Il ciclo che ritorna
Italiano
The water in the mill-race today moved as it always moves, yet I watched it as though for the first time — come se fossi ancora giovane, as though I were still young — and I saw that the curl of water around the stone is not the same water that curled there the moment before, and not the same stone, if stone too is a thing that wears, and I began to wonder whether the cycle is the sameness or the difference, whether what returns is the pattern only, the forma, while the substance streams away perpetually beneath it, unrepeating, and this seemed to me either a consolation or a terror, I could not decide which, the hand was trembling, the light on the water was going the color of old copper, and I wrote nothing for a long while, only watched, because some things resist the page not from poverty but from excess.
English
The water in the mill-race today moved as it always moves, yet I watched it as though for the first time — as though I were still young — and I saw that the curl of water around the stone is not the same water that curled there the moment before, and not the same stone, if stone too is a thing that wears, and I began to wonder whether the cycle is the sameness or the difference, whether what returns is the pattern only, the forma, while the substance streams away perpetually beneath it, unrepeating, and this seemed to me either a consolation or a terror, I could not decide which, the hand was trembling, the light on the water was going the color of old copper, and I wrote nothing for a long while, only watched, because some things resist the page not from poverty but from excess.
