la poesia

Nearing the end of my BritLit final this afternoon, I reached the multiple choice section only to be told that I should enter my answers on the Scranton. It took me a minute to rearrange the letters to Scantron, but the damage was done. I marked a, b, c, and d to the tune of The Office theme, and it doesn't help that my professor looks remarkably like Pam Beesley.

Then (logically, of course) I spent the next ten minutes wondering whose idea it was to put cacti along the Testing Center windowsills.

But that is beside the point (no, really?). What this post is really about, besides being a rather convenient way to procrastinate my exam preparations, is Italian poetry. Because I fell in love with this simple little poem by Margherita Guidacci and felt the need to share. So here it is, first in Italian, and then translated as well as I could try:

La conchiglia

Non a te appartengo, sebbene nel cavo
della tua mano ora riposi, viandante;
né alla sabbia da cui mi raccogliesti
e dove giacqui lungamente, prima
che al tuo sguardo si offrisse la mia fortuna mirabile.
Io compagna d'agili pesci e d'alghe
ebbi vita dal grembo delle libere onde.
E non odio ne oblio ma l'amara tempesta me ne divise.
Perciò i duole in me l'antica patria e rimormora
assiduamente e né sospira la mia anima marina,
mentre tu reggi il mio segreto sulla tua palma
e stupito vi pieghi il tuo orecchio straniero.

: : : : : : : : : : :

The Seashell

I do not belong to you, though in the hollow
of your hand I now rest, wayfarer;
neither do I belong to the sand from which you collected me,
and where I have lain long, before
I ever offered my good luck to your gaze.
I am partner of the nimble fish and the algae,
I had life in the womb of the free waves.
And neither hate nor oblivion but the bitter storm divides me.
That is why you find in me the ache of the ancient homeland
and the painstaking murmurings and the sigh of my sea-soul,
while you hold my secret in your palm
and, astonished, turn it to your foreign ear.

I love this poem for---surprise---several reasons, the first of which is setting (because Poems of the Sea take up a good portion of my bookshelf and they sing of summers at T-Street and Tahunanui sunsets and the steely beauty of Punakaiki) and the second, words. It doesn't quite translate to the English, but you don't have to know a lick of Italian to get the feel of something like the murmur of rimormora or the lilt of assonance in la mia anima marina. The shout-out to mirabile helps too, of course.

But my favorite bit of all is the seashell's longing voice, the cry for home and family. I like the loneliness of being stranded on a foreign shore, only to be picked up and picked through by a stranger and flung back to the rough sand. And I like knowing (if my childhood observations prove accurate) that the sea will eventually come to claim her, and pull her home.