Privilege

Umberto Saba (1883-1957) 

The Stream

So adventurous in my myth, you

are so thin between your banks.

You have no flowery margins that I can see.

Where you stagnate you expose filthy things.

Yet when I look at you, anxiety wrings my heart,

o poor little stream.

All your course is that

of my thought, which you force back

to its beginnings, to everything strong and beautiful

that I wondered at in you; and if I recall the great

rivers, their encounter with the hostile sea,

this water, which barely reddens the naked

feet of a washerwoman,

still appears to me the most perilous

and happy, with islands and cascades;

and the knoll down which you flow is a mountain.

On your paved bank the grass

grew, and always grows in memory;

it is always Saturday evening around you;

always his stern mother reminds a child

that this water is in flight,

that it never again finds its source

nor its bank; always the still beautiful

woman grows sad, and the boy, who heard

a strange likeness between our life and

that of the stream, seeks her hand.

After Sadness

This bread tastes of a memory,

chewed in this poor tavern

where the harbor is most littered and deserted.

And I savor the beet’s bitterness,

seated, on the way back home,

facing the cloud-topped mountains and the lighthouse.

My spirit, having vanquished one of its torments,

observes with new eyes in the ancient evening

a pilot with his pregnant wife,

and a ship, its seasoned wood

glistening in the sunset, its smokestack,

as tall as the two masts, making a childish

design that I made myself twenty years ago.

Who could have told me then that my life

would be so beautiful, with so many sweet concerns,

and so much solitary bliss!

Privilege

I am a good friend. I’m easily

taken by the hand, and I do what

others ask of me, well and cheerfully.

But my secret soul that does not lie

to itself murmurs its own words.

And sometimes a god calls me and wants

me to listen to him. With the thoughts

that are born in me then, with myheart 

beating inside, with the intensity of my pain,

I reject all likeness with other men.

I have this privilege. And I will keep it.