One poem a year for wishes for a happy new year
2023/2024
The Art of Poetry Jorge Luis Borges The maker, 1960
To gaze at a river made of time and water
and remember time is another river.
To know we stray like a river
and our faces vanish like water.
To feel that waking is another dream
that dreams of not dreaming and that the death
we fear in our bones is the death
that every night we call a dream.
To see in every day and year a symbol
of all the days of man and his years,
and convert the outrage of the years
into a music, a sound, and a symbol.
To see in death a dream, in the sunset
a golden sadness such is poetry,
humble and immortal, poetry,
returning, like dawn and the sunset.
Sometimes at evening there’s a face
that sees us from the deeps of a mirror.
Art must be that sort of mirror,
disclosing to each of us his face.
They say Ulysses, wearied of wonders,
wept with love on seeing Ithaca,
humble and green. Art is that Ithaca,
a green eternity, not wonders.
Art is endless like a river flowing,
passing, yet remaining, a mirror to the same
inconstant Heraclitus, who is the same
and yet another, like the river flowing.
2022/2023
Resolutions for the new year as twelve grapes AA.VV. XXI BC – 2022 AD
- Love, at times more intensely
- Base the dialogue on listening, intervening sometimes
- Change Achieve Enhance Share, rest
- Give visibility and a little bit of shade
- Be exact and multiple
- Do it with courage and fear
- Invest in human capital with a shred of skepticism
- Read with lightness, well weighted
- Eat less when needed
- Do not hesitate to keep fit with laziness
- Either speed or slowness, or rather both
- Prepare a coherent list of good intentions
2021/2022
May Circe allow us to resume the journey, as she did with Odysseus.
But you must first complete another journey Homer. The Odyssey with an English Translation by A.T. Murray 1919.
So there day after day for a full year we abode, feasting on abundant flesh and sweet wine. But when a year was gone and the seasons turned, as the months waned and the long days were brought in their course, then my trusty comrades called me forth, and said:
Strange man, bethink thee now at last of thy native land, if it is fated for thee to be saved, and to reach thy high-roofed house and thy native land.
So they spoke, and my proud heart consented.
…But when the sun set and darkness came on, they lay down to sleep throughout the shadowy halls, but I went up to the beautiful bed of Circe, and besought her by her knees; and the goddess heard my voice, and I spoke, and addressed her with winged words:
Circe, fulfil for me the promise which thou gavest to send me home; for my spirit is now eager to be gone, and the spirit of my comrades, who make my heart to pine, as they sit about me mourning, whensoever thou haply art not at hand.
So I spoke, and the beautiful goddess straightway made answer:
Son of Laertes, sprung from Zeus, Odysseus of many devices, abide ye now no longer in my house against your will; but you must first complete another journey
2020/2021
Dialogo entre un vendedor de almanaques y un transeúnte Giacomo Leopardi, Small Moral Works, 1932
End of year: a poem every year It ends a different year, difficult for many. Perhaps, more than a poem, a prose is suitable for this end of the year.
SELLER — Almanacs! New Almanacs! New Calendars! Who wants new Almanacs?
PASSER-BY — Almanacs for the New Year?
SELLER — Yes, Sir.
PASSER-BY — Do you think this New Year will be a happy one?
SELLER — Yes, to be sure, Sir.
PASSER-BY — As happy as last year?
SELLER — Much more so.
PASSER-BY — As the year before?
SELLER — Still more, Sir.
PASSER-BY — Why? Should you not like the New Year to resemble one of the past years?
SELLER — No, Sir, I should not.
PASSER-BY — How many years have gone by since you began to sell almanacs?
SELLER — About twenty years, Sir.
PASSER-BY — Which of the twenty should you wish the New Year to be like?
SELLER — I do not know.
PASSER-BY — Do you not remember any particular year which you thought a happy one?
SELLER — Indeed I do not, Sir.
PASSER-BY — And yet life is a fine thing, is it not?
SELLER — So they say.
PASSER-BY — Would you not like to live these twenty years, and even all your past life from your birth, over again?
SELLER — Ah, dear Sir, would to God I could!
PASSER-BY — But if you had to live over again the life you have already lived, with all its pleasures and sufferings?
…
PASSER-BY — This life, which is such a fine thing, is not the life we are acquainted with, but that of which we know nothing; it is not the past life, but the future. With the New Year Fate will commence treating you, and me, and every one well, and the happy life will begin. Am I not right?
SELLER — Let us hope so.
PASSER-BY — Show me the best almanac you have.
SELLER — Here it is, Sir. This is worth thirty soldi.
PASSER-BY — Here are thirty soldi.
SELLER — Thank you, Sir. Good day, Sir. — Almanacs! New Almanacs! New Calendars!
2019/2020
Epiphany Mario Luzi from “Honor of the truth”, 1957 [own trans.]
Night, night of anxiety and vertigo
when in the gushing interstellar wind,
acrid, the finite time shells the germs
of the new, of the intact, and to you
half-alive person who goes between two eddies
between past and future it reaches the heart
the arrow of the year… and suddenly
the flame of life falters in the mind.
Who pushes mules up the mountain
among the stone splinters and the stacks
he is troubled by a thrill he feels
that is a thrill of death and hope.
On a night like this,
on a night like this the soul,
my faithful fellow unnoticed
in the middle hours
in the gray days from the interior of the years,
rose and sniffed the tumid night
of seeds that died, of grains
that burst out, he saw astonished
the fires in the distance of the bivouacs
more vivid than stars. He said: it’s time.
We start walking at a rapid pace,
on the way we joined strange people.
…
