sansoni, 1976, Vol. I, p.919.







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