Antonio Porchia

Antonio Porchia was an Italian-born writer and poet.

Voces (1943)

Translated from Spanish by W.S. Merwin:

• Creo que son los males del alma, el alma. Porque el alma que se cura de sus males, muere.
  
  • Translation: I believe that the soul consists of its sufferings. For the soul that cures its own sufferings dies.

• I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes.

• If only I could leave everything as it is, without moving a single star or a single cloud. Oh, if only I could!

• You can owe nothing, if you give back its light to the sun.

• Those who gave away their wings are sad not to see them fly.

• You are sad because they abandon you and you have not fallen.

• Nothing is not only nothing. It is also our prison.

• My great day came and went, I do not know how. Because it did not pass through dawn when it came, nor through dusk when it went.

• Quien no llena su mundo de fantasmas, se queda solo.
  
  • Translation: He who does not fill his world with phantoms remains alone.

• I would go to heaven, but I would take my hell; I would not go alone.

• They have stopped deceiving you, not loving you. And it seems to you that they have stopped loving you.

• He who holds me by a thread is not strong; the thread is strong.

• Tú crees que me matas. Yo creo que te suicidas.
  
  • Translation: You think you are killing me. I think you are committing suicide.

• My heaviness comes from the heights.

• Whatever I take, I take too much or too little; I do not take the exact amount. The exact amount is no use to me.

• Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?

• You are fastened to them and cannot understand how, because they are not fastened to you.

• I stop wanting what I am looking for, looking for it.

• When I die, I will not see myself die, for the first time.

• We become aware of the void as we fill it.

• Because they know the name of what I am looking for, they think they know what I am looking for!

• A thing, until it is everything, is noise, and once it is everything it is silence.

• When I break any of the chains that bind me I feel that I make myself smaller.

• Before I travelled my road I was my road.

• One lives in the hope of becoming a memory.

• Sometimes, at night, I turn on the light to not see my own darkness.