Folio — Il ciclo che non ha nome

The water in the canal today moved as it always moves — and yet I watched it for an hour as though it were new. Perché? The same ripple does not return. I have written this before, in other notebooks, other cities — the river at Florence, the Arno in flood, the irrigation channels of the Lombard plain drawn in ink so fine the lines look like thought — and still the moving water surprises me, still I reach for the chalk, the hand shakes, the chalk skids, and what I make is not what I saw but something adjacent to it, a translation with losses, the way a word carried from Italian into French loses the exact weight of its vowels. The soul, perhaps, works the same way — si traduce, is translated, loses something in each passage, gains something else, and what arrives at the final shore is neither the original nor a stranger but a thing that has been carried. The candle is burning. The water outside is still moving, I think, though I can no longer see it.